TRANSPARENT CONTOUR DRAWING
Certainly one of the most powerful tools with which to see is the contour drawing. I guess that is why authors such as Nicolaides in his The Natural Way To Draw essentially starts his...
Tagged: FORM GENERATION
TRANSPARENT WEAVING
We ran across the weaving of Ethel Stein at the Art Institute of Chicago last fall. She is a mater weaver who, at 96 years old, is only now coming into the recognition that...
WHAT A THOUGHT LOOKS LIKE
Bucky Fuller believed that the tetrahedron was the most efficient enclosure that humans can create in the Newtonian world. A tetrahedron has four points which then create enclosures with four sides. These four points...
ASSOCIATIVE CONFIDENCE
We typically categorize smart people based on their ability to recall facts. Our entire educational system is based upon this premise. My personal belief is that each of us has a more or less...
RANDOM MODERNIST BUILDING
Sometimes a building that you see stays in your imagination. This happened recently during a visit to Vancouver. While riding bicycles around the city, we happened to ride past this random modernist pavilion which...
RELATIVITY
We live in curved spacetime. At least this is what the theory of relativity tells us. Space is curved by gravity. Therefore the space upon which we inhabit the earth is curved. It is...
EARLY PERSPECTIVE THINKERS
During the 1620s, Francis Bacon, a Franciscan monk, composed the Opus Majus. This was intended to be a compendium of the knowledge of the world. As we may expect from a Franciscan monk, he...
ARCHITECT BLOGS OF NOTE
There are two architect blogs that pertain to sketching, watercolors and architecture that are fun to check out. Frank Harmon, who is an architect, has a nice blog titled Native Places. This link was...
THREE DIMENSIONAL SOUL
Bernhard Hoetger was a sculptor who also designed buildings. In 1928, he wrote. “We want no inhibitions and checks by recipes, we want the free spirit to find its own laws. The creative moment...
VISUAL SERENDIPITY
A word that I keep coming back to is associative. If our drawings promote and foster associations in our minds, then they have added value. And we have mentioned Google Images as a medium...
DRAWING IS DEAD
I respectfully note the passing of Michael Graves, Architect, who died yesterday at the age of 80. The Postmodern Movement, which Graves championed, was gaining its’ full strength while I was in architecture school....
THE 3D SOLID PROBLEM
All we can draw are planes. We cannot render the volume inside a solid. In the drawing above, there is a solid and a void within the cube. The dark green solid part is...
DREAM DRAWING
Mr. Manish Udar, in a recent contribution to the LinkedIn conversation that can be found here, mentioned the phenomenon of analogue drawings triggering dreams. I wonder if any one else has had a dream...
SCIENTIFIC METHOD
To operate successfully in science, you first advance a hypothesis. And then you have to make a judgement on this hypothesis based on direct empirical observation. In design, our we make empirical observations based...
TRANSPARENT THUMBNAILS
I like social media better than I used to. Because of the interesting discussion that has sprung up on a small corner of LinkedIn, as I mentioned earlier, I am starting to see a...
MATHEMATICAL DESIGN
Mathematics provides an interesting reflection on some of our favorite themes; knowledge, learning, abstraction, etc. Mathematics’ principal function is to problem solve. We use math if we need to know the area of a...
ELEMENTAL SHAPES
The square. The circle. The sphere. All are what we call elemental shapes, or elemental building blocks. Yet the primacy of these shapes and forms is merely our cultural construct. We are attracted to...
APPROXIMATIONS
Ideas require mental images. If you don’t have the former, you don’t have the latter. But what are these ideas in our mind? How exact are they? How real are they? They are best...
DRAWING TO SAVE THE WORLD
We have shown that thinking requires mental images. Images contain thought and visual facts. Therefore our drawings are hugely important. They are a testament to a logical and rigorous construction. If we consider that...
CARPENTER CENTER UNDERSTANDING
We made a pilgrimage to Le Corbusier’s Carpenter Center in Cambridge, MA recently. This might have been the third time that I was there. School had not started yet so we were able to...
DATA PROCESSING
Don’t draw like a camera. A camera merely records perceptual data. A camera records the surface data. Then at some distant point in time, the processing of that data occurs. Or is supposed to...
VISUAL SUPERIORITY
Have you ever thought about how lucky you are to be able to utilize and operate within the world of visual shapes, rather than rely instead on verbal language? The immense richness of our...
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