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A book on S+ ARCHITECTURE’s work / Visioning Architecture: The Sketches of Murat Soygeniş

By splusarchitecture
Jul 9, '19 9:44 AM EST
Book cover
Book cover

Visioning Architecture: The Sketches of Murat Soygeniş

Book: Barbano, Giuliana (Ed.), Visioning Architecture: The Sketches of Murat Soygeniş (Foreword by Steve Badanes, Gabriela Goldschmidt, Cover text by Andrea Oppenheimer Dean), Aracne Editrice, Rome, Italy, 612p, 2017 (ISBN: 978-88-255-0506-1)

From the cover text by Andrea Oppenheimer Dean:

At a time when digital design dominates architectural education and practice, Murat Soygenis remains enamored of hand drawing, convinced of its advantages, even its superiority. In a foreword to this book of Soygenis’ sketches, Steve Badanes, founder of the design-build firm Jersey Devil, explains some of the benefits of hand drawing: “Study sketches encourage the designer to think over and over again and develop the design in multiple layers, both in the mind and on paper. Just as one lays a sheet of tracing paper over another, our thoughts are recorded by sketches we make, and, as we continue working on a design problem to develop and detail it, what we record as a sketch gets refined and elaborated.”

Hand drawing not only remains the fastest way to align and analyze visual, intuitive, and cognitive insights, it also offers the designer unencumbered freedom. There are no presets, as in digital drawing. The pen or pencil is an extension of the designer’s body, brain, and imagination. “This quick thinking process while sketching can not be put aside even in the digital age,” Badanes writes.

In her foreword, Professor Gabriela Goldschmidt, whose research has focused on design cognition and visual thinking, calls Soygenis “an ardent sketcher.” She writes, “The sketches Soygenis makes are very beautiful. But they are much more than beautiful: they are instructive, and they tell the story of a mind dedicated to making architecture that is just right for its occupants, for its environment, for the state of the art in building technology.”

Many of Soygenis’ sketches are “thinking” drawings, efforts to clarify thought during pre-design stages. Others are “talking” sketches, meant to explain a design to clients and others. A third type of drawing is ‘prescriptive,” detailing a design’s specifics—its dimensions, materials, details.

At S+ ARCHITECTURE, the architecture office that Soygenis founded, he has made it a principle to begin all initial design work with hand-drawn sketches. The firm’s work includes a wide array of projects, and throughout the design process of all projects sketching becomes a powerful tool for visioning architecture.

This book of sketches illustrates Murat Soygenis’ cognitive, experimental journeys in design.

Andrea Oppenheimer Dean

Writer in Architecture and Design 

Washington, DC