This week, we’d like to introduce our resident academic, Ben, to the world of Woobius Scribbles. An accomplished architect and theorist, Ben will be providing you, our readers, with snippets of his wisdom over the coming months.
Architecture’s visual bias
Architecture is designed and represented in a predominantly visual manner but it is itself not predominantly visual.
It is clear that architecture is designed and communicated mainly through visual means. Drawings, whether ‘working drawings’ or ‘visualisations’, communicate spaces or construction techniques by representing them visually. These are often augmented by explanatory text, either on the drawing or in a specification, but it is the drawing that remains primary. Models are less dominantly visual because they can be moved around and touched, but to some extent, the physical model is losing its place to the computer model, which is perhaps the ultimate visually dominated medium. It produces ‘photo-realistic’ perspectives that look like your building will really look.
But buildings are more than what they look like. And I don’t just mean that we neglect the other senses. We use buildings, things happen in them and these events can radically change the spaces without substantially changing their visual appearance (imagine a sports hall hosting a game of basketball one day and an examination on the next). Our experiences are spatial, not pictorial, and many of their aspects cannot be drawn (meaningfully) in terms only of what they look like. Our experience of buildings is as much organisational as visual.
A sense of perspective
A perspective drawings seems closer to representing what it’s like to be in a space than, say, a section. But a perspective gives us one view only. A fully rendered perspective presents us with a fait accompli; this may be useful (although still perhaps misleading) in representing a design to others but it is difficult to work with as a designer. There is little ambiguity in the image which can be inventively misread; we can only go back and change the ‘object’ and try and improve it, we rarely see other possibilities in the drawing itself.
Plan and section drawings are always thought to imply objectivity in representation – they describe the building from an objective, orthogonal standpoint. They are therefore thought not to describe the experience of being there. I think, though, that they do; it’s just that they don’t tell us what it will look like. If we know the conventions of a plan or section drawing we can walk through it in our mind and imagine what it is like to be there. This means it tends to open up possibilities when we are designing – we imagine things that maybe we hadn’t thought of before – in contrast to the fully rendered perspective which allows only one interpretation.
Site analysis
Another interesting case is that of ‘site analysis’ in an educational context. In most projects, students start with some kind of site or context analysis. In one particular module I taught recently, we encouraged them to go into considerable depth. The visual output for the portfolio was a series of diagrams that represented the understanding of the site they had developed. Marking this kind of work in a portfolio, when the student’s verbal explanation is missing, is deeply problematic, especially when it comes to moderation by external tutors. A good piece of analysis that demonstrates a highly sophisticated understanding of the site but which is drawn up poorly, perhaps because the student is graphically weak, gets treated, at least initially, like a poor piece of analysis because that is what it looks like. By contrast an indifferent piece of analysis which is drawn up really well gets treated, again at least initially, as a good piece of analysis. It is difficult to separate the content from the representation and we therefore are always in danger of marking graphic ability whereas in this particular case we were trying to mark analysis.
There is something unavoidably visual about designing because it is intimately linked with the act of drawing. But for me the new dominance of the 3-d computer visualisation pushes this too far. Because these forms of representation portray buildings as finished objects to be viewed, we can end up designing ‘finished’ objects to be viewed and eventually buildings that look like computer models rather than the other way round.
