The Architect and the Craftsman (original) (raw)
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Drawing: the active desire of design. A case of designing architecture
CROSSING THE LINE CONFERENCE, 2014
We aim to discuss that which generally refers to the contribution of drawing in the understanding of the design project, and particularly in relation to architecture. From a heuristic perspective, it is accepted that drawing recreates 'ways of seeing' which facilitate the project. Throughout the project, drawing contributes in supporting and stimulating the idea's development in accordance with the stratified process of design. We present a case study of the project drawings by considering the work of the architect Bernardo Rodrigues (Ponta Delgada, Azores, Portugal, 1972). He got a degree in Architecture from FAUP, Oporto University, 1996. Their architectural projects are spread across USA, China, Japan, Dubai, and of course Portugal. His work, focused on sensory perception and matter, has been the subject of national and internationally thoughts. According to Bernardo Rodrigues architecture discipline must returns closely back to nature, therefore, supports the idea of sustainability through ethics projected in architectural shape through the material building and its environment. "The twenty-first century should be the return to the classic and timeless categories of social planning and then urban", the architect said. The experimental nature of the projects leads to its fair recognition that is according to the original essence of architecture while thought about the human being on earth. The Bernardo Rodrigues work stands out through sustainability using materials that replying the energy yield but also to poetic dwelling the world. Thus, drawing is more than the heuristic representation of the project of architecture. The character of representation is contaminated by all that is marginal to design project is disseminated through it ethically and materially, joining opposites and differences through a poetic desire expressed on the drawing. The architectural images of Bernardo Rodrigues design results from a multiple methodological contemporary process which derives an architecture freed from traditional instrumental constraints and thus becomes an object that questions whether the world and their representations. Thus, the subject of representation goes beyond the functional consideration of the design, because the different instrumental drawings influences the perception of the subject and the author. The analysis seeks to contribute to a critical and multidisciplinary discussion between drawing and architecture through the drawing practice and designing in order to stimulate the interdisciplinary understanding in generating ideas and solutions that the architectural design should provide.
MANOAJE(1): a proposal to refound the “language” of “architectural thinking”
Proceedings of the International Conference ‘Between Data and Senses; Architecture, Neuroscience and the Digital Worlds’., 2017
This research explores the problem of the nonexistence and need of an operational and integral definition of “language” in the field of representation in architecture, despite the widespread and historic use and tacit validation of ‘drawing’ and ‘modelling’ as such, both in academic environments and in professional practice.
If in the analysis of the relatively recent history and theoretical development of architecture one had to exclude the last twenty-five years, one would be immediately struck by a “partial” lack of a distinct and evident evolution of new design methodologies. If the final product of an eighteenth century architectural thought is physically embodied in, for example, an Italian palazzo, a quite similar procedure is still employed two hundred years later in the design of a Modernist housing scheme. If one sets aside the emergence of new building typologies, architectural “styles”, the use of new materials like steel and reinforced concrete, and the changes in built form which these materials brought up, one notices that the critical thinking procedure is still very similar. On the other hand, this intellectual stable situation in the architectural field cannot neglect the artistic input which certain individuals brought to the architectural world in those periods. For example, the techniques adopted by artists/architects like Michelangelo and Palladio differ significantly from those used by Novak and Spuybroek, albeit the result is somewhat a happy and positive evolution in design terms! In between these two extremes reside the architectural formal inventions of Mendelsohn and Gaudi. By examining the characteristics of these periods, it becomes quite clear that a shift from a mechanical or manual approach to informational and digital synthesis occurred in the architectural profession. The aim of this paper is to scrutinise the details of this transformation and to discuss the hypothetic futuristic role of architects, no more as intellectual craftsmen (painters, sculptors, master-masons), but as innovative digital programmers, IT engineers and software script-writers. In brief, this paper will examine the progression of architects’ approach to design from Euclidean geometry to scripts and codes.
