Broad Contemporary @ LACMA

Broad Contemporary Art Museum designed by Renzo Piano Building Workshop, 2008, at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). Doorway and handrail details at second floor entry.

Reading About Why Architects Still Draw

Why Architects Still a Draw by Paulo Belardi is a neat little book that is crafted as two essays or lectures of a course. The first is "Thinking By Hand: A Lecture On Inventive Drawing". In this essay the author relates drawing to thinking, which is, I think, astute and paramount. The second is "No Day Without  A Line: A Lecture On Informed Drawing". In this essay the author generally wants to establish a theoretical underpinning for survey drawing.

 

This book is modeled on Italo Calvino's writing. It is a narrative told with other narratives. Literature, movies, poems, places, people, events. These are all configured to support an essay with an opaque narrative arc. This is both the delight and the dilemma of the book. Many examples are tangents that don't reinforce the thesis at hand and leave the reader wondering, why the excursus? If you like this elliptical style of writing, you will enjoy the book.

 

This book about drawings has no drawings inside it, nor illustrations, nor photos. I found this to be a drawback, as they could have enriched the book and help achieve its goals. The books preface notes that related illustrations can be found on a website - which is helpful but still seemingly remote. If you choose to buy a physical book, shouldn't you get the images too?

Belardi returns to Calvino and specifically mentions the essay "Quickness" from Six Memos for the Next Millennium, a wonderful book at the center of my bookshelf. Ultimately, these two essay lectures by Belardi could benefit from Calvino's quickness, if not from the editorial services of Hemingway. Although there are illustrative voids in the prose, its is still an excellent lecture, and guides the ready on a journey of contemplating the complexity and potential of drawing.

The trickiest part of the book is that it is difficult to extract what the author is actually advocating, i.e. how can one make the types of drawings that he's envisioning. And is hand drawing advocated? Or on-site drawing and measuring? Or on-site sketching? It seems like an Analytique type of drawing might be the answer. The author states that an informed survey drawing includes 5 dimensions:

• X_width/exploration;
• Y_height/stratification;
• Z_depth/interpretation;
• Time; and
• Culture.

To do this properly, thoroughly, and without the benefit of examples, it seems like the only satisfactory type of survey would be a comprehensive, Ph.D style study of a building, resulting in a drawn book.

 

One might suppose that something in the essay is lost in translation, but I don't think so. I suspect the translation by Zachary Nowak to be nuanced and true. I just find the writing to be so circuitous, talking around the central point and potential force of the book - drawing - as if the author is afraid to outspokenly praise drawing as he clearly wants to.

 

In the end, drawing itself remains undefined.