How architectural drawings work - and what that implies for the role of representation in architecture

Journal of Architecture

Volumn 13, Issue 5, 2008, Pages 535-564

  Bafna, Sonit ^a  

^a GEORGIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 65849379504     PISSN: 13602365     EISSN: 14664410     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/13602360802453327     Document Type: Article

References (61)

1. Robin Evans, 'Translations from Drawing to Building', in Translations from Drawing to Building and other Essays (Cambridge MA, The MIT Press, 1997), p. 156.
2. The two part-sentences quoted from Evans further below in this section are from pages 157 and 186 respectively. See also Robin Evans, The Projective Cast (Cambridge, MA, The MIT Press, 1995).
3. Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art (Indianapolis, Hackett, 1976), p. 219. Goodman distinguishes types of symbolic systems associated with different arts on pages 177-221.
4. 'Thus although a drawing often counts as a sketch, and a measurement in numerals as a script, the particular selection of drawings and numerals in an architectural plan counts as a digital diagram and as a score.' Goodman, Languages of Art, op. cit., p. 218. Goodman's discussion seems to focus entirely on working drawings used during the construction process, although it must be admitted that he does not make that qualification explicitly.
5. The pair of prints shown here (in Figure 1) is from a negative at the Kunsthalle, Mannheim, dating possibly from 1925. Another copy of photographs of these drawings, with signs of being touched up, is at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. In the mid-1960s, students at IIT Chicago prepared revised versions of these plans. These were first published in Werner Blaser, Mies van der Rohe: die Kunst der Struktur (Zurich, Artemis Verlag, 1965), but these are variations that add a substantial amount of detail not found in the originals.
6. A full listing of the publications of these drawings can be found in Wolf Tegethoff's Mies van der Rohe: Villas and country houses (New York, MOMA, 1985), p. 37;
7. originally published as Mies van der Rohe; die Villen und Landhausprojekte, (Essen, R. Bacht, 1981).
8. The standard Mies biography, Franz Schulze's Mies van der Rohe: A critical biography (Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 1985) sets this project very informatively within the overall context of Mies's work.
9. Goodman, Languages of Art, op. cit.; for discussion of density, see pp. 130-141; for repleteness, pp. 228-230; and for definition of symbolic functioning of a sketch, p. 198.
10. 'This fact about maps and what they map is confirmed by the way we extract information from such information as they contain. To do so we do not rely on a natural perceptual capacity, such as I hold seeing-in to be. We rely on a skill we learn.' Wollheim, 'What the spectator sees', in Visual Theory: Painting and interpretation, eds, Norman Bryson, Michael Ann Holly, Keith Moxey (New York, HarperCollins, 1991), p. 119; emphasis mine.
11. See Walton, Mimesis as Make Believe (Cambridge MA, The Harvard University Press, 1990), pp. 293-296. His dismissal of the issue of conventionality is on page 301.
12. Dalibor Vesely, 'Architecture and the Conflict of Representation', AA Files, 8 (1985), pp. 21-39.
13. Vesely's argument was made in the context of a lively discussion in the 1980s on representational paradigms believed to be embedded within different projective conventions: the seminal essay in this set is by Yves Alain Bois, 'Metamorphosis of Axonometry', Daidalos, 1 (1981), pp. 40-58;
14. and a notable response, Massimo Scolari, 'Elements for a History of Axonometry', Architectural Design, 55, no. 5/6 (1985), pp. 73-78.
15. This line of inquiry was further developed by Alberto Perez-Gomez in several essays following his Architecture and the Crisis of Modern Science (Cambridge, MA, The MIT Press, 1983).
16. For a more recent recounting of these ideas, see Perez-Gomez and Louise Pelletier, Architectural Representation and the Perspectival Hinge (Cambridge, MA, The MIT Press, 1997).
17. The issues raised by Evans in 'Translations from Drawings to Buildings' (see Note 1 above), originally published in AA Files, 12 (1986), pp. 3-18, are also best understood in the context of these writings.
18. The point is made in Tegethoff, Mies van der Rohe, op. cit., pp. 38-39, but has not attracted much attention despite the amount of writing devoted to the Brick Country House.
19. Sonit Bafna, A Morphology of Intentions (Unpublished Doctoral Dissertation, Georgia Institute of Technology, 2002), pp. 205-210, discusses this point in the context of a larger discussion establishing Mies's intentionality regarding the project.
20. Colin Rowe, 'Mannerism and Modern Architecture', in The Mathematics of the Ideal Villa and other Essays (Cambridge, MA, The MIT Press, 1976), pp. 47-49.
21. Wolf Tegethoff, 'From Obscurity to Maturity: Mies van der Rohe's breakthrough to modernism', in Mies van der Rohe: Critical Essays, ed., Franz Schulze (Cambridge MA, The MIT Press, 1989), p. 56.
22. In asserting this, I am not claiming that aesthetic experience is only perceptual, requiring no capacity of the observer other than passively to absorb the given work; critical engagement with the work that aesthetic experience requires is characterised by an active, seeking, behavioural component as well. In short, perception is a necessary, but not sufficient, component of aesthetic experience. Also, see below, Note 18.
