“Architectural sketches” (Author, 2022)
TABLE OF CONTENTS
1. Introduction: Opening Up the Space of Drawing Again
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 fourth installment, contains section 4.2.
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An earlier version of this essay was previously published as (Paans, 2024a), except for the Introduction, which was written specifically for APP.
4.2. From traces to situated figurations
An idea that is being sketched out is situated within the topos of the drawing surface. We move now on from the surface of the drawing to the visual constellation that is realized on it.
The second assumption of the representational paradigm is that drawings are imitations or copies of an (absent) object or idea that they are supposed to faithfully represent, but which is a misconception:
Architectural drawing is a unique locus of active thinking, itself the fertile wellspring of ideas, where a design emerges from within the effort of drawing. It is a common misconception that architectural design drawing merely documents something already fully determined in the mind. (Emmons, 2019: p. 1)
In many cases, although most strikingly visible in architectural drawing, the suggestion can be made that hand drawing serves not a representational, but a navigational purpose. The literature on thinking-through-drawing is unambiguous in this regard: architectural drawing by hand drawing serves as a means to explore rather than to illustrate (Paans and Pasel 2018, 2020; Have and Van Den Toren, 2012; McGuirk, 2008; see also Schütze, Sachse and Römer, 2003 for an empirical study). Instead of being imitations or copies, drawings by hand that emerge in the creative process are best understood as situated figurations. They are situated because their presence cannot be decoupled from the surface on which they appear; they are figurations rather than figures because they are not meant to be faithful representations of an object, but they create the conditions for an object to appear at all.
Figurations are visual attempts to articulate various aspects of an idea that thereby becomes possible. This process of articulation is anything but linear or predictable, although there are exceptions to this rule. Importantly, the figuration appears gradually and visually through the articulation of lines. In everyday language, we casually say that we “figure things out” when we are struggling with a problem or a puzzle. When we forcefully make a rhetorical point, we use a “figure of speech.” The close etymological link between the figure, the puzzle, and rhetorical strategies tells us a lot about the aim of figuration. By articulating an idea through figurations, we forcibly draw it in the realm of visual and haptic perception. There is a close link between the concept of Anschauung (intuition or direct perception) and figuration. Direct perception requires visual figures as basis for reasoning. Yet, these figures invite as much questions as they answer.
As philosopher Sybille Krämer has developed in detail, the very act of articulating an idea on a surface by visual means imbues it with a new, unique character. The drawing or figure is not just a copy of something that is absent, but acquires its own, unique presence that is synoptic and simultaneous rather than explanatory or analytic. The appearance of an idea as a figure opens it up towards our cognition and discursive capacities. Yet, the figure remains a figure, and is not amenable to reductive explanation (Krämer, 2009, 2016). There is always a representational surplus in it that cannot be grasped conceptually, but rather through fragmentation and aspectual development.
Still, it might seem paradoxical that an idea becomes only possible by articulating its various aspects. However, in his third Critique, Immanuel Kant made exactly the same point with regard to concepts when he discussed the faculty of reflection:
To reflect (to consider), however, is to compare and to hold together given representations either with others or with one’s faculty of cognition, in relation to a concept thereby made possible. (Kant, 1790/2009: p. 15, CPJFI 20: 211)
What Kant notes about the act of reflection applies even more to drawing by hand. By “drawing things together,” that is, by extracting from the space of ideas visual cues and aspects, the idea assumes a kind of possibility (Latour, 1990). Once drawn, notions that appear as situated far apart when considered in isolation display a surprising proximity; correspondingly, ideas that seemed obviously linked lose their seemingly indisputable connection. Nowhere else has this been demonstrated better than in Schön’s seminal study on reflection-in-action and many so-called “protocol studies” of designers at work (Schön, 1987, 1992; Goldschmidt, 1991; Palmboom, 2020; Mittelberg, Schmitz and Groninger, 2017). Reading the transcripts of designers verbalizing their thoughts, one cannot help to be struck by the connective potential of drawing. There is indeed a (pre-)cognitive bridge between the articulating mind and the gesturing hand, and it is this connection that makes drawing so fluid, evolving from one aspect of an idea to another.
The recent work by Fauconnier and Turner extend this thought towards the notion of “conceptual blending”. Like a design idea, a new concept emerges as a kind of elastic entity that is enriched, transformed and shaped by introducing and juxtaposing various notions, blending them into a new entity (Fauconnier and Turner, 2002; see also Taura and Nagai, 2013). Importantly, one requires a connective practice to be able to cultivate and nurture a concept into a fully developed entity that seamlessly integrates the components and notions of which it is composed.
