Sir Peter Cook - Drawing: The Motive Force of Architecture

Drawing

This edition first published 2014
Copyright 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
First edition published 2008 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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Executive Commissioning Editor: Helen Castle
Project Editor: Miriam Murphy
Assistant Editor: Calver Lezama

TO YAEL AND ALEXANDER who keep me chirpy

I should like to thank Helen Castle, Executive Commissioning Editor, for her wise and steady advice, Caroline Ellerby, freelance editor, for her resource and tolerance over the long period during which this book has been folded in and out of my various activities. Miriam Murphy, Project Editor, for her deftness and understanding and Karen Willcox, freelance designer, for her spirited designing.

Is it not a spontaneous means of summarising immediate intention? A form of jotting-down. Of course, other antennae of the brain are less encumbered. Shouting, murmuring, kicking or the wandering of the mind are less impeded by the necessary use of an implement, such as a pencil. The many effects on our consciousness of such implements has led to ceaseless pondering, whether it involves the impact of a lead pencil or the use of a particular computer program. Here lie so many of the debates about drawings themselves especially in a civilisation that is obsessed by the process.

Another issue that we have to get out of the way is the question as to whether architects drawings owe more to the demands of architecture or to an artistic inheritance where the particularisation of a building matters little. Into this come the issues of consciousness, state of mind and motive.

We know that the professional writer or journalist evolves towards habits of description and the ordering of information that parallel a written piece: the pre-edit, the trained mind and the articulation of key observations. We readily recognise and accept such symptoms.

So how do we deal with the undoubtable parallels in architecture? These easily cross beyond the thresholds of technique, preoccupation or style so that the priorities of an ideal emerge to be described in drawn lines that may enjoy those priorities.

Much of the most memorable or most definitive architecture comes forth at a moment when a set of ideas exists as a form of attack: a retort to another set of ideas. The pressure of rhetoric or drive needing to find an outlet, needing to shout loudly, to insist, awaken, reveal. The action will vary according to the temperament of the author and the means may well be highly conscious of the means used by the imagined adversary, whether this is an architect of an opposite persuasion or a sluggish and indifferent public. A parody of drawn mannerisms, or deliberately chosen cool in response to hot, or sparse in response to complex, closely paralleling the architecture itself or its cultural background. Thus the extraordinary clarity, fierceness and buildable rhetoric of the work that came out of the immediate post-Revolutionary Russia attacked on all fronts through composition, graphics, colour, film, music, material and, of course, the power of the accompanying verbal rhetoric. As such, it can be seen as a coherent piece.

By contrast, one only has to glance at the kinds of drawings that accompanied Frank Lloyd Wrights Broadacre City (193258) and the subsequent Living City (1958), with their implications of endless Midwestern plains and soft, crafted materials and gruffly polite Midwestern conversation and values. They sought a natural expression of this through the medium of the deftly stroked coloured pencil: itself a fairly direct product of the soil.

Frank Lloyd Wright, Living City, 1958. Aerial view: pencil and sepia on tracing paper, 89.5 107.3 cm. The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, Scottsdale, Arizona.

Delving into crazed territory, we realise that human will is an extraordinary phenomenon. If the desire is strong enough, the attack will be made ideally with the same integrity as the two scenarios just described. But otherwise using whatever resources come to hand.

There may not always be any particular correlation between the significance of a powerful architectural drawing and its inherent artistic merit, if we regard that in the illustrative sense. Such a relation between the representative aspects of illustration and selectivity will return as a central paradox in ones discussion. This questions the tradition that if a child displayed a talent for drawing and a grasp of mathematics, he or she would make a good architect.

The vexed issue of comprehension converting itself into reproduction will crop up throughout this survey, but for the moment one is relating only to the issue of motive. Herein lie thousands of moments of irritation and frustration on the part of (even) the motivated: when the concept or maybe the image of a project is sitting there inside ones brain, but the drawn version is but a poor thing. Inhibited by technique, inhibited by clumsiness or inhibited because the imagined notion has no real precedent in familiar imagery.