by:Shumi Bose

Case Studies:Nigel CoatesFiona ScottLiam O’ConnorPaper Salon & Anna Gibb

Architecture Paper #4January 2014

ARCHITECTURE AND DRAWING

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In the sixteenth century, Renaissance humanist Leon Battista Alberti championed the architect as an intellectual professional, and drawing as the architect’s original act of creation. So emerged the claim of drawing as a fundamental practice of architecture. Still today, through the complex process of producing a building, drawing remains the architect’s space for exploration and expression.

This intellectual relationship was paraphrased by the RIBA Journal, which stated of its 2013 drawing competition, “Architecture is all about communicating ideas, and drawing, of whatever kind, is the best way of doing that.” Competition judge and architect Narinder Sagoo of Foster and Partners stressed the importance of drawing as the most effective means to express both prosaic and polemic issues, to lay people and clients alike.

Public awareness and discussion of architecture has increased in recent years, particularly around large-scale urban regeneration projects which can take years to deliver – such as the London Olympics and the subsequent legacy operations. During this period, it is essential to maintain public support, and the expressive power of drawings can be effective in conveying a desirable vision for the future.

The current interest in drawing is evidenced by the immense popularity of recent initiatives such as The Big Draw, and 10 ×10, a fundraising project initiated by Article 25 (formerly Architecture for Humanity), which asks 100 architects each year to draw a particular segment of London, producing “artworks inspired by the environment they help to create and shape.”

According to Austin Williams, lecturer in architec-ture and urbanism at the Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University in China, “Many people have reverted to a leaded pencil on lined paper, to return to the skilful artistry that has been lost to the ubiquity of the PC.”

Indeed, despite the sophistication and increased availability of digital tools, our fascination with hand drawing shows no sign of abating. Architecture schools across the United Kingdom are also showing a renewed interest in drawing skills, with students returning to traditional methods in order to define an individual visual language.

The fusion of old and new technologies can produce complementary, even hybrid effects, but whereas computer programmes allow for a certain distance, Williams suggests that hand drawing “requires swaggering in the face of incipient failure”. This is telling of another function served by the act of drawing; that is the attempt to manifest thinking, to solve a problem or explore an idea before an approach can be crystallised and communicated. The physical act of drawing has an immediacy to it; the drawing or sketch becomes a critical tool for experimenting, making mistakes and suggesting possible solutions, rather than the careful modelling of photo-real alternative realities. Perhaps our increased exposure to visual imagery in general, through our screen-dom-inated lives, makes us more sensitive to the specific qualities of hand drawing – expressive, humane, and demonstrative of a live thought process.

Nigel Coates Drawing as expression

During London Design Festival 2013, the remarkable drawings of Nigel Coates were mounted in a retro-spective exhibition entitled Exploded: Works on paper from the Nigel Coates archive. Through sketchbooks, designs and framed artworks accumulated over time, Coates is able to “trace the emergence of an expressive drawing style”.

Architecture and Drawing

Shumi Bose highlights the revival of drawing within architecture and explores drawing as a form of expression, understanding, documentation and thinking.

right: Nigel Coates, Ark Albion, Sections, 1984Courtesy: Nigel Coates Studio

Over the last thirty years, Nigel Coates has been an advocate of Narrative Architecture – both the title of his 2012 publication and a term commonly used to describe his expressive style of designing, which capitalises on the creative, storytelling potential of drawing. In 1983, Coates formed Narrative Architecture Today, a group of students and architects who’s task was to imagine, design and create places that nurture meaning, rather than simply achieving functional value. They produced a richly illustrated publication, demonstrating a manifesto of multidisciplinary cross-polination through drawings.

Coates moves naturally in the world of the projected, hypothetical and polemic. His propositions – from the early Ark Albion to Ecstacity and Hypner-otosphere – exemplify his sensual, complex and socio- culturally engaged reading of urban life. Architects, he says, are narrators rather than the sole protagonists of architecture, and observing and incorporating the multi-layered experience of everyday life is part of the job. His drawings employ shifts in scale and refer to literature, art and pop culture, animated with figures and gestures of movement and dynamism.

Stories are played out in architectural space, but also across time: Coates’ narratives show the future and past of a site, the historical and imaginary resonances which echo therein. A classical column seems analogous in Japan, yet Coates’ lively drawing for the design of Caffe Bongo justifies a theatrical, symbolic staging of civic aspirations in the chaotic, sign-laden urban environment of Tokyo.

In his book Narrative Architecture he declares the architect’s role in mediating function and fiction, proposing imaginative scenarios and expressing possible futures. This might extend from fictional scenarios and exaggerated dynamism to technical capacities: part of the function of drawing, he says, is to stretch one’s

knowledge and understanding of how something might be built. Fundamental to Coates’ design philosophy is the idea that “drawing accesses other possibilities for architecture”.