The possibility of such an entity is visually projected onto the drawing surface. If architectural hand drawings exhibit representational traits, they do so to the degree that the sketching process assists in projecting an idea into the world under the form of a figuration. As discussed, the link between the hand and the mind is fully activated in hand drawing, even to the degree that Le Corbusier claimed that his ideas flowed from his drawing hands to his mind, and not the other way around (Emmons, 2017: p.100). Such fluid, spontaneous drawing is projective:
[T]he drawing is still committed to the project by the idea that promotes it. Drawing in design “associates itself” with drawing in art as a visible representation of the uncertainty of the object of design as an artefact of desire, but only as a “passing” formulation and not as the inevitable finality of design. (Pombo and Magalhães, 2006: p. 3)
To project is necessarily an act of experimentation, and even of risk-taking. Very often, the image that appears onto the drawing surface bears only scant resemblance to the imaginal impulse that underpins it. It is a tentative formulation of what appears in the creative consciousness.
For good reason, the German term for “designing” is Entwerfen. Literally, it means to throw something out, to make an idea flow out into the physical world. Once it is thrown out into the world, the projection acquires a peculiar ontological status as an open object (Paans, 2021). No longer is it a fluid notion that can hardly be grasped, but it has been projected as a relatively stable visual entity that appearing on a surface. Yet, it is not a physical object or a finalized design – there is no “inevitable finality” yet.
When we speak of Entwerfen as activity, we must also pay attention to the predicament of the ideas that are projected onto the drawing surface. The Heideggerian concept of Geworfenheit (thrownness) can in this context be read as an acute observation about the projective, oriented nature of our creative capabilities. We “throw” ideas into the world, mediated and aided by drawing. Although they do not (yet) exist as physical objects in the world, they acquire a tangible ontological existence that causally affects the creative thinking process:
Drawing as the possibility of construction of the idea, determines the appearance of the object’s form, while representation of the object. Drawing is for design the projectual instrument that enables the visible appearance of the idea. (Pombo and Magalhães, 2006: p. 3 )
Figure 3: Visual concepts like these—even if not designs—play important cognitive roles in developing design ideas. (Author, 2018)
Through drawing lines, ideas develop in a process of gestation. Initially, an idea may be vague or only rudimentary developed. But instead of being depictions or illustrations of this vague idea, the drawn lines points beyond themselves towards the essential characteristics of what they depict (see Fig. 3 above). It should be said that these characteristics are inferred and encountered rather than defined. Lines are articulations, but not yet articulations of something final or even figurative. This leads once again to a paradox: before an idea fully crystallizes, it can only be hinted at in a circumspect, roundabout manner. The “thing” to which it refers cannot be conceptually caught. Indeed, it even requires some openness that to drive the creative process (Paans 2022; Pombo and Magalhães, 2006: p. 7).
The idea that drawing depicts or duplicates a virtual object that already exists, to some degree finished, in a kind of mental space is quite natural, and corresponds to what W.J.T. Mitchell called “naïve realism” about imagery (Mitchell, 1984: 508–509). Once more, the representational paradigm rears its head here, casting drawing as a practice of duplicating an (absent) object.
But as Michel Foucault put it “the object does not await in limbo to become embodied in a visible and prolix objectivity” (Foucault, 2002: p. 49). It is not as if there is a mental or virtual repository from which objects or ideas emerge as ready-mades. This point seems obvious, but it is worth remembering, as the often-mythical status of architectural sketches often unwittingly conveys the misleading idea that the “mastermind of the creator” knew all along what was going to be designed.[i]
Figure 4: Lines as pure expression of abstract structures. They are not purely descriptive, nor are they completely accurate. Yet, they allow for identifying relations. (Author, 2021)
More than anything, an idea is drawn into being by producing a series of successive visual artefacts that slowly and jointly articulate its essence (see Fig. 4 above). In this process of projection, articulation and exploration, designers familiarize themselves with its structure. We have discussed already how a process of “indwelling” or “taking into possession” is necessary for acquiring a stable grasp on the open object that seems to hover beyond focus.
