SURVEY DRAWING

The act of seeing is one of creation.

When we see a building, we need to open ourselves to as wide a bandwith as possible.  Belardi, in his “No Day Without a Line” lecture tells us that it is important to be open to cultural and time information.

TIME

Certainly time is something that we have covered already.  In our methodology, we address time by walking around a building and taking photos from at least two sides, if not more.  (TRAVEL DRAWING).  Nevermind that Belardi may in fact be talking about historical time.  Time, whether it is a short span or long, is time.  And we need time to understand a building or an object in three dimensions.

Rasmussen also told us that when we see an object or a building, it is a wider sensory experience than simply seeing in pictures.  (DO WE SEE IN PICTURES?)

CUTURE

So Belardi’s recommendation that we also include culture in the seeing of a building adds to our sensory bandwidth.  Consider Belardi’s passage below as he describes the cultural input from seeing a piazza:

“To truly know the piazza, the architectural surveyor must make an informed survey, must bring knowledge with him. How are the entrances to the open space the result of traffic patterns from centuries past? How can changing demographics and concern for environmental impacts shape the future of the piazza? What does Italian culture need from the piazza? A survey then becomes a document that relates historical details and communal needs, not just meters or feet, stone or steel.” p. xi.

He uses the term survey.  And in fact when we are sensiorily inputting an ORDINARY BUILDING so as to draw it later, survey may indeed be an appropriate term.

My drawing above is of a commuter railway station in Lisbon.  What cultural information did I take in when I was walking around it, taking photos, in real time?  I guess I was first struck by the De Stijl modernist stylistic flourishes, and I wondered who made the decision to provide this very specific modernist expression in this location?  My second impression was of the doors;  did commuters wait inside and then exit that small door when the train came?

And then I thought how wonderful the long, low building lines correspond with the long, lowness of train travel.  The extended cantilever of the roof shields passengers from the sun and provides a weather protected pathway to the train.  Do passengers in fact enjoy their daily interface with this building?  And if so, what do they think of the graffiti painted on it?

I believe the above cultural questions and perceptions are what Belardi is saying that we need to include in our sensory input when we are walking around it, taking photos.

WIDE BANDWIDTH

So the humble task of taking photos of a building to draw later is, in fact, a very large task.  I expect that when we see something that we are going to draw later, we need to shift our bodies into a data input mode.  This is akin to the opening of the pores in your skin.  We need to open our senses to the sounds, light from different angles, use, interface, dimensions, additions, details…etc.  That’s a lot of work.

As with anything in life, the more we do something, the better we get.  Let’s be sure we have our sense input dial set on the wide bandwith setting.

1.  Belardi, Paolo.  Why Architects Still Draw.  MIT Press. 2014.