Opening Up the Space of Drawing: Lines and the Locus of Creation in Architectural Design, #2.

“Architectural sketches” (Author, 2022)

TABLE OF CONTENTS

1. Introduction: Opening Up the Space of Drawing Again

2. Structure and Argument

3. The Representational Paradigm: Three Basic Assumptions About Drawing by Hand

4. Entering the Space of Drawing: The Performative Paradigm

4.1 From neutral surface to inhabited topos

4.2. From traces to situated figurations

4.3. From lines-as-marks to lines-as-processes

5. Conclusion: The Locus of Creation Explored

The essay that follows will be published in six installments; this, the second installment, contains sections 2 and 3.

But you can also download and read or share a .pdf of the complete text of this essay, including the REFERENCES, by scrolling down to the bottom of this post and clicking on the Download tab.

An earlier version of this essay was previously published as (Paans, 2024a), except for the Introduction, which was written specifically for APP.

2. Structure and Argument

The practice of exploringly drawing by hand, or sketching, is ubiquitous in the design disciplines. It is taught around the world as one of the most straightforward techniques of developing ideas, exploring intuitions, prototyping solutions, or communicating concepts (Purcell and Gero, 1998). Seemingly simple and straightforward, the dynamics of drawing by hand also seem easy to understand—that is, as long as one accepts that drawing is a form of mimetic, i.e. broadly imitative, visual representation, thereby considering it as a representational technique (Paans, 2024a). But to accept that viewpoint would be unnecessarily reductive, since it has been argued convincingly that drawing by hand is not just a form of representation, but that it constitutes a form of thinking in its own right (Hoffmann, 2020; see also Geer, 2011: p. 45; Pallasmaa 2015: p. 92; Paans and Pasel 2018). As such, the nature of drawing by hand is an issue that has its home in the realm of aesthetics. From Kant’s Third Critique onward, aesthetics has predominantly focused on the notion of the beautiful. However, if we recast it as what Hegel aptly called “the science of sensibility,” we see that aesthetics encompasses not only the notion of beauty, but the dynamics that characterize artistic practices such as painting, sculpting, or drawing in the broad sense. An anticipation of this approach is already found in Kant, who approached reflection as a type of sensibility-in-practice (Paans, 2023).

Returning now to drawing practices, the statement that drawing by hand is a genuine form of thinking—no matter how intuitively appealing—presents us with paradoxes left and right. If hand drawing is indeed an autonomous form of thinking, how is it so? How do visual and gestural creation guide the process of (creative) thinking, or tap into aspects of that process that no other activity can reach? If aesthetics is concerned with the sensibility inherent in artistic practice, then it must provide an answer, model, or tentative theory.

To address this question, I take an indirect route and elaborate a very simple claim: that drawing lines by hand is a form of generating conditions for creative thought.

To restrict the focus of this paper, I limit the discussion to drawing lines by hand in architectural design. Creating lines, as architectural theorist Marco Frascari argued, is itself a way of “architectural thinking” (Frascari, 2009). Although I’ll also return to Frascari’s statement later on, right now I’d like to extend his thesis to support an additional claim: not only is drawing lines by hand a form of thinking, but correspondingly, lines play indispensable roles in the emergence of the locus of creation. In the course of my argument, I’ll explain what this claim means.

3. The Representational Paradigm: Three Basic Assumptions About Drawing by Hand

To lay out the position I’m criticizing, let’s introduce three assumptions about drawing by hand and lines in architectural design that jointly constitute what I call the representational paradigm.

The first assumption about drawing by hand is that it occurs on a neutral plane. This idea can be traced back to Ancient Greek conceptions of the human mind. The mind was regarded as a tabula rasa, or empty plane that would be inscribed by impressions or marks.[i] Notice here the close analogy with the development of writing: the mind was conceived as a surface that would acquire its unique shape by external influence, just as the empty sheet of paper is marked with symbols or marks by an author. This assumption made it easy to lump drawing and writing together under the heading of “the production of traces.”[ii] In doing so, the act of drawing was silently subsumed under writing.[iii]

Writing means permanence: a text can be read in the author’s absence, because the marks have a lifespan that very often exceeds that of the human being. From the very first beginning of architectural drawing during the Renaissance, the material aspect of this permanence claimed center stage: first, a parchment had to be prepared, second, a line had to be engraved into it, and third, this line had to be filled with specially prepared ink (Frascari, 2017: p. 29; Emmons 2019: p. 102). Before the line could achieve its permanence, an entire sequence of material processes was required.

The second assumption is that drawings are imitations or copies of an object or idea that they are supposed to represent faithfully. The idea that the arts are essentially imitative can already be found in Aristotle’s Poetics (Aristotle, 1984: p. 2318). Aristotle notices that imitation is a form of learning, and that imitation offers delight or pleasure. We encounter a similar thought in the Platonic corpus, which states that the arts focus on imitation (mimesis) in order to achieve visual resemblance.[iv] In some cases, this is true, since there are drawings that are meant to specify certain features. For instance, technical drawings must closely resemble the objects they depict in order to be useful at all.[v] However, Aristotle’s theory adds a significant ingredient: there is a sense of pleasurable discovery of reverie that makes itself felt while drawing. Imitation opens up the mental space towards encountering the new. Yet, it is this aspect that is routinely downplayed within the representational paradigm.