Fiona Scott Drawing as understanding

Expanding one’s understanding is the main motivation for Fiona Scott, co-founder of Gort Scott Architects. “The process of drawing forces you to deconstruct, to figure out how things are put together.” Scott was taught, in part, by Nigel Coates, and she too uses drawing to reveal urban narratives and histories in meticulous detail. Her observational drawing practice cherishes the inherent patterns and textures of building types and configurations, recording complex characteristics inevitably lost in large commercial developments. “You might think you understand something at a glance, but when you have to draw it accurately and make it fit with its surroundings, you find yourself having to find out more …”

This act of drawing is reflected in Scott’s approach to reading the city; in her examination of points, lines and routes rather than centres of growth. Scott began to develop her close-looking drawing practice focusing on the arterial high street, with a commission from the quasi-governmental Design for London group in 2009. Later she assisted in developing the London Develop-ment Agency’s (LDA) Agenda for High Streets.

Scott’s drawing methodology took an approach of detailed observation and non-judgemental, faithful recording. Analysing the formal, functional, demo-graphic and ethnographic make-up of London’s high streets provided her with a new and deeper under-standing of the urban fabric. Her richly informative

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right & left: Liam O’Connor Untitled (site marks left by rust, water, building materials) 2010Courtesy: Liam O’Connor

middle: Liam O’Connor #26, British Museum Residency, 2010–2013Courtesy: Liam O’Connor

drawings use a mixture of formal design and sketching techniques, which conflate flat elevations with an almost axonometric perspective of the urban block behind the facade. “I had to develop a way of demonstrating the extraordinary, often unseen depth of the high street, to describe its variety in form and use,” she says of her unique geometrical projections.

A series of Scott’s drawings, entitled ‘Thames to Tooting: Urban block and the arterial London high street’, were included in Common Ground, the main exhibition at the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2012, curated by David Chipperfield. Scott’s annotated pen and ink drawings described various businesses and social activities which cluster within the historic-modern patchwork of inner city London, showing an array of building types and styles stuffed with overlapping users and stakeholders.

Drawing forms an important strategic component for Gort Scott’s architectural practice, from site analysis through to design proposal. Client-facing visuals from the office combine hand-drawn elements collaged with digital and computer-aided imagery. Scott does not see an exclusive dichotomy between digital and manual techniques of drawing; in some visualisations, photo-realistic cut-outs are counterpoint the hand drawn propositions. Figures and back-ground context are easily separated from the spaces yet to come, which remain sketchy and give scope to the imagination.

Liam O’ConnorDrawing as documentation

As artist-in-residence at the British Museum, Liam O’Connor’s hide-like room has perched at the edge of a building site for the last three years. Like Scott, his

close-looking observations over this time have led to a deep understanding of his subject. The World Conservation and Exhibitions Centre, a new extension to the British Museum designed by Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners, will open in Spring 2014. O’Connor has been hidden within the museum, documenting its construction since 2010. The only practitioner in this selection not working as an architect, O’Connor’s final piece is a single drawing recording many layers of observation and study, made over many months – first documenting the voided site, then the turbulence of excavation, later the imposition of structural steels and the reorganisation of space.

During his MA at the Royal College of Art, he settled on architectural and urban spaces as the subject of his experimental reportage. Drawing spaces with mainly narrative significance and composition, he noticed that these ‘concrete’ spaces were also in flux. Drawing a set of stairs in Kings Cross, he returned to find these filled in, they had disappeared and were no longer available to enter or view. Something seemed significant in drawing these precarious places. O’Connor’s work thereafter takes on an almost documentary, albeit subjective, fervence – reconciling the artist with alterations in the perceived world. O’Connor works strictly from observation, positioning his work from the real rather than remembered or imagined space. But although they observe the present moment, O’Connor maintains that his drawings are made in relation to the past of a site, which is always present and must make itself known. Seeing the city fabric as a dynamic process rather than a fixed entity has informed his choice of charcoal and vivid pastel, which capture something of this fluidity.

Trained as a graphic designer, O’Connor cites summer jobs labouring on building sites as having a profound impact on his working methods. Indeed,

far left: Nigel Coates, Drawing for Caffè Bongo, Tokyo, 1986Courtesy: Nigel Coates Studio

left: Gort Scott, Map of Arterial High Road, London, 2009.From ‘A London High Street: Uxbridge to Romford’, report for Design for LondonCourtesy: Gort Scott Architects

below: Fiona Scott, Mermaid Court, Borough High Street, London, 2012.From the series ‘Thames to Tooting: Urban block and the arterial London high street’Courtesy: Gort Scott Architects

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as spectacular as his layered pencil drawing is in documenting RSH+P’s Museum extension, much of his drawing research at the British Museum allows the site to ‘record’ itself on paper – almost casting the site as the author. O’Connor’s gathering of marks, rubbings and textures made from the building materials and process of construction – like the arc of a digger, or the rust marks left by iron nails – produce some of his most moving works. The carpenters bench is a ubiquitous temporary site structure on which every-thing is measured and built, its surface recording innumerable saw-cuts and traces of tools. It is in itself, a drawing, and every physical process ingrained on its surface exists somewhere in the building. O’Connor allows these otherwise mute elements to speak through the marks they make. As well as observing and documenting the changing construction site, he records the physical traces of the site itself.

