F.4.1 Student-led Freehand Drawing Initiatives

• Juan Fernández González & Olivia Champ, Harvard University

The increasingly important role of computer programs in architectural education and practice has led universities to question the relevance of freehand drawing. Whereas drawings used to be made entirely by hand, they are now most often made with computer programs and digital media. This tendency has resulted in curriculum changes which generally reduce the time that architecture students spend learning and practising freehand drawing inside and outside. However, student-led initiatives can differ from this tendency by acting independently or in collaboration with other courses.

In this paper presentation, we explore the potential of student-led initiatives which aim to elevate the long-standing tradition of freehand drawing in architectural education. We introduce the GSD Sketching Group as a case study. Created in Spring 2022 by two Harvard Graduate School of Design students, the group aims to encourage sketching across the design professions and to strengthen its relevance in a university context. The GSD Sketching Group meets at inspiring locations where students can draw the subject of their choice on-site. Students engage in dialogues to learn collectively from a variety of artistic styles and media, and students of all levels of experience are welcome.

Based on the first year of the GSD Sketching Group’s existence, we discuss some challenges and opportunities that the group has faced. We then speculate on the broader impact that student-led initiatives could have on the role of sketching in architectural education. These initiatives are situated within a larger historical context, exploring the boundaries of sketching as contemplation, understanding, and self-expression.

keywords: freehand drawing, student-led initiatives, sketching, architectural education

F.4.2 Le dessin pour observer le projet et le dessin d’observation

• Nicole Valois, Université de Montréal

Comme responsable de l’atelier de design à la maitrise en architecture de paysage, j’accompagne les étudiants dans la réalisation de leurs projets, en portant une attention toute particulière sur le dessin du projet et sur le dessin d’observation. Car pour être réalisé, un projet doit être esquissé, dessiné en plan, coupes, élévations, puis représenté en perspectives et par des croquis d’ambiance. Et pour devenir architecte paysagiste, il faut savoir observer et représenter. Le dessin de projet et le dessin d’observation sont les deux modes employés dans la pédagogie de cet atelier et, pour inculquer cette discipline, je dessine avec eux.

Pour faire émerger la pensée dis-je aux étudiants, il est essentiel de dessiner. Le dessin n’est pas une finalité en soi, mais une expression de la pensée : il sert à la développer tout autant qu’à la soutenir. L’un des moyens pour y arriver est sans doute le dessin à main levée, car il lie directement la pensée au geste et qu’il permet de s’ancrer dans le projet. C’est pourquoi lors d’un échange entre un étudiant et moi autour de son projet, je l’incite à dessiner et je fais de même : je dessine en conversant. Ces dessins servent à vérifier par exemple si ses intentions sur la spatialité du site sont partagées. Cette technique a permis de voir que dessiner et verbaliser simultanément les intentions de projet stimulent la pensée et les échanges.

Pour développer le sens de l’observation et une manière d’interpréter le réel et dans l’espoir d’inculquer l’habitude du dessin d’observation, de courtes séances de dessins sont menées durant les heures d’atelier. Ces séances sont libres, non évaluées et menées dans le plaisir. Comme l’atelier se déroule en hiver, c’est à travers les fenêtres du pavillon de la faculté de l’aménagement que les étudiants captent le paysage par le dessin.

La présentation expose ces deux outils pédagogiques en mettant l’accent sur la période pandémique de Covid-19, alors que les ateliers se déroulaient à distance. La communication par le dessin étant devenue plus difficile, je me suis mise à prendre davantage de notes subséquemment aux échanges avec les étudiants, afin de me remémorer leur processus, garder le fil des discussions pour mieux engendrer les discussions futures. Quant aux séances de dessin d’observation, elles sont devenues un moyen de nourrir les liens entre les étudiants, dans un cadre non officiel.

mots clés : dessin, observation, Covid-19, paysage, distance

F.4.3 The Field Sketch as Process

• Heinrich Schnoedt, Virginia Tech

Field Sketching in Professional Practice

Long traditions of field sketching in art, architecture and engineering have left us with a great array of graphic impressions of artifacts and places from all corners of the world. Prior to the invention of photography and the subsequent increased portability of the camera, sketching in the field frequently served to momentarily record, simulating the perspectival condition of our eyesight as a scenographic impression. Other types of field sketching included graphic and numeric notations as important fragments to be recalled for further work.

Even today, with a great array of digital recording tools available, the sketch on site has not been displaced and continues to be a spontaneous but very effective important recording instrument connecting the numeric and geometric relationships. Such graphic notes which were made to directly assist the work are perhaps exemplified by the work of Leonardo da Vinci, Auguste Choisy, Gunnar Asplund, Le Corbusier, and countless others.

Field Sketching in Architectural Education

While the field sketch’s purpose in practice seeks the production of an object, it can be argued that in field sketching as an educational endeavor the sketch itself is less important rather the actual process of sketching in field.

When students sketch in the fields, the process demands an extended duration of time spent with the subject. Eye, brain and hand have to coordinate to theorize and understand the corporeality of a three-dimensional presence to be abstracted in a sketch. While the portable camera has replaced the perspectival condition, the sketch on site offers a broad array of types of representations that cannot captured with a camera. In this sense, it is not important to hold up metric accuracy or a picturesque perspectival appearance as the criteria of success in a sketch. Moreover, the real value of field sketching, especially for a student of architecture -regardless of the subject- is the exercise in articulation of perception. It encourages active composition, a contemplation of position of objects in space, an examination of light with respect of appearance, the reading of the relationship between structure and form, and most importantly an identification of elements responsible for the atmosphere of space.

In this pedagogical framework, especially in architecture, field sketching is a potent didactic tool which effectively amplifies observation, perception and spatial thinking.

keywords: process, pedagogy, duration, perception, atmosphere

F.4.4 Between Hand and Computer: The Dialectic Expansion of the Field of Architectural Drawing

• Mohammad Moezzi, University of Calgary

Architectural sketching has two unique characteristics, thoughtfulness and embodiment, which allows it to incorporate virtual and actual tools. The advent of early computer graphics in the 1960s and computer-aided design in the 1980s blurred the lines between architectural drawing, sketching, and other media like photography, animation, and 3D modeling. However, it intensified some polar oppositions, such as virtuality and actuality, immediacy and media, tactile sensations and ocular-centricity, metabolic and technological velocities, perception and computation, and original and copy. There is a mind-body problem at the root of these oppositions. According to Maurice Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception, the mind and body have a dialectical relationship. The dialectic space, which also has roots in Hegel’s philosophy, is a conduit without boundaries that creates the opportunity for unity. For a better understanding of the position of architectural sketching as an analog bodily tool in relation to this dialectic, these practical sub-dualisms are discussed: drawing and modeling, autographic and allographic practices, notation and drawing, materiality and immateriality, indeterminacy and precision, ambiguity and transparency, imagination and illusion, muscular memory and computer memory, lines and (pixels, data, and digits). This paper shed light upon the new positions of architectural drawing in the dialectical space between sketching and digital visualization.

keywords: dialectic phenomenology, mind-body problem, architectural drawing, sketching, computer-aided-design