2017
The paper explores architectural design methods and related tools of drawing in research of historical cases and interpretation of architecture theory by a new generation of digital design trained architects and students from the University of Belgrade (Serbia), University of Zagreb (Croatia), ETH Zurich (Switzerland) and RWTH Aachen (Germany). The object of study is modern architecture in the Mediterranean, and the historical cases are two summer houses designed by the architect Nikola Dobrović (1897, Pécs– 1967, Belgrade), on the island of Lopud in the Adriatic: Villa Vesna, designed in 1937 and constructed in 1939, and the unrealized design for the architect’s own house from 1965, for the site by the sea shore in the intermediate vicinity of the first house. The paper is based on archival and photographic documentation and sources that were studied and interpreted in the process of conceiving and executing the architectural drawings exhibition “Originally on Nikola Dobrović: Contemporary Architecture Drawing Glossary”, held in the gallery of the Cultural Centre of Belgrade as part of the Belgrade International Week of Architecture, BINA 2017. The paper addresses issues related to, consequences and effects of using architect’s tool of drawing analysis and digital drawing techniques in history and theory research and design theory. We will open with a glossary of terms theorized by Dobrović in 1950s and 1960s in his text books Contemporary Architecture, volumes 1-5, as interpreted sixty odd years later by M. Arch. students in the elective course work “Contemporary Architecture Theories” through analytical drawings of Dobrović’s modernist architecture. The two – glossary and drawings – formed the basis for a series of international workshops on architectural drawing and on exhibiting architectural drawing. The main discussion focuses on 15 detailed analytical drawings produced by digital means, that came through the workshops. Drawings present the outcome of a convoluted process of teaching and learning by delving into and demystification of Dobrović’s technique of building and design, through detailed re-projecting the meaning of chosen notions such as “stich”, “volume”, “trace”, “water”, “level”, “landscape”, “Mediterranean”, “lightness”, “heaviness” and “textile”. Study focused on construction details and joints of materials and functions, whereby the existing villa served as a manual for construction drawings of the unbuilt house next to it. Considered equal, the built and the unbuilt were studied in parallel as contemporaneous to each other, despite a 30-year gap between the two projects, aiming to extract from the historical cases the theoretical notions that are usable for current design preoccupations. In conclusion, we will discuss issues of exhibiting and public, that is, lay perception of architectural drawings, executed and presented not as actual project drawings but as artwork in a gallery. How abstract are concrete construction details when drawn as part of an art project; is the drawing a medium that allows both abstract projection of the lay beholder and concrete projection of the trained eye; finally, could it be argued that the building lays in the eyes of the drawing’s beholder?
MAP ARIA UMR n°694/CNRS/CULTURE, Ecole Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture
2010
This paper reports on a work carried out during a one-week workshop with students of the architecture school of Nancy in France. Based on the advancements of CAD/CAM technologies, this exercise explores the link between two stages of the process of creation of an architectural object; geometric modelling and respective manufacturing preparations. The main idea is to deal with the continuum of the form creation, from the first idea (designer’s mental image), through the geometric description, to the final physical model. The development of architectural vocabulary is largely related to recent advances in the world of digital design. Advanced CAD tools and geometric modellers allow the creation of forms that overtake Euclidian models. But digital also affects the universe of manufacturing; CNC technologies provide the possibility of creating physical version of
When architecture wanted to be drawing
2018
Drawing has always been considered an instrument subordinated to the ultimate object of architecture: the real construction of the building. However, since the foundation of the discipline in the fifteenth century, this relationship has sometimes been questioned, altered, and even inverted, coming to confuse reality and its representation. Through the study of the Museum of Roman Art of Merida, by Rafael Moneo; the first urban projects carried out by Ricardo Bofill in France at the beginning of the 1980s; and the restoration project of the Chapel of San Isidro developed by Javier Velles between 1986 and 1990, this article delves into the last episode of this phenomenon. Due to the effort of its authors to carry out the liberal exercise of the profession, by means of the restitution of their specific instruments, these architectures would be conceived through the drawing, and it is possible to appreciate in their configuration the same types of illusions of the drawing. These works s...
The abstract and the normative: Controspazio’s architectural drawings
Research Encounters via Architecture’s Methods 17th Annual PhD Student Symposium , 2021
According to the French philosopher Françoise Choay, the discipline of architecture has a twofold foundation: on one side, it is grounded on verbal rules, expressed mainly in the works of Vitruvius and Alberti. These texts act as an ordinate sequence of instructions and considerations that are meant to inform the aims, scopes and instruments of architects. On the other, architecture was established by what Choay refers to as the model: a series of works that, due to their capacity to depict a possible future, act as instruments for a radical critique of the existing world, and lay the basis for imagining a ‘project’ for the cities. Choay refers to rules and models as conceptual instruments to understand architecture’s ideological milieu. We seek, with this work, to extend Choay’s definition towards a more inclusive perspective by which architects’ works – the drawings that may or may not lead to the construction of a building – act as euristic systems that inform practice.