A4511 Architectural Drawing: Advanced
Methods/Practice DistributionalPaola Iacucci
I see this class as the student's personal investigation between the notion of drawing and the making of architecture. As the work goes on, as in a workshop, the tools a nd the language will adhere more and more to a personal expression and identity. The tools and the language will become the same as the tectonic object that they make. They will be the object. Our task is to go deeply into the search for a recognizable language that corresponds to the student's inner impulse.
The different media and means of representation (perspective, oblique representation, shadow) are the tools. The tools have to be sharpened and made more subtle and precise. The language is our own. Tracing this work of investigating and experimenting about drawing and representation will be your personal exploration and achievement.
The site enters as a fundamental condition of the work. We may consider the space of the city as an experimental, phenomenal space of perception beyond one-point perspective, suing multiple viewpoints. The city is thought of as architecture and urban space is considered to be a collision of volumes and of spatial voids under light. This space is the space or experience, a phenomenon experienced as life. Urban space is as solid as its volumes and its voids, as dynamic as their counterpoint in light and time. It is free from the planar grid even though the grid very precisely rules it.
If we consider the phenomenon of making, then we see architecture as a construction in which our minds and emotions, our deep intention encounters the materials of this making and the infinite possibilities of junction and construction among them. How materials, in their primary forms, join together in a tectonic relation to give meaning that effects out perception and emotion of space. This relation of compression and tension, of density and lightness, of heavyweight and lightweight, expresses itself as a construction in light, in solids, in moving planes as we perceive them.
MATERIALS: cast glass absorbs light, takes light within and the material properties live in an optical phenomenon. Reflection and refraction, opaqueness and transparency give us the materiality of construction, of life, of a spatial perception.
TECTONICS: counterpoint of built relations make a tectonic phrase as movement in music. The viewpoint from which we perceive this construction is multiple and changes in time giving physical life to the space defined by the tectonic matter.
SPACE: to experience in space and time the construction of these materials with their physical life gives us a perception of architecture beyond the pure form of the object.
Points of view are multiple and change in time; they form space in move ment, changing perspective of the architecture opening numerous possible relations between us and the space we live in. It is no longer a question of objects in space, it is a question of essence and of construction through the materia. If poetics means to make, then it has to do with construction. The poetics of architecture becomes the poetics of its own construction and making.
From a drawing we can go from the abstract to the definition of construction and reality to the idea of space, construction , light and tectonics through representation. The implications of making architecture in the space of the city in a chosen site will be felt through drawings and models that are open to any experiment of materiality of tools and media. The fundamental idea of the course is to try all representational tools and techniques applying a spatial idea tied to a tectonic concept. This spatial and tectonic theme transforms itself as you work on it. It is a work in progress. The structure of the course is a workshop; as a workshop, it will deal with the issue of making, of techne., of doing.
In the site we will work with the section forming ties between construction, tectonic, space and light. To build is to find the inner constructive relation between tectonics, planarities, volumes, elements of matter and spatiality, between construction and light. We will work through drawings, exploring our themes and at some point a sectional model will be introduced to better understand the sectional qualities of the space and the tectonics. From these models, new drawings will be constructed keeping in mind the possible transformation of spaces in light, materials and shadow through tectonics and construction. The effort will be more and more through the issue of scale and density or lightness of materials and their surfaces and junctions. Finally, we will arrive at a fragment of architecture that implies all the abstract qualities defining it.