Architectural Synaesthesia - Prof. M. Schaut and Prof. D. Bucsescu

Daer All:

I thought that , at this particular moment, in the course of your design work, it would be helpful for the studio as a whole, to reread carefully this article about Scarpa's way of drawing. There are, I feel, helpful hints about how you all should approach the way you draw your projects now!!!

Here is a shorten version of the reading I was under the impression you all would have shared to date. If not it is never to late...Feel free to comment and engage in a studio discussion on the methods of drawing your projects.

Let me know what you think about this reading and how it might affect the way you draw NOW.

Dan



From the article “The Drawings of Carlo Scarpa”.
by Hubert Damish

in the book about Carlo Scarpa “The Complete works”

Despite Scarpa’s great admiration for Frank Loyed Wright, their use of drawings was quite different. For FLW, the design had no meaning or existence save as an immediate image. For that reason he would visualize it in the form of a perspective view, often colored, which enabled him to see the building, designed in plan, section, and elevation, as he imagined it on the site.

There is nothing like that in Scarpa’s case. ….Scarpa’s graphic output does not act as a surrogate for what was never built. This is because Scarpa’s approach was completely dominated by, paradoxically, the problem of realization. From this point of view, it seems that the Venetian architect’s attitude has a curious similarity to that of Cezanne. Scarpa harbored , the same doubt as Cezanne, if we believe what Merleau-Ponty tells us. And it is this doubt, clearly methodological, which gives his work, seemingly so modest, a historical incisivness that some consider extraordinary………….

It is as if we are confronted with an inevitable and perhaps insoluble enigma, one whose power of raising significant issues will continue to grow wherever architecture is practiced. In examining the series of drawings for the re-ordering of the Castelvecchio in Verona, one is struck by the fact that they are mainly studies of details.

Apart from the quite elaborate drawings for the placing of the equestrian statue of Cangrande, which are the logistical testimony of his (Scarpa’s) precise calculation of effects (though it should be noticed that there is no view of the whole, save for the photos Scarpa used in drawing possible versions of the most active, or at least most deliberately representative, core of the whole) we have mostly working drawings, if not actually those used on the site. ….

Here is the correct term is demonstrative power, for eack of these sketches- …constitutes a proof of the absolute priority Scarpa ascribed to actual construction and whatever that involved.

This priority did not derive from in any way from technological ideology or even nostalgia for traditional craftsmanship, though Scarpa was definitely against everything he considered a sign of the degradation and decline of the métier.

..a perspective representation is barely distinguishable at first glance from a planimetric drawing since both have the look of elaborations based on superimposition of sheets, this constitutes the charachteristic trait of an architecture which has to be analyzed in layers and by its intervals, gaps and joints, often extremely small yet calculated.

Scarpa could not have been more scathing about those students who attempted to work, right from the start, by using perspective views and axonometric projections,, taking up a viewpoint outside the object Instead of laying bare its guts and innards, as he wanted them to do. Perspective views and aerial representations had to be left till a second stage, after the completion of the design by plans and sections, the only instruments that make it possible to grasp from the inside the relationships between the different elements of the composition. Even photographs are useless, save when used as the basis of an elaboration traced over them. The essential goal therefore lies in the purpose of verification, if not actually experimantation, which Scarpa assigns to drawing……For instance, a perspective image of a staircase does not allow sufficient accuracy in identifying the number of steps and their height, let alone the details of their jointing. –jointing, being a link up with Cezannes doubt.

A critical position of this kind acquires special significance at a time like the present, characterized by an attempt to reduce architectural thought to the single dimension of an image, to the detriment of its symbolical and real dimensions.

In this is no paradox; the man who revealed the full potential of museum architecture also uttered the most stringent criticismsof the ever-recurring error of confusing architecture with its image or any kind of scenography. …An image can never replace a demonstration.