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The Journal of Architecture Volume 10 Number 5

Unformed drawing: notes, sketches, and diagrams

Yeoryia Manolopoulou

The Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London, UK

This text discusses drawing as a place where design imagination and critical thinking intersect. In particular, it examines the role informal notes, sketches and diagrams play in the development and communication of architectural ideas difcult to describe in either only words or only images. Note-making shifts between writing and drawing, and takes advantage of both. Sketches work as intuitive devices, stimulating the imagination, entailing spontaneous action, but also posing questions and tempting ones curiosity to explore things through longer processes. Diagrams, on the other hand, are spatio-temporal abstractions that use more intellectual means of representation. They extract the fundamental issues of a scheme and visually articulate them in the form of signs. Architects need notes, sketches and diagrams to imagine, understand relationships, construct and communicate what is important. Once a project is completed a revision of old scribbles, made during its creation, often reveals lost possibilities and different paths that might have been taken. Because of their minimal and incomplete form, notes, sketches and diagrams are open to variable interpretations. They can be ambivalent but trap a dense residue of intentions and meanings difcult to express in more elaborate modes of representation. Notes, sketches and diagrams are fundamental tools of human creativity and communication, and they have signicant implications for the progress of design knowledge: as ambiguous rather than prescribed signs, they enhance collaboration, doubt and change. As unformed and incomplete drawings, they lead to new architectural possibilities (Figs 1, 2, 3, 4). Shared language
In 2004 the 236th Summer Exhibition at the Royal Academy, London, devoted a special section to drawing.1 Designers of all kinds, zoologists, engineers, sportsmen, musicians, surgeons, lm-makers, pilots, poets and detectives were represented by drawings they make in their work. The exhibited drawings varied remarkably, as they had different purposes and meanings, but all shared a common characteristic: they were working drawings, a composition of note-making, sketching and diagramming that, combining visual and linguistic
# 2005 The Journal of Architecture

information, stood somewhere between the realms of text and image. The display revealed how, behind very different activities and professions, this kind of informal drawing has gradually built a distinctive language of visual communication. Allen Jones, one of the exhibition curators, comments: Next to speaking and singing, drawing must be the most ancient form of communication of all.2 Drawing in the form of pictorial notes, sketches and diagrams is a signicant language of communication that is being used across different disciplines, cultures and periods. Architectures
13602365 DOI: 10.1080/13602360500462323

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Unformed drawing: notes, sketches, and diagrams Yeoryia Manolopoulou

Figure 1. Notebook III, 35/36. On Film: the collapsing walls of the room. (Drawing by the author.)

contribution to this shared eld of knowledge is extremely valuable but learning from other disciplines is of equal importance. If this drawing language is easily accessible, how can architecture use it and further develop it in order to communicate itself better to wider audiences? Notes, sketches and diagrams constitute a relatively simple and less coded system of representation that recognises the role of the reader/viewer in the architectural discourse, facilitates dialogue and is open to participation and change.

One year later, in 2005, the architectural exhibition Herzog & de Meuron: An Exhibition at the Tate Modern, London, celebrated what Jacques Herzog calls the waste products of a thought process.3 The display aimed to show how a thinking process becomes architectural material. It included dozens of working models, mock-ups at various scales, and building samples. The majority of the exhibits were sketches in three-dimensions, architectural thought in its purest and less representational form. The audience, coming from a wide background, seemed

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Figure 2. House F: sketch 19. (Project by AY Architects. Drawing by the author.)

content and engaged, perhaps understanding better what an architectural process implies.

Unformed drawing
Notes, sketches, and diagrams in mixed combinations make what we can call incomplete or unformed drawing. An unformed drawing can be a short record made to help memory, an observation quickly expressed in visual or linguistic form, a thought at the impulse of creation, a suggestion for something to be researched further, a free illustration of something spontaneously imagined,

a drawing of a seemingly insignicant detail, a proposal for future writing or drawing. Most importantly the unformed drawing is alive and changeable. It forms questions as much as answers. With the aid of notes, sketches and diagrams we link the abstract world with the material world and develop architectural ideas in the form of texts, drawings, objects and buildings. But the unformed drawing does not attempt to illustrate reality in the way a picture does and should not be seen as directly representing the geometrical or measurable attributes of objects. Surely we can use notes, sketches

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Figure 3. Notebook III, 51/52. Drafting Pier 40: design proposal for the oating islands. (Drawing by the author.)

and diagrams to describe material form and function but, perhaps most importantly, we can also use them as research tools to explore spatial concepts and relationships. The unformed drawing is an inventive rather than a representational device, a tool for critical enquiry, not for mere illustration.

