LECTURES + READINGS
VISUAL DESIGN THEORY?
week 001
The opening lectures provide an overview of the course and general introductions. Important key concepts and terms will be discussed.
BECOME WHO YOU ARE
week 002
A moment of self-reflection that considers the role of identity in a design discourse.
Vladamir Nabakov. Speak, Memory. (New York: Vintage Books, 1967)
Charlie Kaufman. Screenwriters’ Lecture. BAFTA on 30 September 2011
TEMPLATE FOR BECOME WHO YOU ARE ASSIGNMENT //// PDF VERSION
L'OEIL DE L'ENFANT
week 003
This set of lectures considers origins. ‘How do we learn to draw?’ is the central question and focuses on Rudolph Arnheim’s seminal research with regard to developmental psychology. The oldest and most widespread theory or explanation of children’s drawings is that since children do not depict what one assumes they see, some mental activity other than perception must intervene. Intellectualist theory asserts that art at an early stage is derived from a non-visual source – or abstract concepts. But where would these concepts come from and in what form if not in the form of visual data? The exercise entitled DISEMBODIED CIRCLE: A TWELVE STEP PROGRAM will be conducted.
The objective is to represent an architectural idea at one-to-one scale. This is the architectural act in a compressed form… It is right that somewhere early in students’ education they come into contact not only with the conception of an object but the enormous and joyful responsibility for realizing it as well.
- Tod Williams, “OBJECT” from Education of an Architect
The exercise entitled Disembodied Circle allows young designers to engage a highly personal three-dimensional space, one that makes the often more abstract processes of the design studio more tangible. The exercise provides a forum in which to examine the consequences of various physical conditions and question fundamental design decisions related to scale and site as well as appreciate various phenomenological determinants of place. The magic of this exercise lies in its absolute simplicity, its ability to emphasize how subtle shifts in dimension can profoundly affect one’s psychological reading of a space. In a relatively short period, students undergo a wonderful transformation from an interstitial state, that of the wall, to an external and then internal realization of an archetypal condition – the inscribed circle.
We begin the third week by looking at examples of children's books. Specifically, we will examine illustrative techniques that focus on the frame, narrative structure, the imagination, color, printing techniques, and movement. As well, we will travel some 35,000 years back in time and examine the oldest known pictorial creations of humanity as documented in Werner Herzog's Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2010). As such, we will expand our investigation of drawing beyond mere developmental necessity to include prehistoric persons who used graphic techniques to cope with and better understand the complexities of the world around them.
Italo Calvino. Marcovaldo or The seasons in the city. 1963
James Agee. “Knoxville: Summer 1915,” in A Death in the Family (New York: Penguin, 1957).
LECTURE /// GROWTH
REFERENCES /// JOHN HEJDUK, PAUL KLEE, ANTOINE DE ST. EXUPERY, ARNHEIM, REPRESENTATIONAL CONCEPTS, SIGNIFIER AND SIGNIFIED, PRIMORDIAL CIRCLE, VERTICAL AND HORIZONTAL, THIS IS NOT A BOX, TICKLE MONSTER, HAROLD AND THE PURPLE CRAYON, THE FIRST PEKO-NEKO BIRD, THE LITTLE PRINCE
WALKING ON WATER
week 004
This lecture considers the work of Christo and Jeanne-Claude, significant twentieth-century artists that blurred the boundary between paper and the physical construct as it relates to the work of art.
BLINDNESS
week 005
I cannot walk through the suburbs in the solitude of the night without thinking that the night pleases us because it suppresses idle details, just as our memory does…
- Jorge Luis Borges, writes in “A New Refutation of Time” in Labyrinths
An examination of photographic precedent reveals that the photographer, and less often the designer, relies heavily on the subtle nuances of place as it transforms from day to night and year to decade in the same fashion that a writer’s characters wrinkle with time. This was never more evident than throughout the nineteenth century as photographers reacted to the transforming physical landscape, the loss of night’s mysteries to the imposition of artificial light. Now, the ever-increasing illumination of our waking moments has turned the silence of the moonlit agrarian landscape into a distant memory and almost total fiction.
With this industrial transformation, the possibility of oscillating in the uncertainty of human thought and emotion, a kind of intellectual twilight where vision succumbs to the imagination, has been eliminated from everyday life. Photography’s (literally translated as ‘drawing with light’) early portrayal of time and its ability to qualify experience through degrees of darkness offers a realm of opportunity for resurrecting the poetry and sublimity of night as a driving element in the conception of space. Lightwriting: Constructing Night challenges our translations of space as seen by a more majestic light than the sun, reconstituting the poetics of the night and reestablishing the potential for a symbiotic relationship between the design process and the photographic image.