Under this assumption, it is but a small step to imagine that a drawing is always a visual representation of an absent object that functions as a stand-in. A drawing is seen as a copy of an object. Or, it may also be seen as a visual representation of it. The distinction between these two is that a drawing may indeed represent an object (as in still life painting), but that object need not be absent. In the case of designing, the object-to-be is at least partially absent, and so drawing fills in an imaginative rather than a representational gap. This assumption directly follows from the idea that drawing is inherently imitative. The object that is depicted is absent, or does not even exist yet, but the drawing makes it present in a precise, descriptive, and tangible manner (Pombo and Magalhães, 2006). This conception of drawing owes much to Leon Battista Alberti’s idea that drawing is the process of setting up a descriptive geometry (Pallasmaa, 2009: p. 29; Paans, Pasel, and Ehlen, 2019): that is, a precise, scale-drawn visual representation of an object that is to be built. Alberti codified drawing in such a way that it became a tool for transmitting ideas between designer and builder. Likewise, the drawing became a tool for “intellectualizing” an idea (Paans, Pasel and Ehlen, 2019). By means of geometric representation, otherwise fuzzy ideas become stable objects of inquiry (Goldschmidt, 1991; Ammon, 2016; Van Den Berghe, 2013; Paans and Pasel, 2018). Not only do they acquire a kind of “objectivity” or representational stability, but likewise, they become amenable to a process of control and metric measurement. In this type of hand drawing, the line was the mark of precision, through scale and metric precision corresponding to a future line or given measure in the real world. However, the lines from which the hand drawn object is constructed play vastly different roles in the process of creation. Again, the sense of pleasure and discovery that Aristotle describes is part and parcel of drawing by hand. The role of lines in the drawing process is not reducible to merely to representing an object faithfully.

Third, drawing has been subsumed under writing as the production of a kind of script that serves a communicative purpose. This is not to say that drawing by hand never serves to communicate information—an obvious counterexample is technical drawing that is used to instruct the construction workers executing a plan. Instead, drawing by hand is a noun without a predicative completion; it is not a synonym for illustrating or codifying completed, well-formed thoughts. The written text has often been held up as a pinnacle of expressive precision at the expense of the drawing. 20^th-century Continental and Analytic philosophy took quite some time to come to terms with forms of expression that were not syllogistic, propositional, or text-based, or that had no clear signifier-signified structure.[vi] The discussion of what constitutes images has developed only recently with image theory and media theory. It should be indicative in this regard that we have a philosophy of language, but no philosophy of drawing. This is partly explicable because drawings cannot be reduced to propositions But even when we discuss language, we mostly talk about written language, propositions, or logically well-formed statements.[vii] Language is reduced to either logic or the production of traces or marks. This has one important ramification for drawing: lines are seen as passive traces or marks of a notation process that bears a close analogy to writing, although the line itself cannot be treated as a proposition or statement (Cross, 1982; Whyte and Ewenstein, 2010; Krämer, 2015). But as poststructuralism and hermeneutics have both shown, text and image alike are very much active.[viii] Drawing has a dynamic of its own: a regimen of operation that is not reducible to writing, although it is also notational (Paans and Pasel, 2018). Luckily, this fact is more and more recognized in architectural theory (Nigianni 2017), but some of the ambiguity remains.

Summarizing the results of this section, the representational paradigm rests on three assumptions: (i) drawing by hand occurs on a neutral plane, (ii) drawings are imitations/and or visual representations of an (absent) object, and (iii) drawing by hand is a kind of script and therefore lines are passive traces. In the next section, I discuss a critical and organicist alternative to this account.

NOTES

[i] The idea is discussed in Aristotle’s De Anima, referring back to Plato’s Timaeus.

[ii] This idea is inherent in Jacques Derrida’s concept of différance (Derrida 1982). See (Derrida 1982; see Krämer, Kogge, and Grube, 2016).

[iii] (Flusser, 2004) also discusses the link between writing and drawing. But in this case, Flusser conceives text as line-based thinking, and drawing as surface-based thinking. Flusser’s account of the surface, however, bears close resemblance to the idea of the plane as a topos.

[iv] See for instance the work of French philosopher Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe on the subtle difference between mimesis and imitation. Often, the two terms are held to deal with replication, but Lacoue-Labarthe disputes this claim, arguing that they are in fact significantly different.

[v] We find a variation on this thought in the idea that designers draw in order to communicate their ideas. This claim is partially true, and it is easy to pinpoint drawings that primarily serve a communicative purpose. Such drawings may be final renderings of a project or plans that depict a plan. However, these drawings are made only when an idea has already been worked out in a process of designing.

[vi] Some of this tension is implicit in Nelson Goodman’s account in Languages of Art (Goodman, 1968). For a discussion of this theme, see (Paans and Pasel, 2018).

[vii] Partially, this influence can be traced back to the philosophical roots of early Analytic philosophy and also the after-effects of John Austin’s 1962 book How to do Things with Words.

[viii] (Gadamer, 1960/2013: pp. 108–109; Derrida, 1982; and Yaneva, 2009) embed the idea of activity within the framework of Bruno Latour’s Actor-Network-Theory (aka ANT), whereby artefact and social conditions become players in an integral network of conscious actors, materials, and processes.

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