VIEWPOINT

Drawing representationally requires that a viewpoint be specified. In CAD systems, you have to pick a point in space from where the viewer’s eyes are. In the Renaissance, the viewer was given a single orientation point in the picture. When you construct a manual perspective drawing, establishing the viewer’s point is one of the first things that you do.

Drawing transparently takes the viewer’s viewpoint out of the drawing equation. This decreases the delusion of the drawing by permitting the true positions of forms and objects in relation to other forms and objects. Yet nothing is hidden.

A viewpoint sets up the potential for monumentality. As architects, we really cannot resist the monumental. Monumentality is not necessarily bad. But I think that we are seduced into the creation of monumentality by the way that we draw. Yet by revealing what is hidden, we can collapse the image into the object. Or the image and the object become more unified. Therefore appearances are not separate from the object. The architecture becomes a temporal space for human action.

There is a general propensity for students to learn to draw objects at the exclusion of the context. This might be the result of the very focused manner in which we see. We call this foveal vision, as we have the ability to see very clearly a car or a cat. The remainder of the field of vision is generally blurry. But the object that we are focusing on is presented to us in remarkable detail. And this is typically the way we are taught to draw; make a focused drawing with high detail of the object or building. Draw yourself a monument.

In Transparent Drawing, we are more interested in a non focused way of seeing. This more generalized point of view is inclusive in that an entire range of our field of vision is presented with equal interest. The trend toward monumentality is reduced as the complete object now becomes the focus.

This diffuse viewpoint can be accomplished with any of the typical drawing projection systems; linear perspective, isometric, etc. The act of seeing thru an object accomplishes this diffusing of our field of vision. This reduction in focus gives us the necessary latitude to think holistically, rather than suffer the limitations of one specific object view.