For photographers, the spiritual essence of moonlight and glowing cities devoid of moving objects were ideal subjects for the necessary longer exposure times. Clearly, if the physical realm could not preserve the sublime qualities of the night then it fell to the mechanical eye to stimulate the imagination and record this disappearing and soon to become fictional night-world.
Photographs from late nineteenth and early twentieth century document the poetic qualities of night as captured by Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Steichen, and Brassai. These photographs exploit themes seldom incorporated into conventional architectural representation and are certainly worthy of further exploration such as temperature, absence and presence, reflection, the blurring of representational boundaries (i.e. photography becomes painting), inversion – where the negative space becomes the positive, the transformation of technology to the poetic realm (i.e. streetlights become constellations), the fragment, commentary on technology and the disappearing night landscape, and finally degrees of isolation and melancholy.
Jorge Luis Borges, “Blindness,” in Seven Nights (New York: New Directions Books, 1984).
Jun’ichiro Tanazaki, In Praise of Shadows (Sedgwick: Leete’s Island, 1977), 1-23.
Juhani Pallasmaa. The Eyes of the Skin (Wiley-Academy, 2005)
APERTURE
week 006
Consideration of the three P’s as they relate to aperture: [p]hysical, [p]hysiological, and [p]sychological.
ARTISTIC CONSCIENCE
week 007
An investigation into what Michael Graves referred to as the artistic conscience. “It goes without saying that what the architect chooses to draw, using his sketchbook as a tool for observation, reveals an examination of the artistic conscience.” This week will examine how the architect “first looks, then observes, and finally discovers” and will present how the Grand Tour served as a primary vehicle for such discovery for two centuries.
Michael Graves. The Necessity for Drawing in Brian Ambroziak. Images of a Grand Tour (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2005).
LECTURE /// ARTISTIC CONSCIENCE
ARTISTIC CONSCIENCE /// IKONEN SKETCHES
2021 BEST OF THE BEST /// STUDENT SUBMISSIONS
INFINITE PERSPECTIVES
week 008
This lecture provides an overview of cartographic relief presentation techniques from antiquity to the present. We will examine the quantitative and qualitative artistic methods that paralleled advances in the sciences as the Icarian point of view was slowly realized.
Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (University of California Press, 1984) Certeau Reading corrected 040122
SCRIPTING SPACE
week 009
Games such as Clue appropriate language and impose narratives that trigger a participant’s imagination and arouse existing biases. The possibility that “Professor Plum did it in the Study with a Candlestick” yields a signified response pulled from the subconscious of the player that is instantly reinforced by the physical image of a staunch old academic. A playing card is then positioned on a board where signifier and signified coexist. Such wonderfully rich narratives reinforce the important role that language plays in the construction of spatial identities. So whereas, similar to the process of collage, the combination of images register new possibilities, the combination of words achieves a similar goal but with a greater degree of confidence by designers that have spent the greater portion of their formative years using words and numbers rather than images. This lecture questions the degree to which such narratives can be communicated through conventional systems of orthographic projection, systems that often times do little to evoke direct linguistic relationships.
The territory of this investigation is positioned firmly within a filmic discourse that draws heavily upon the ‘archetypes of the unconscious’ found in Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of Stephen King’s novel “The Shining,” the suburban heterotopia of Tim Burton’s “Edward Scissorhands,” the non-linear narrative found in Quentin Tarantino’s “Pulp Fiction,” and the maniacal level of detail in Wes Anderson’s “The Royal Tenenbaums.” The original scripts for each of these films provide insight to how designers might leverage unique aspects of the screenplay in the development of multivalent space.
Theoretical projects such as Superstudio and Piero Frassinelli’s “Twelve Cautionary Tales for Christmas: Twelve Ideal Cities,” Rem Koolhaas’s Architectural Association thesis “Exodus, or the Voluntary Prisoners of Architecture,” and Bernard Tschumi’s “The Manhattan Transcripts” exploit the breadth of this representational middle ground inherent to the screenplay positioned between literature and architecture.
