corridors of the unbuilt imagination

ICI Trade Pavilion (unbuilt)::Macdonald+Salter

These fantastic drawings come via (once again) Lebbeus Woods, accompanied by Lebbeus' ruminations on the decline of handdrawing as an imaginative practice within architecture:

"Once upon a time, before computers came to be the pre-eminent architectural design tool, architects made drawings by hand. Instead of leaving it up to the computer's software to make and assemble the lines defining contours and edges of forms, architects would draw line by line, gradually building up the drawing. Somewhere in the backs of their minds, perhaps, the Italian term disegno, which means both 'drawing' and 'design,' worked to convince them that the two concepts were synonymous: to draw was to design, and to design was to draw. In the same way, the ideas of 'analysis' and 'synthesis' came together in the act, and the artifact, of drawing. To build up a drawing line by line is an analytical act---one chooses exactly where to place the line, based on an understanding of the problem or conditions to be addressed, and, at the same time, of the need for the sum of lines to create a greater whole, a coherent, cohering and integrated form...."

I wonder, though, if the decline of handdrawing is less problematic for landscape architecture than architecture. While I would not argue that handdrawing is an unimportant skill for the landscape architect, I think perhaps the total privileging of handdrawing can be more problematic for landscape architects than architects, because the stuff of landscape architecture is more resistant to reduction to the two-dimensional than the stuff of architecture (at least, architecture narrowly construed). While the plan and section are useful tools to the landscape architect, and vital tools for the architect, the landscape architect must deal with subtlies of topography (third dimension) and, more importantly, time, process, and flow (fourth dimensions), which are not easily captured in traditional plan and section (though I will admit that plan and section used cleverly become powerful tools for organizing and interpreting three dimensional reality in two dimensional space).

This is unfair to architecture; probably the dimension of time is just as important for the architect as the landscape architect; criticizing architecture is not my aim, here; what I am certain of, though, is that the section and plan, while necessary for landscape architects, are not sufficient to represent the full subject matter of landscape architecture. What the full subject matter of landscape architecture is, I will leave unnamed for the moment. The tendency to reduce landscape architecture to a branch of or identical twin to architecture, however, I think is often unnecessarily reductive (though certainly representative of landscape architecture as it is most often practiced, and probably proceeds often from an understandable jealousy for the status and fame accorded to architecture). This reduction, though, often involves an reductive view of architecture as well (formalism is probably a good short-hand for this, and modernism might be as well, though I would add that I think much of what passes for postmodernism in architectural theory is really hyper-modernism, a statement which can only be defended through a much longer discourse on the genealogy of modernism and postmodernism than I intend to attempt here). If one takes a more expansive view of what architecture is (see BLDGBLOG, Life Without Buildings, etc.) -- and I think we all should -- then this is not nearly so problematic (and hence I often use the contraction landscape/architecture to refer to a much more broadly construed set of overlapping endeavours).

I think I will have something more to say on the usefulness of handdrawing once I have finished something I am reading. I also have something more coherent to say on the relationship of between modernism, postmodernism, and landscape/architecture, but it will probably be a bit before I am happy enough with those thoughts to share them. (And once I have shared them, I doubt they will be finalized even then.)

Posted by eatingbark at October 15, 2008 1:01 PM