Architects' Sketches: Dialog and Design
Kendra Schank Smith
Language: English
Pages: 153
ISBN: 2:00287159
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Publish Year note: First published in 2008
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Concepts from architects' minds evolve through sketches and as a mode of transference are conveyed to the finished building. This book compares qualities of sketches to reveal unique approaches to the instruments of thinking in which all architects engage. It provides new insight into the relationship between architectural sketches and the process of creative manipulation.
Sketches comprise a thinking mechanism, and through the qualities of ambiguity, quickness and change, they initiate a dialogue for architects. As a medium to facilitate communication, recording, discovery and evaluation, their pertinence lies in their ability to exhibit both the precise and the imprecise.
Exploring four related theoretical approaches, play, memory-imagination-fantasy, caricature and the grotesque, the book shows how imprecision stimulates imagination to conceive new forms in the dialogue of architectural sketches.
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defined. The buildings in the distance are rendered with quick vague lines. The pedestrians in the foreground are brief profiles. Schmidt emphasizes the bold slice through the building contrasting its lighter value and adding to its transparency. Simplifying the dark shape into a bold form anticipates the final construction but also acts conceptually to identify the building’s stark shape – thus the ‘Black Diamond’. The windows on the lower level have been shown as quick ‘n’ and ‘m’ shapes in
as the medium for the creative process used to conceive architecture, they also use sketches in all aspects of the design process with individual expression. This examination suggests an interpretation of architects’ relationships with the transitory and immediate images they utilize for design. Because architectural sketches are part of a thinking process and seldom an end product, they play an important role in the process of architectural design. Even though architectural sketches are uniquely
strangeness of the form, then we have the grotesque. It is the half-formed, the perplexed and the suggestively monstrous. (Santayana, 1961: 175) Again, in Figure 5.6, it is confusing to view strange forms that are ambiguous but also resemble the grotesque in their relationship to the human body. The turret on the right is disturbing because, when glancing away, it has a bizarre resemblance to a face. The shape can allow perception of various forms, as it is incomplete enough to permit
really be taken apart and described in words. When it comes down to being in the field and looking at a bird, you don’t take the time to analyze it and say it shows this, this, and this; therefore it must be this species. It’s more natural and instinctive. After a lot of practice, you look at the bird, and it triggers little switches in your brain. It looks right. You know what it is at a glance. (Gladwell, 2005: 44–45) This occurrence usually emanates from experience helping observers recognize
conscious of ’ (Gladwell, 2005: 67–68). They make conscious and also these subconscious corrections in their play to refine and improve performance. Likewise architects, using their judgment, continually perfect their sketches to meet conceptual notions or to ‘make and match’ an impression in their mind’s eye. This mental impression as compared to the sketched image is a constant refinement of likeness. Not all architects draw from imagination, but instead may start by drawing a shape or form and