23. Franz Schulze, Mies van der Rohe, op. cit., pp. 113-116.
24. Tegethoff, 'From Obscurity to Maturity', op. cit., p. 55.
25. Baxandall, 'The Language of Art History', New Literary History, 10 (1979), pp. 453-465, offers a more nuanced description of art historical language along these lines, dividing the lexicon used into three classes - comparative, causal and those registering effects. My particular interest is how these act in concert to produce an overall inferential context.
26. The terms interpretive and explanatory are used here in the sense discussed by Georg Henrik von Wright, Explanation and Understanding (Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1971), pp. 4-7, clarifying a distinction originating in the writings of the nineteenth-century German philosophers of history, Johann Gustav Droysen and Willhelm Dilthey. An explanatory paradigm, in contrast with the interpretive one, would frame the description of an event not from effect to cause but rather from cause to effect; the cause in this latter case would be a general law, and thus would leave no room for intentionality.
27. In asserting the role of attention over experience here, I am motivated by philosophers such as Arthur Danto and Goodman, who have both independently argued for art ultimately producing cognitive rather than experiential effects. Others, such as Richard Shusterman, have counter-argued for the role of experience as the ultimate end of art: see Shusterman, 'The ends of aesthetic experience', Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 55, no.1 (1997), pp. 29-41. Despite my sympathies with what Danto and Goodman write, however, my argument here does not entail a necessary acceptance of their position. My argument is made in the narrow context of the uses to which architectural drawings can be put, and so need not preclude a full-blooded aesthetic experience that Shusterman holds important as an end itself.
28. The direct source of my usage of the term 'imaginative engagement' and of the thesis that a definitional task of artists is to create works sustaining imaginative engagement, is Michael Podro, Depiction (New Haven, CT, Yale University Press, 1998), pp. 7-9, although in his use of the term, imagination is integral to depiction, whereas I prefer to use imagination when what he calls the 'fictive' element appears in the viewer's engagement with a painting.
29. This distinction is most explicitly clarified in Christopher Peacock, 'Depiction', The Philosophical Review, 96, no.3 (1987), pp. 383-410.
30. See p. 386: 'Suppose you see hanging on a wall, a silhouette of the Salisbury Cathedral ... If the silhouette is successful, the following is true of the observer's experience: the silhouette is presented in an area of the perceiver's visual field which is experienced as similar in shape to the region of the visual field in which Salisbury Cathedral itself is presented when seen from a certain angle. The point is not that the area of visual field is thus similar in shape, but that it is experienced as being so,...' (emphasis mine).
31. 'But a more sweeping ... point is that seeing-in appears to be biologically grounded. It is an innate capacity, though, as with all innate capacities, it requires an environment sufficiently congenial and sufficiently stimulating, in which to mature.' Wollheim, 'What the spectator sees', op. cit., p. 114.
32. For a very accessible presentation of a theory of our visual system as a rule-governed entity, see D. D. Hoffman, Visual Intelligence (New York, W.W. Norton and Co., 1998): see, in particular, pp. 79-105.
33. For an assessment of various cues that we use to construct a sense of depth in visual layout, and an accompanying theory of their relative role at different distances, see James E. Cutting and Peter M. Vishton, 'Perceiving layout and knowing distances: The integration, relative potency, and contextual use of different information about depth', in Perception of Space and Motion, eds, W. Epstein and S. Rogers (New York, Academic Press, 1995), pp. 71-118.
34. On the view that our visual perception of pictures uses the same mechanism as our actual perception, see J. J. Gibson, An Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (Boston, Houghton-Mifflin, 1979);
35. for Gibson's arguments on pictures in particular, see Gibson, 'Pictures, perspective and perception', in Reasons for Realism, eds, E. Reed and R. Jones (Hillsdale, NJ, Erlbaum, 1982), pp. 231 -240.
36. The point about artists deliberately creating constraints on depth-giving cues and other viewing conditions in order to prevent ambiguous readings of spatial relationships in pictorial space is made in Sheena Rogers, 'Perceiving Pictorial Space', in Perception of Space and Motion, eds, W. Epstein and S. Rogers (New York, Academic Press, 1995), pp. 119-163.
37. For one clear statement of this position, see Wollheim, 'What the spectator sees', op. cit., pp. 122-123.
38. Ibid., p.105;
39. Walton, Mimesis and Make Believe, op. cit., p.294.
40. Podro, 'Representation and the Golden Calf, in Visual Theory: Painting and interpretation, eds, Norman Bryson, Michael Ann Holly and Keith Moxey (New York, HarperCollins, 1991), pp. 163-189.