Between image and language

Unformed drawings recall automatism. The surrealist denition of automatic drawing derived from automatic writing: Write quickly, without a preconceived subject, fast enough not to remember

and not to be tempted to read over what you have written.4 Automatic writing happens horizontally, not on the vertical plane of a normal picture.5 So does automatic drawing. Rosalind Krauss has noticed how writing on a horizontal surface is different from the pictorial vertical plane of painting. Automatic writing and drawing reect the more culturally processed domain of the written sign, rather than the upright eld of vision, she writes.6 To a certain extent this is true for architectural notes, sketches, and diagrams, but they are linked with language as much as with vision. Moreover,

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Figure 4. Notebook IV, 01/02. The difference between what I see and what I draw, linked with Jacques Lacans schema of the eye and the gaze and Marcel Duchamps Large Glass. (Drawing by the author.)

their signicance and articulation is far more complex than the surrealist automatic techniques. Marcel Duchamps work is a good example. It offers complex artistic, philosophical and mathematical concepts that extend beyond the visual substance of his work. These ideas were formulated in manuscript notes, sketches and diagrams made on any available piece of paper. Duchamp carefully reproduced them in the Box of 1914, the Green Box published in ` linnitif) published in 1934, and the White Box (A 1966.7 Referring to his Large Glass (191523) and the Green Box, he wrote: the two elements, glass

for the eyes, text for the ears and understanding, were to have complemented each other, and above all prevented each other from assuming either a plastic-aesthetic or a literary form. 8 Can architecture benet from a similar intersection of the material medium and the realm of language? Traditional architectural representation attempts to describe reality uniformly and consistently: using unfailingly the conventions of a particular projection system, the same drawing scale, uniform detail level and so on. On the contrary, the unformed drawing may be inconsistent in these respects. Because of

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their inconsistent and composite nature, notes, diagrams, sketches, and their combinations, are perhaps closer than the formal architectural drawing to giving us an idea about the complexity of space, how it is perceived, remembered and imagined. Perception is not a clear window onto reality but a complex constructive act. It is informed by a sum of physiological, psychological and cultural facts, linking vision with language in curious and unpredictable ways. Similarly the unformed drawing is not always consistent and does not offer singular interpretations. It combines language and picture elements and might be paralleled with the way in which perception actually works.

to make arithmetic, as to make geometry, or to make any science, something else than pure logic is necessary. To designate this something else we have no word other than intuition.9

Increased possibilities
The architects of the practice Coop Himmelblau translate the graphic attributes of a sketch straight into the structure and appearance of a building. They begin their designs through extra quick acts (deliberately using fast body gestures, quick drawing, and model-making techniques), which they then capriciously enlarge into building forms. Although this is problematic, as it is an only formal operation detracting from the full potential of the unformed drawing, what is interesting is the speed with which they work. The speed is imperative because it reduces conscious control and elaboration, and encourages spontaneity, mistakes and accidents that can be meaningful. Coop Himmelblau name these techniques psychograms and the resulting architecture open architecture. While they claim their projects emerge like a feeling rather than a building form, most architects prefer to justify design choices with an objective reasoning that downplays the function of instinct. A large component of architectural theory and practice, for example, from Leon Battista Alberti to Le Corbusier, has been based on systems of proportion rooted in Euclidean geometry. These attempt to limit the choice of shapes, dimensions and ratios which architects might choose from the theoretically innite range open to them. In this sense, they aim to reduce randomness and restrict choice. Contrarily, projects that take good advantage of sketching

Intuition and knowledge

Unformed drawings are highly intuitive. Although intuition is difcult to grasp, its value in the creative process should not be ignored. Intuition directs the imagination beyond previous learning and conscious reasoning to unexpected associations. In this sense a sketch might evoke confusion but might also stir the imagination. Sketching is not an arbitrary pictorial process but a mechanism that assists the possibility of seeing something new emerging within the unknown and the indeterminate. It is charged with scientic curiosity and the search for knowledge. s belief that intuiImportant here is Henri Poincare tion invents whereas logic proves. He writes: We believe that in our reasonings we no longer appeal to intuition; the philosophers will tell us this is an illusion. Pure logic could never lead us to anything but tautologies; it could create nothing new; not from it alone can any science issue. In one sense these philosophers are right;

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naturally encourage an increase in choice and randomness. As CAD drawings and digital imaging now dominate design processes, notes, sketches and diagrams are among the few valuable intuitive tools we still use outside the computer. As unrened raw material, the unformed drawing has characteristics that are difcult to adapt to computers: rst, because it favours instinctive and less controllable manners of working, secondly because it is not limited to xed lists of choicessuch as the CAD software palettesand it, therefore, offers increased possibilities. On the other hand the role of the diagram in architecture seems to be diminishing. Anthony Vidler writes that the diagram usually takes a secondary place in architectural practice and words like diagrammatic tend to have negative connotations.10 Yet during the last decade or so the diagram has become fashionable. For example, the practice UN Studio uses diagrams in order to translate movement, statistical and economical mappings of activities straight into built form. Peter Eisenman, on the other hand, sees diagrams on a graphic rather than functional level without addressing spatial or material relationships. Vidler writes that Rem Koolhaas and Bernard Tschumi offer a more convincing use of the diagram since their diagrams not only pregure their buildings but incorporate their qualities.11 However, I would argue that Koolhaas and Tschumi still reduce the role of the diagram to a representational tool of xed architectural form and function. The diagram can strongly inuence design decisions but it is not an authoritarian and xed sign. It is instead a process that

develops and changes along with our architectural thinking. The diagram is not a representational object: it is not prior or subordinate to the building and it functions best when it operates independently from the building process.

