Vor-text-u(r)al Translations from Building to Drawing

We may all be familiar with Pliny the Elder’s story of Diboutades that traces the origin of drawing back to the outline of a departing lover’s shadow on a wall. But we may not all be acquainted with Robin Evan’s comparative interpretation of two representations depicting this same story. In Translations from Drawing to Building Evan compares the paintings of David Allan and Karl Schinkel, both titled The Origin of Painting, to illustrate the foundational differences between the (classical) role of drawing for the painter and for the architect. His argument rests on the pictoral disparity between the architectural (interior) context of the former and the pastoral (exterior) context of the latter. In Allan’s painting Diboutades traces the outline of her lover’s shadow, projected from a lamp’s point-source illumination, on the wall of a room. In Schinkel’s rendition the shadow of the lover’s profile traced by a shepherd on the face of an inclined rock constitutes a projection from the sun’s parallel rays.

What Evan endeavours to demonstrate with his comparative analysis is a ‘reversed directionality of drawing’ that establishes the fundamental difference between the artist’s and the architect’s vision. On the one hand the artist (Allan) choses an architectural surface to inscribe the first mark of drawing and an interior built setting to illustrate its origin thereby foregrounding, Evan argues, the precedence of architecture over drawing : architecture is here prior to representation. On the other hand, the architect (Schinkel) depicts the minimal of material artifice, inscribing the initial mark directly on nature by a third party (i.e. the architect), emphasizing the precedence of drawing, as a prior act of thought, over building : architecture is consequent to representation. The artist’s drawing according to Evans is a reflection of a reality that exists outside of it whereas the architect’s reflects a reality that exists only within the drawing until it is projected outside of it. In either case, drawing is a function of projection and both renditions in Evan’s view, involve all the required elements : a source of light, an object or subject of representation, a surface of projection and a means of tracing. (Evan 1997)

Vor-text-u(r)al Translations from Building to Drawing sought to inflect the reversed directionality Evan has put into play between drawing and architecture simply by changing the nature of its sources of projection and tracing. The static (albeit vibratile) source of light was replaced by a vortical source of air and both the tool and means of tracing, by the blades of a mechanical propeller. The project was first developed with improvised architectural models of two different simple interior spaces mirroring each other across a floor plane. The lower space was inverted so as to transform ceiling into floor. A basin of China ink in an alcohol compound was alternately placed on the floor of either space and a small propeller lowered onto its surface and set in motion. The ink was propelled and pulverized across the space leaving negative shadows of architectural elements and streaks of movement on its walls. The model was then turned upside down and the action repeated in the second space. It was finally deployed, removing the floor plane and unfolding the walls into a continuous linear panel.

What ensued was a gently curbed longitudinal ‘archiscape’ that evokes a landscape, embodying the vortical energy of the event of drawing-with-architecture. One might even argue that the floor-line become horizon reflects a reversible gravitational field around its axis that echoes a cosmic reality. Regardless, Evan’s drawing-building, interior (architecture)-exterior(nature) dialectics come full circle blurring and activating the gap that sets them apart; artist and architect’s pre-established positions are reconciled. The space of architecture has been projected into drawing and onto its own surfaces, it both produces (and is the product of) a drawing which points to an outside (nature) while virtually bringing outside in. Space thereby becomes a binding medium between architecture and drawing, walls become interfaces between exterior and interior, drawing and architecture, reality and virtuality. What is translated from architecture to drawing is not the architectonic geometry of the room but a spatio-temporal quality of flow, an atmospheric space of affect or again, in Ingold’s words, a ‘spatially extended quality of feeling’. The erasure of objects or content of architecture, leaving but the trace of their vacuum on the walls refer back to their absence, perhaps more significantly than would the contour of a departed object. Before the walls are dismantled, the room takes on the virtual presence of the drawing that transforms one’s perception of its spatial relations even at the scale of the model. The remaining traces activate these relations even after the event has perished. The walls-become-drawing would surely draw a viewer into an uncanny subjective space of affect and imaginary that perceptually and spatially relate to the space, imbuing it with a renewed sense of meaning.

What was revealed in Erasing the Barcelona Pavillon however, was the degree and quality of permeability of architectural spaces. Many spaces do not breathe! It was not easy to find projects that could produce interesting drawings…through rich and varied layerings, offsetting of planes or walls, diversity of material transparparencies, linear rhythms from columns, posts and frames, varied heights, etc. What if we were to build to acheive desirable drawings?

The Vortex

One may wonder what the use of a propeller has imparted on the project. When the whirling blades are lowered onto the liquid they create a vortex or suction that pulls up the ink, pulverizes it and pushes it across the space in a rotary movement. Vortices account for many (natural) phenomena from weather systems to heartbeats or to simple actions such as stirring one’s coffee with a spoon; they constitute the motor force of fluid or flow motion. Many artists have endeavoured to depict the swirling movement of visible and invisible vortical forces throughout the ages. One only has to think of the drawings of Leonardo da Vinci, Van Gogh’s starry nights or Etienne-Jules Marrrey’s experimentations with smoke and airflows. (Koumoutsakos 2005) But more importantly in my thinking about the interval between drawing and architecture is the operative process that it foregrounds and the questions it pries open. It has been argued already that drawing is an act of pulling (dragging) and pushing: thought, gesture, feeling pushes the line across the paper and simultaneously pulls from the line its formative force i.e. the formative form of line resounds within thought and sensation as a generating force. There is therefore a vortical force at play between drawing and drawer. One could say there is a similar vortical flow between drawing and architecture. As with Vor-text-u(r)al Translations from Building to Drawing architecture reciprocally operates as a formative force by projecting itself inside-out into other virtualities that (can) in turn resonate with drawing.