41. It is worth noting here that Podro discusses not just traditional representational drawings but abstract drawings as well; he compares Auerbach's and Poussin's studies after Titian's Bacchus and Ariadne in order to bring out the similarity of depicted space in some of their paintings. It seems to me not too much of a stretch to extend these ideas to non-representational art. Even in the works of artists such as Kandinsky, Rothko, Pollock or Marden, successful engagement on the part of the viewer demands exploration of relative depths amongst the graphic elements that constitute the paintings. Compare also Podro's discussion of Kandinsky and Mondrian (Depiction, op. cit., pp. 23-26), where he shows that even the non-representational programmes of such painters were ultimately grounded in concerns about the depictive functioning of pictures in general.
42. Podro, 'Representation and the Golden Calf, op. cit., p. 185; the term disegno is a reference to Vasari, used, he states (p.163), in the sense of 'the mind's grasp of things in the fluent delineation of them.'
43. This account is in essential agreement with the conditions that the philosopher Arthur Danto proposed as marking the distinctive difference between a representation and a work of art. Thus, '... metaphors embody some of the structures that I have supposed artworks to have: they do not merely present subjects, but properties of the mode of presentation itself must be constituent in understanding them,...' Danto, Transfiguration of the Commonplace (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1981), p. 189.
44. For a comprehensive discussion of the history of this debate, see Wolf Tegethoff, Mies van der Rohe: Villas and country houses, op. cit., pp. 49-51.
45. Michael Baxandall, Patterns of Intention (Yale, Yale University Press, 1985), pp. 58-60.
46. D. D. Hoffman and W. A. Richards, 'Parts of Recognition', Cognition, 18 (1984), pp. 65-96.
47. For a wider contextual presentation of this finding and related work, see Hoffman, Visual Intelligence, op. cit., pp. 82-83.
48. The allographs versus autographic distinction is due to Goodman: first introduced in Languages of Art, op. cit., pp. 112-114. Allographs arts are those in which the actual work can be completely and uniquely specified by a notational scheme; a poem or a musical symphony are obvious examples. For a work of autographic art, like a painting, such a specification is not possible. Goodman used these distinctions to develop arguments about why some art forms such as paintings can be forged, while others such as poems cannot. This distinction gives some trouble in the case of architecture, as he himself acknowledged (p.221), although for generic buildings, his inclination was to think of architecture as an allographs art.
49. For instance, 'Architectural and musical works, unlike paintings or plays or novels, are seldom descriptive or representational. With some interesting exceptions, architectural works do not denote - that is they do not describe, recount, depict, or portray. They mean, if at all, in other ways.' Goodman, 'How Buildings Mean', in Reconceptions in Philosophy and Other Arts and Sciences, eds, Goodman and Catherine Elgin (Indianapolis, Hackett Publishers, 1988), p. 31.
50. Roger Scruton, The Aesthetics of Architecture (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1979), also maintains a similar position.
51. Our understanding of the traditional conception of the Indian temple as a mountain is due to Stella Kramrisch, The Hindu Temple (Calcutta, University of Calcutta Press, 1946).
52. The idea that the temple form contains depictions of elements of contemporary palatial architecture has been discussed by Michael Meister in a number of writings. See, for instance: Meister, 'De- and Re-constructing the Indian Temple', Art Journal, 49 (1990), pp. 395-400,
53. and, Meister, 'Prāsāda as Palace: Kūtina Origins of the Nāgara Temple', Artibus Asiae, 49 (1989), pp. 254-280.
54. Rudolf Wittkower, Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism (London, Alec Tiranti, 1952), pp. 80-84.
55. Colin Rowe, 'Transparency: Literal and Phenomenal', in The Mathematics of the Ideal Villa and Other Essays (Cambridge, MA, The MIT Press, 1976), pp. 159-183;
56. originally published in Perspecta, 8 (1963), pp. 45-54.
57. The idea that design involves an active reformulation of design goals through manipulation of systematic procedures is much discussed in several fields investigating the nature of the design process. M Gorman and B. Carlson, 'Interpreting Invention as a Cognitive Process', Science, Technology, and Human Values, 15 (1990), pp. 131-164,
58. and C. Keller and J. Keller, Cognition and Tool Use (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 108-129, both focus on the cognitive aspects of the design process.
59. John Peponis, 'Formulation', The Journal of Architecture, 10, no. 2 (2005), pp.119-134, argues that the design process in architecture is essentially aimed at the reformulation of an embodied conceptual thesis.
60. 'The subject of a representational work of art is also the subject of the thoughts of a man who sees it or reads it with understanding; to enjoy the work is therefore to reflect upon its subject.' Roger Scruton, The Aesthetics of Architecture, op. cit., p. 186. It should be noted that Scruton's criterion allows textual works to be representational as well, that is, Scruton's sense of representation is similar to Goodman's sense of denotation. In any case, the examples discussed in the text below qualify under either of these terms, as well as the stricter definition of representation as depiction.
61. For very persuasive arguments in favour of the idea of representation as a reference, see Danto, Transfiguration of the Commonplace, op. cit., pp. 71-74.