However, oppositely to the inhabiting pole of this process, we should also emphasize the situating pole. In projecting an idea through figurations, these visual constellations are situated or “thrown” in the world, from where they can be exposed to scrutiny and (collective) discussion. In situating such visual artefacts, their structure, internal coherence, tensions, irresolvable or incommensurable elements is brought before the mind. Tim Ingold cites J. Arthur Thomson, who, in his 1911 Introduction to Science wrote:
When we work long at a thing and come to know it up and down, in and out, through and through, it becomes in a quite remarkable way translucent. The botanist can see through his tree, see wood and bast…, The zoologist can in the same way see through the snail on the thorn, seeing as in a glass model everything in its place, the nerve-centres, the muscles, the stomach, the beating heart, the coursing blood, and the filtering kidney. So the human body becomes translucent to the skilled anatomist. (Ingold, 2007: p. 61; Thomson, 1911: pp. 27–28)
Up and down, in and out, through and through—like a navigator, the inquirer traverses the open object, tracing lines through it until its structure is comprehended by grasping the proper place of each element. Thomson’s mention of translucency is noteworthy because it is not full transparency that is strived for, but a translucency that suggests depth, overlayering and the juxtaposition of simultaneous elements (Paans, 2024b). By positioning the drawn object in a topos, it becomes part of a wider environment. Like Kant’s notion of reflection, representations and notions are held together in this environment, and gradually settle into meaningful structures.
If we follow the implications of this insight, it means that drawing is a mode of taking action, or “thinking equals knowing equals making” (Betsky and Eeuwens, 2008: pp. 143-176). Doing and making are acts of acquiring insight into the constitution of the open object that comes into being on the surface. That the accumulation of insight occurs by making or constructing objects and artefacts is an established fact. As the disciplines of artistic research (see, e.g., Haarmann, 2019) and design research[ii] prove, making is an essential strategy for systematizing a body of ideas. To make is to search. It is for good reason that the philosopher Vilém Flusser described the process of getting acquainted with an idea or notion “ein suchendes begreifen,” i.e., “a searching grasping” (Flusser, 1994: p. 60). To familiarize oneself with an idea, one must grasp it through gestures, through imaginative indwelling and through a process of searching it. The topos of the drawing is gradually grasped in a genetic process of coming to terms with its figurative appearance.
Figure 5: The entire area of a design project represented as an object that is visualized at different scale levels and with different levels of precision. (Author, 2017)
The so-called “practical turn” in the philosophy of science has shed considerable light on how scientists themselves are involved in constructing and reconstructing ideas in which drawing plays often a constitutive, if underestimated, role (Knorr-Cetina, 2006). Schön conceptualizes a similar process as a reflective conversation in which transactions between designer and designed take place (Schön, 1992: p. 4). Perhaps a better term would be a “creative conversation”. The theme of conversation is also taken up by the sociologist of science Karin Knorr-Cetina. She states that during research, a researcher adopts sometimes the “perspective of the object” or enters into a direct, so-called “objectual” relation with it (Knorr-Cetina, 2006: p. 174). The example she uses is of a scientist who, in the absence of a microscope, visualizes a largely magnified version of a protein standing in front of him. This allows him to visualize and understand the reactions of the protein when brought into contact with other chemical compounds (Knorr-Cetina, 2006: p. 179). Like the hand drawing, the structure and the behavior of the protein is gradually grasped.
The imagined object (a protein in this case) that is in reality invisible is by this move situated before the mind’s eye, and thereby brought into focus as a figuration or a open object. Its internal structure can responses can be understood and predictions about its behaviour can be made. It can be understood more thoroughly by visualizing it as a structure. The hand drawing in architecture accomplishes a similar feat: it succeeds in situating a conceptual structure before the mind’s eye (see Fig. 5 above). However, we should be careful in accepting all premises from sociology of science. In Knorr-Cetina’s example, the scientist uses a visualization technique. However, this has the unintended consequence of pitting content (the protein) against form (its visualization). Decades earlier, the philosopher Susanne K. Langer had already cautioned against this division:
An artistic symbol is a much more intricate thing than what we usually think of as a form, because it involves all the relationships of its elements to one another, all similarities and differences of quality, not only geometric or other familiar relations. That is why qualities enter directly into the form itself, not as its contents, but as constitutive elements in it. (Langer, 1953: p. 51)
Unlike the symbolic language that De Certeau invoked, the artistic symbol (and the hand drawing equally so) possesses distinct qualities and depicts not just structural or geometric relations. Likewise, the hand drawing has a tangible, artistic quality of its own and is not merely a geometric representation.
The process of visualization discussed by Knorr-Cetina remains descriptive. Unlike the drawing, its use is concerned with structure and rationalization. However, the architectural drawing process is not reducible to a kind of rationalized decision-taking or heuristics. Granted, drawings may be used as heuristic instruments, but especially sketches are much more than reasoning instruments. We can see this from the fact the drawn image contains empirical as well as poetic contents. Put differently, we might describe it as the “locus of tensions” caused by a poetic force that resides in it (see Fig. 6 below). Edmund Burke remarked acutely that images in the mind’s eye produced a strong emotional response that far surpasses reasoning (Burke, 1757/2015: pp. 49–50).