Uncertain and incomplete

Although most unformed drawing is not concerned with aesthetics, it often has a particular texture. While we should not overvalue the graphic elegance of scribbles, we, likewise, should not undervalue it. The casual appearance of notes disguises their conceptual signicance. But they can be as important as the nal presentations of projects. Accidents and mistakes, the minutest slips, the random eeting of inconsistent ideas, the errors and doubts of note-making are signicant aspects of the creative process that should not be neglected. The process of architectural thinking is as important as the nished product because it opens new possibilities. Notebooks can trace the history and the uncertainties of the creative process. For the uninvolved reader the cloudy information contained in notebooks is hard to comprehend. Yet this information is not fully controllable by its author either. Unformed drawings are indeed open to variable interpretation more than any other elaborate medium of expression. So open are they that often they confuse both authors and readers. Unformed drawings are not conclusive. They are open to change.12 Their process can be paralleled with the construction and life of the building. The building process and use can be less or more xed, depending on how much the architect allows for participation, exibility and change. Notes, sketches

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and diagrams play an important productive role here: when used overtly, allowing for doubt, collaboration and change they aid the development and communication of an unformed architecture. An unformed architecture recognises itself as incomplete because a number of factors, such as design and construction teams, users, nature and chance, are responsible for its creation.

we cannot eliminate it, as we do not fully control the passage of our imagination to its manifestation.

Acknowledgement
This article derives from a research project entitled Techniques of Indeterminacy in the Process of Architectural Design which was funded by the UKs Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). An earlier version was presented at the Congress CATH 2004.

Unexpressed imagination
In the process of creation, our intention is an ambiguous desire which we constantly pursue but cannot express fully. Captured perhaps in a sketch, our pure intention remains unexpressed and invisible even at the end of the work. Our passage from the imagined (intention) to the expressed (realisation) is a missing link. Duchamp denes this phenomenon as the art coefcient: [There] . . . is a difference between the intention and its realisation, a difference which the artist is not aware of . . . in the chain of reactions accompanying the creative act, a link is missing. This gap which represents the inability of the artist to express fully his intention; this difference between what he intended to realise and did realise, is the personal coefcient contained in the work. In other words, the personal art coefcient is like an arithmetic relation between the unexpressed but intended and the unintentionally expressed.13 This relationship haunts architecture on all fronts: architects, engineers, builders and inhabitants try to fulll their desires but cannot always. The gap between the intended idea and its possible realisations is at the heart of human creativity. Thankfully

Note on gures
The notebook pages I include are not aimed at explaining the different projects behind them. Their role is simply to visualise the materiality and aesthetic of one kind of unformed drawing, representative of a personal way of working rather than of the diversity of ways of using notebooks.

Notes and references

1. The works were selected by David Hockney and Allen Jones. 2. Allen Jones, Royal Academy Illustrated 2004 (London, Royal Academy of Arts, 2004), p. 8. 3. Jacques Herzog, quoted in Sheena Wagstaff, Herzog & de Meuron: An Exhibition, exhibition leaet, 2005, unpaginated. Breton, quoted in Edward Lucie-Smith, Move4. Andre ments in Art since 1945: Issues and Concepts (London, Thames and Hudson, 1995), p. 33. 5. For several artistic expressions of the twentieth century (including action painting, music and performance improvisation) automatism has been an important creative factor. Jackson Pollock, Jean Tinguely, Cy Twombly, John Cage, Merce Cunningham and Terry Riley are some of the artists who have considered

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6.

7.

8.

9.

the advantages of automatism, many through improvisation and collaborative work. Rosalind E. Krauss, The Optical Unconscious (Cambridge, MIT Press, 1993), p. 284. A later version of automatism in strong reference to the horizontality of its support can be found in Pollocks work. In addition, a group of 289 notes was published posthumously (Marcel Duchamp, Notes, trans. Paul Matisse, Paris, Centre National dArt et de Culture Georges Pompidou, 1980) increasing the number of Duchamps notes to 476. Extract from Duchamps letter to Jean Suquet. Quoted in Pierre Cabanne, Duchamp & Co. (Paris, Finest SA/ Editions Pierre Terrail, 1977), pp. 132 35. , quoted in Craig E. Adcock, Henri Poincare Marcel Duchamps Notes from the Large Glass: An

10.

11. 12.

13.

N-Dimensional Analysis (Ann Arbor, UMI Research Press, 1983), p. 144. Anthony Vidler, Diagrams of Utopia in Catherine de Zegher and Mark Wigley, eds, The Activist Drawing: Retracing Situationist Architectures from Constants New Babylon to Beyond (New York, The Drawing Center, and Cambridge, MIT Press, 2001), p. 84. Ibid., p. 90. In their most elaborate version, unformed drawings become scores, time-based drawings similar to notational systems used in music and performances. Sometimes scores are used as limiting and determinate systems. But used overtly, allowing for change, they can be very useful mechanisms in design. Duchamp, quoted in Harriett Ann Watts, Chance: A Perspective on Dada (Ann Arbor, UMI Research Press, 1980), pp. 40 41.