INDIGENOUS PERFECTION
I happened to take a drive a couple of evenings ago. The late afternoon was warm and it was good to be driving rural roads. After 25 years of living up here, it is...
Tagged: ANALOGUE DRAWING
BUCKY FULLER
Buckminster Fuller is a supreme systems thinker. He argued from day one that to understand the part, you have to understand the whole. Early in his education, he rebelled against the manner in which...
MILITARY AXONOMETRIC
The use of parallel line drawing first came into wide use for the design of military fortresses. In light of the general invasionary tendencies in the 15th and 16th centuries, impregnability was foremost on...
YOU CANNOT NOT DRAW HISTORY
I guess one fundamental motivation for this project is to give architecture students a format with which to overcome what I continue to see as the passive teaching of architectural history. I characterize this...
EXCEPTIONAL BARN 1
There is a unique barn shape that I have only seen in Central Upstate New York. The examples that I know of are around Seneca Falls. They look very organic and wedded to the...
IS ARCHITECTURE ART?
In these pages, we have stated that we are not creating art in our drawings. And because we are not creating art, then we must not be artists. So if the drawings that we...
STUDENT TRANSPARENT DRAWING
I taught both design and gave a lecture survey course last fall. My goal in the course was to give a broad pictorial overview of architecture. And as you might guess, I had the...
PROJECT AN OBJECT OUT OF MOON
In Vers Une Architecture, LeCorbusier states. “The plan proceeds from within to without; the exterior is the result of an interior. The elements of architecture are light and shade, walls and space.” The plan...
ON REALISM – A LETTER TO HELEN
Why not draw realistically? After all, a basic tenant of realism is that it represents truth. A completely natural drawing is done without any outside artifice. Forms, textures, shadows, etc. are all rendered...
ORDINARY BUILDING 2
For many people of our ilk, the brakes on our cars sure get a workout. We know the routine. We are driving along, typically trying to get someplace on time. And then there is...
FIRE PHONE
Amazon introduced their new Fire Phone. A technology perk that tries to distinguish the Fire from any other phone is what Amazon calls “dynamic perspective.” The cameras on the device tracks the position that...
BEAUX-ARTS BLAME GAME 2
There was a building boom in America after the Civil War. American architects were very concerned regarding both the low quality of the design and construction of these buildings. Thus there was a large...
PAUL KLEE AND TRANSPARENCY
Paul Klee seems to be thinking transparently in this watercolor. He seems to be employing what to this point we would call a Byzantine space time understanding. It is not an isometric drawing where...
QUICK START
If you have persevered thru any of this, you might be wondering how you would start to do a transparent drawing. You might have an urge to find a piece of paper, a pencil,...
BEAUX ARTS BLAME GAME 1
The Ecole des Beaux-Arts has been and continues to be a huge influence on our profession. It was a very prestigious arts and architecture school in Paris. It traced it’s roots back to 1648...
DURAND AND REPRESENTATION
I am of course not the first to question the place of representation in the depiction of architecture. Durand, writing in the early 1800s in his Mecanisme de la composition, stated the inextricable link...
TACTILE TRACES
Nicolaides in The Natural Way to Draw describes the essential drawing phenomenon as tracing with your eye. That is, you move your pencil in the same manner that your eye sees the object that...
SENSORY MEMORY
One of the prime texts which we are typically all given is The Natural Way To Draw by Nicolides. He writes of sensory memory, which is within all of us. We gain sensory memory...
PERSPECTIVE POWER
Desargues was a French mathematician, engineer and architect who lived at the beginning of the 17th Century. In the 1640s, he stated that perspective theory was seen as a tool to help moderate between...
BYZANTINE CHURCHES
We just had a fantastic trip to Turkey. So expect continual postings from this trip. A huge revelation revelation was how the Byzantines used domes. They employed a cascading assembly of full domes, half...
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