I must say, it was a bit disconcerting getting an impromptu announcement from John McMurrough that Andrew Zago was in the East Review space, ready to give a talk on Drawings. Sure, we have tons of work due this week for just about every class, but the work made for engaging conversation nonetheless!

"Drawings and Pictures"

Set up a couple distinctions

Building on some thoughts from lecture in the fall

Discussing drawings is sort of an anachronism

With a few marginal endeavors in architecture, we don't just build buildings; we set up certain directions for others to build buildings

Talking about the working space of architecture is by no means a one-to-one relationship with drawing

You produce drawings, drawings become buildings

Discuss the former, to dismiss the latter [ref. drawing & pictures]

Produce things that allow for non-architects to have a clear conception of the building

[Showing Pianesi drawings]

People would see the work of Piranesi and probably thiink "what a disappointment Rome was after being exposed to the engravings of Piranesi"

Views as views, and not as mere snapshots of Rome

Piranesi thought of archaeology as a creative field, saying, "okay, i got it, I'll fill in the rest."

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Drawings

Showing "Visitation" study by Leonardo da Vinci

Paolo Uccello - one of the key proponents/creators of perspective

"Battle of San Romano"

Space is ordered by the discovery of perspective

Math in painting is done by projecting calculations onto the face/head [showing work of de la Francesca]

The idea that one could order one's buildings and cities led to the concept of 'planning'

[showing drawing panels of Urbino, ideal renaissance cities]

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Moving toward the 20th century, there is no one, over-arching idea projected onto the work [ref El Lissitzky's Crown paingings]

Virilio and Perrault worked on the 'oblique' as an attempt to remove a sense of horizontality in architecture

There's an odd relationship between work of artists like Mondrian and architects of the de Stijl movement. Mondrian did not consider many architectural projects of the time to be de Stijl

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Kazimir Malevich

Did a series of architectural studies

In contrast to the minimalist paintings, physical models seem a bit contrived

I've never been influenced by the Russians, and especially not by Malevich - Mies [from K. Frampton[

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Drawing is a subset of a larger working technique

Range of architect's work lies somewhere in between a gradient of "immanent" versus "projective"

Immanent exists in and of itself

Projective pays no attention to the rules

Everything the architect produces should have a balance between immanent and projective characteristics

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Going back to Piranesi for a moment

How do you take apart scale, perspectival correctness, atmosphere, to the point that what you produce is no longer a perspective

Panorama becomes popular in the Late-Eighteenth / Nineteenth Centuries

Panorama is a warped, three-dimensional scene no longer dependent on the rules of perspective

Ed Ruscha - Every address on the Sunset Strip, series of smaller perspectives that are butted side-by-side to match

Effective technique, referenced as an homage in Learning from Las Vegas by Venturi & Scott Brown

Stan Douglas - Vancouver Artist, Every Address on 100 Block of Hasting Street

Not a photograph taken from far away, neither is it series of photos stitched together

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Film Studies by Zago

New eras need to construct new ways of representing cities

Trying to capture strange atmosphere of the city

The horizontal is a pure elevation, the vertical section is in perspective