Figure 6: Evocative sketch that is not just about the precise geometry of an idea, but that represent a vision or idea. Notice how the perspective is not technically correct, but still conveys an architectural idea. (Author, 2016)
For instance, images of vastness invoke a certain imaginative power that transcends the descriptive capacity of reason. Kevin McLaughlin explored this idea in more detail, describing the poetic force inherent in images:
The ability to communicate the feeling of reason transcending cognitive experience also brings with it internally a “withdrawal” of communicability. The language of the poets expresses the capacity and the incapacity to communicate the feeling of the divisive finitude of reason as a force and an unforce. (McLaughlin, 2014: p. xiii)
Poetic language inhabits a peculiar twilight zone. On the one hand, it is intelligible as language and has an impressive force and precision; on the other hand, and like the drawn line, it points ceaselessly beyond itself towards a realm that cannot be described by mere words. But on the other hand, unlike the word, which has a range of meanings, the drawn line is often pure expression.[iii] Its meaning is inferred and demonstrated rather than linguistically determined.
McLaughlin invokes the image of the ocean as something that can be viewed in two different ways. On the one hand, we may view the ocean as an object that can be possessed and described to some degree. We can measure its depth, decide to use it for fishery or travel across its surface. But on the other hand, the ocean is so large and beyond the direct grasp of our human cognitive abilities that it become the site of myth. It is evoked as dark, threatening, bottomless etc.
According to Kant, the latter type of viewing the ocean lies at the heart of the aesthetic judgment. When our cognitive capacities fail to circumscribe an entity precisely in space and time, our mode of perceiving switches from the “finitude of reason” to the language of the sublime. No wonder, then that Burke invokes the idea of “vastness” in his discussion of the sublime. It is the fundamental “openness” of such entities that enables them to transcend our cognitive grasp: the very idea of possession and control vanishes from under our hands. The very fact that the image seems to restlessly oscillate between literal and poetic interpretations makes it unsettling but also open, especially in the case of drawing, where new variations and alternatives can quickly be manufactured:
For drawing is … a great absorber of change, of inconsistency, of variability, of whim, of perverseness, of dogmatism and of waywardness. There is, after all, no such thing as a “correct” drawing. There is no ultimate obligation of the drawer to perform to a formula. (Cook, 2014: pp. 228–229)
It is not too far-fetched to apply this insight to drawn images instead of literary images. After all, both types of image operate with the tension that emerges between the empirical and the poetic, or the descriptive and the evocative. Moreover, like the elastic concept, the drawn lines absorb, transform and transfigure changes, figments of the imagination and inconsistencies without becoming gibberish or nonsense. How this inherent, yet generative tension itself emerges has been described with acuity by Ingold in his study on the anthropological foundation of lines:
Whether however a line is real or a ghost—whether, in other words, it is a phenomenon of experience or an apparition—cannot always be unequivocally determined, and I have to confess that the distinction is decidedly problematic. (Ingold, 2007: p. 50)
The line combines a sense of reality, but also a sense of being-unreal, because it points always beyond itself. Like the words in a poem always seem to open up beyond their literal meaning, the drawn line hints at a reality that is implied and beckoning rather than defined and precisely demarcated. Unlike the symbol, the drawn line short-circuits the relation between perception and automated response. Seeing a symbol like a red light does not just activate the idea of “stop,” but activates an entire behavioral pattern geared to stopping the car, coupled to a sense of urgency and heightened perception. The symbol is not just a visual marker, but a cue to activate an entire range of embodied, affective and cognitive responses (Bohm, 2004: pp. 76–124). This insight about the relation between visual stimulation and bodily response allows us to rethink the nature of the line itself, especially when considered against the background of the creative process.
NOTES
[i] See (Graves, 1977) for a discussion of the role of the first sketches; see (Charitonidou, 2022) for a discussion of Frank Lloyd Wright’s hand sketches.
[ii] See (Michel, 2005) for an overview. See (Hasenhütl, 2009) and (Ammon, 2016) for an overview of knowledge accumulation in drawing. A detailed account of how drawing and thinking interact is presented in a case study by (Vangrunderbeek, 2018).
[iii] That is, of course, as long as the line is not part of what C.S. Peirce would call a “symbol.” A symbol might be a horizontal line to symbolize a floor, or a curvy line symbolizing a wave.
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