Paper Salon & Anna Gibb Drawing as thinking

As part of Venice Takeaway – the agglomeration of global research which formed the British Pavilion at the 2012 Venice Biennale of Architecture – young British architects Anna Gibb and Ross Anderson found inspiration in the ‘Paper Architects’, a Moscow-based collective formed in the mid-eighties. This group, which included Alexander Brodsky and Ilya Utkin, used imaginative drawings to react against the censure of Soviet rule, entering their highly polemical proposals into ‘forbidden’ architectural competitions. For Anderson and Gibb at the time – as architects who graduated at the apex of the current financial crisis – competition drawings provided rare opportunities for creative freedom and self-expression. In the

absence of job security or even employment, drawing seemed to be the best medium through which to explore hypothetical possibilities, as well as a way to keep working. Gibb’s recent solo exhibition 365 Drawings Later, records the discipline and labour of making one drawing each day for a year.

Upon their return from Venice, the British Council hosted a workshop or ‘Paper Salon’ to put their research of visionary architectural drawings into practice. The idea of the Paper Salon was to combine the ‘salon’ – those enlightenment-era gatherings aimed at facilitating the exchange of ideas – with the equisse, the practice of working out ideas through drawing and sketching. The Paper Salon was held at Calvert22 gallery in Spring 2013. As well as Gibb and Anderson participants included the architect Professor Alan Dunlop, who had mentored Gibb’s own drawing practice at Robert Gordon University in Aberdeen, and Yuri Avvakumov, one of the original members of the Soviet ‘Paper Architecture’ group of the 1980s.

Attendees were divided into teams and asked to make critical proposals, propelled by imaginative, speculative drawings. Inspired by Moscow’s Paper Architects, the Salon participants addressed subjects such as the housing crisis, political inertia and public rights to urban space, and the act of drawing enabled the group to debate possible futures. The role of drawing in the creative process was also discussed; the rapid, speculative exercise of drawing versus using the drawing to communicate a defined message or position. The discursive Salon format, easily replicable elsewhere, combined well with the active task, and framed passionate debate about the role of visionary ‘paper’ architecture.

right: Anna Gibb 365 Drawings Later (installation view at The Lighthouse, Glasgow) 2013 Courtesy: Anna Gibb

left: Anna Gibb Mockba, 2012Courtesy: Anna Gibb

below: Anna Gibb Torri di Firenze, 2010Courtesy: Anna Gibb

Author:

Shumi Bose is a writer, editor, teacher and curator based in London. Currently teaching history and theory of architecture at the Architectural Association and Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, Bose is also a Contributing Editor at Blueprint magazine, and has previously worked at Afterall, the Architects’ Journal and Volume magazine. In 2012, Bose was a curatorial collaborator for Common Ground, the 13th International Exhibition of Architecture at the Venice Biennale directed by Sir David Chipperfield. She was co-editor of the related publications, Common Ground: A Critical Reader and Juergen Teller’s Common Ground in Photographs. Bose has worked as a freelance curator for the British Council and at Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York.

Links:

Nigel Coates nigelcoates.com

Gort Scott Architects gortscott.com

Liam O’Connor liamoconnor.co.uk

Anna Gibb annagibb.com

The Big Drawcampaignfordrawing.org/bigdraw

10 × 1010x10london.com

British Councilblog.britshcouncil.org/paper- architecure

Further Reading:

Why Architects Draw, Edward Robbins; interviews with Edward Cullinan et al.(M.I.T. Press, 1994)

Architects’ Sketchbooks, Will Jones; Foreword by Narinder Sagoo (Thames & Hudson, 2011)

Off Piste – Drawing Inspiration, Austin Williams (Times Higher Education, August 2013)

ADF Papers:

ADF Papers explore new directions in British architecture, design and fashion. They are available online at Back of the Envelope blog www.britishcouncil.org/design.

ADF Papers are published by the British Council’s Architecture, Design, Fashion department; designed by objectif, and printed on Colorplan paper by GF Smith.

The British Council is the UK’s international organisation for cultural relations. In the Architecture, Design, Fashion department we develop exhibitions, events and collaborations linking designers and cultural institutions around the world.

Cover illustration:

Detail from:Untitled (Site marks), 2012Courtesy: Liam O’Connor