Drawing and Conceiving Space: How to Express Spatial Experience Through Drawing?

Teaching drawing in architectural education raises questions regarding the representation of spatial experiences: to what extent can sensory experiences of space be intensified through observing and drawing and, perhaps equally important, what those drawings would look like? In the context of their drawing classes, the authors started to inquire the discrepancy between conceiving and perceiving space, and the aptitude of representing spatial concepts upon a two dimensional surface. Through observation and translating observation into drawings, students discover that conventionalised ways of drawing, such as linear perspective, only reveal part of the story. While linear perspective remains the dominant way of representing space, obviously visible in photography, film, 3D-imaging and architectural impressions, the authors started looking for ways of drawing which inquire possibilities of expressing spatial experiences. Drawing as an activity which is able to enhance spatial understanding, rather than as a tool to communicate virtual spaces. Next to drawing as a ‘skill’, which can be learnt, the drawing classes started to inquire non-visual aspects of space by analysing attributes of spatiality, which are difficult to convey through two dimensional drawings. Starting from a contextualisation of spatial drawing within architectural practice, the article examines the discrepancy between geometric space and lived space, in order to reveal the dubious role of linear perspective within (architectural) culture and history. After a brief return to how we imagined and represented space in our childhood, the article presents a series of practice based examples. Drawing on the authors’ teaching practice, it illustrates possibilities to expand our visual language by exploring space and spatiality through observing and drawing.

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Bringing the German Pavilion Back Home

10.26686/wgtn.17131946 ◽

2021 ◽

Author(s):

◽

Jessica Wright

Keyword(s):

Projective Geometry ◽

Principal Part ◽

Linear Perspective ◽

Two Dimensional ◽

Dimensional Representation ◽

New Form

<p>This research investigates a correspondence between the architectural representational tool of drawing, and the translations of these into something recognised as ‘built’. It is fundamentally concerned around representation in architecture driven by the principles that our entire engagement with architecture is via representation. Architects do not produce buildings but produce images of buildings, and the role of two-dimensional representation plays a principal part in architecture. Architecture is always representational, and the more we engage with representation the more we might push the envelope with what we understand architecture to be. This thesis aims to establish within the contemporary discipline, what we understand about the responsibility of linear perspective as a representational tool. By understanding what lies behind the canon of perspective in architecture, this thesis questions whether the representation of conventional architecture could benefit from a new way of drawing linear perspective? The discovery of perspective during the Renaissance has influenced not only our way of representing architecture but also how we view, and therefore design it. It has become integrated with our understanding of architecture at an unconscious level. Architects no longer need control of projective geometry, and due to this cannot be critical of the system of representation or control its limits. This leads to mediate a shift in perspective, with the intention to generate a representation of new form. The motivation for this thesis was that from linear perspective, as it has done so for centuries, we can produce evocative and meaningful vocabularies that attempt to enrich architecture.</p>

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