Drawing heavily upon filmic techniques, these precedents use writing in a strategic way to advance a discourse that traditionally privileges the image. Frassinelli’s essay that first appeared in AD #12 biases writing in its original state, one ideally suited to the multimedia slide show it evolved into a year later. Koolhaas’s thesis uses language in a deliberate manner so as to increase the subversive possibilities of each collage. Koolhaas’s unique nomenclature animates a series of solitary frames and positions them within an overarching script and allows us to consider ourselves as “prisoners” rather than mere participants. Tschumi’s “The Manhattan Transcripts” is probably the most often cited precedent when it comes to filmic tradition within systems of architectural representation, but in this case it is used as a counterpoint as it excludes language, intensifies the dominance of the image, and situates itself more closely to the technique of storyboarding.
Walter Murch, In the Blink of an Eye: A Perspective on Film Editing (Silman-James Press, 2001)
Andrey Tarkovsky, Sculpting Time, trans Kitty Hunter-Blair (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986)
PCM + COLLAGE
week 010
This week will focus on a workshop entitled Vogue: Mapping Pop Culture.
One rainy day in 1919, finding myself in a village on the Rhine, I was struck by the obsession which held under my gaze the pages of an illustrated catalogue showing objects designed for anthropologic, microscopic, psychologic, mineralogic, and paleontologic demonstration. There I found brought-together elements of figuration so remote that the sheer absurdity of that collection provoked a sudden intensification of the visionary faculties in me and brought forth an illusive succession of contradictory images, double, triple, and multiple images, piling up on each other with the persistence and rapidity which are peculiar to love memories and visions of half-sleep.
These visions called themselves new planes, because of their meeting in a new unknown (the plane of non-agreement). It was enough at that time to embellish these catalogue pages, in painting or drawing, and thereby in gently reproducing only that which saw itself in me, a color, a pencil mark, a landscape foreign to the represented objects, the desert, a tempest, a geological cross-section, a floor, a single straight line signifying the horizon…thus I obtained a faithful fixed image of my hallucination and transformed into revealing dramas my most secret desires – from what had been before only some banal pages of advertising.[1]
- Excerpt from “Beyond Painting” by Max Ernst
Thomas Carlyle wrote in Sartor Resartus that “tangible products” are said to be reduced to the categories of “Cities… Fields… and Books” with the worth of books “far surpassing that of the two others.”[2] The intent behind citing this passage emerges not from being partial to the written word, but to establish a sympathizing companion to the more often cited chapter “This Will Kill That” and out of optimism that the transformative power of literature evident here will inspire architecture and expand upon traditional practices of imagining and representing space. In the foreword to Collage and Architecture, Juhanni Pallasmaa quotes the poet Joseph Brodsky, reminding us that even though collage has long been associated with visual art and film, “it was poetry that invented the technique of montage, not Eisenstein.”[3]
The weeks exercise and lecture attempts to jumpstart the design process through prose. The assignment entitled Vogue: Mapping Pop Culture aspires to expand the present tense of the design process. This assignment asks students to identify a series of fragments from the most recent issue of Vogue magazine and organize them into what Max Ernst referred to as a plane of non-agreement. Drawing upon the aesthetic nature of language as defined by Borges as he describes the near symmetry of the English moon, the signifier plays a central role in searching out a vocabulary that describes qualities seldom associated with the errant trajectories initiated by the hand in the early design process. While the sketched line as well as the typewriter’s hammer both create shapes that evoke symbolic associations, sketching, or disegno as it is referred to in Italian, relies more heavily on composition and geometry and drawing convention in its primary reading. So while two parallel lines might create an almost instantaneous reading of a wall, either in plan or section, and a series of these lines might further begin to evoke a sense of materiality, language possesses the ability to, with the same effort, open the reader’s eyes to a scale unimagined by first marks in graphite and ink. When James Agee describes the material of the sharecroppers houses as “bone pine hung on its nails like an abandoned Christ,” he is metaphorically connecting the structure’s skin to that of the human body while reinforcing the daily even religious struggle inherent to the life of its occupant.[4] The signified image thus plays a vital role in expanding the potential of a simple subject to command an emotional quality seldom achieved through drawing alone.
Culling Vogue magazine, students scour pages of Vogue for language that strikes them as having a strong visual and auditory component — it is by default a representation of contemporary culture with a strongly inherent bias. As such, your starting point draws not from memory but is external and negates the notion of a random process as students consciously choose words or phrases for a variety of reasons. One could see precedent or a site’s context as providing a similar kit of parts with which to begin a conceptual process; a kind of jump-start to the creation of a truly original idea. Douglas Darden’s Condemned Building as well as Dali’s Paranoid-Critical Method (PCM) as described by Rem Koolhaas in Delirious New York, serves as valuable guides to the process and stress the necessary strategies and desires required to make a fresh start and acknowledged that these methods are by no means a novel approach.