This was made after Andrea del. Pozzo's painting, the Triumph of St Ignatius on the ceiling of the San Ignacio Church in 1680. This year students were asked to ...
Spatial Imagination and Representation, a method for integrating the theory and practice of spatial analysis in architectural education.
dr. J.C.T. Voorthuis, associate professor philosophy of design in architecture, TU Eindhoven, Faculty of The Built Environment, The Netherlands
H.M.T. Aarts, assistant professor drawing, TU Eindhoven, Faculty of The Built Environment, The Netherlands ABSTRACT: The course “Spatial Imagination and Representation” brought two rather unlikely subjects together: philosophy and drawing. They have become a promising couple, braiding the theoretical with the practical. Special about the new course is its methodological approach. We have made the philosophy of space into a tangible and concrete subject, explaining various conceptions of space and working out how these conceptions affect our way of responding to space. At the same time, the lessons in drawing explore these theoretical positions, giving the theory a foundation in practice. Both philosophy and drawing are concerned with processes of abstraction in the exploration of our environment. These abstractions express themselves in images and descriptions that can be explored through both disciplines, after all drawing is often defined as a kind of ‘thinking of the hand’. Philosophy on the other hand thinks about the process of thinking itself, but also about the object of its thought. Keywords: architectural education, models and concepts of space, philosophy & drawing, thinking & doing
1 INTRODUCTION For the past three years we were given the opportunity to explore the setting up of a course in which cross-fertilization was a central goal. A teacher of drawing techniques and an art historian-philosopher working together to give students of the built environment the tools to study and conceptualize the idea of space and thereby to help them further their studies in design. The collaboration has proven very fruitful. This paper describes how we set up the course and discusses some of its results and concludes with an attempt to explain the success of the formula through the means and intensity of the integration of disciplines. Nietzsche wrote in his notebooks for the years 18861887 that there are no facts only interpretations. Well, that fits in with current constructivist thinking. Henri Lefebvre (Lefebvre, 1991) developed a model of space in the 1960’s whereby he distinguished three intimately braided activities: firstly, the actual behavior of bodies and things in space, secondly the perception of that behavior, and thirdly the conception of what is happening, that is, the generation of meaning. This triadic model in fact fits in very well with Wittgenstein’s idea that the logic of relations is spatial and temporal and that therefore space is about the relations that obtain in a situation. These
two models of space form the starting point and core of the course. For students it comes as something of a surprise that the idea of space as a design tool for architects is relatively new. It was introduced by the art historian August Schmarsow in the 1880’s (Mallgrave, 1993) and it is from that moment on that space gradually came to be a normative concept in the design of architecture. This instrumentalization of the idea of space as a design tool, and as a criterion by which designs and buildings could be judged, does not however mean that this was the beginning of spatial practice in the arts. The arts have, albeit implicitly, always worked with space in some way or another. Painting and film have always concerned themselves with the production of framed virtual spaces. Music and architecture are immersive arts; they make you undergo their spatial relations through movement. Music moves through time, while you perceive architecture by moving through it. Dance in fact confronts the two; it is an art that specializes in movement through space to express the movement of the music, which in turn expresses some or other emotive or narrative moment. Like sculpture, dance shows itself in space, thereby transforming it. These considerations formed the sketch version of our argument to combine the thinking about space with the creation of virtual and interpreted spaces through the practice of analytical and exploratory drawing.
The purpose of the course is to help students learn to observe analytically, critically and creatively, to make them spatially aware and allow them to instrumentalise what they have learnt in confronting the philosophy and history of spatial representation with their own excursions in the analysis and creative or investigative exploration of space. At the end of the course students have learnt to describe and learnt to apply a specialist set of spatial concepts and tools of representation to the analysis and criticism of objects and spatial situations, and demonstrate a more refined understanding of the design process and in the qualitative evaluation of a design. In short students develop a critical apparatus tailored to practical skills of representation with reference to the production of space that will help them refine their professional interest in the design and production of the built environment. 2 EDUCATION AND METHODOLOGY The subject is taught in the third year of the bachelor course of the built environment. In the charter of the faculty we are told that “The Department of the Built Environment is primarily oriented towards the technology of the building and technological solutions that contribute to the cultural dimension of the built environment.” The signature indicates that the emphasis of the bachelor program is technological and that this technological bias is then applied to questions of culture and quality of life. Subjects like ours are serviced by the department of Architecture, Urbanism, Design and Engineering (AUDE) group which offers a carefully delimited part of the bachelor course. Our subject helps the large number of students who will, after the third year, go on to do a master in architectural design. Design is both a technical as well as an artistic discipline. Our course “Spatial imagination and representation” is geared to exploring the possibilities of this attitude in tying theory and speculation to the development of practical skill, whereby we are careful to contest and explore the often problematic division between the technological and the artistic. We want students to realize that theory and speculation are inextricably connected in design and that the technological and the artistic both contribute to the design of the quality of life in equal measure and are in fact not so easy to separate. The word technology comes from the Greek Techné, which referred to the art of some discipline or craft. Moreover if technology refers to the technique of how to do things then art is itself serviced by technology. A last argument to contest their separation is that technology may be quantitative in its evaluation, but in its development and application it qualifies as an art. The reason we dwell on this is that, especially in our subject which
concerns itself with the improvement of the spatial quality of life, however indirectly, it is very desirable that we do not see technology and art as enemies. Such an attitude, though common is restrictive and destructive to both. The course, which is given 5 ECTS, is built up of three equally important parts. A course of lectures on the history and philosophy of space, in which students are confronted with various models and conceptions of space and are given examples to see how these concepts can be used as instruments of analysis and critique (8 x 1.5 hours). The content of the lectures is carefully coordinated with the lessons in drawing (8 x 3 hours) where students are challenged to explore various means of representing space. The two parts of the course come together in the seminar, where the students are asked, in groups of three, to analyze, critique and artistically explore a particular instance of space or spatial representation. The weekly development of the students doing this assignment is discussed and given feedback by both teachers as well as the rest of the student group taking the course. The seminar culminates in an exhibition accompanied by a presentation to the whole group in which the result is described and explained with the help of arguments underpinning the decisions that the students made. Both the work and the exhibition are carefully documented in a report. The method helps students not just to make decisions, but requires them to argue them through. During the first year of the course students were asked to analyze a work of art in 2 dimensions, depicting some form of virtual space. As it was the first time, we thought it wise to select the works ourselves and chose salient examples from the whole range of the history of world art. It was the task of the student to analyze and transform this two dimensional virtual space by adding a dimension, this could be the third dimension, but it could also be the dimension of time, or a dimension of meaning. During the second, and current academic year, students were asked to find a space in their daily surroundings, analyze it and transform the space by exploring their specified method of analysis and critique. What we hope is special about our approach and method is that we are attempting to achieve a high level of integration between theory and practice, the thinking about space and the thinking about the representation of space as well as the integration of the technical and the artistic in the design of spaces. In this way all facets of spatial design are consciously confronted with each other to achieve a well-argued synthesis.
3 SPATIAL CONCEPTS Apart from the ones already mentioned, such as Lefebvre and Wittgenstein, the lecture course investigates a number of specific models of the way space has been conceived and represented from the PreSocratic philosophers who were concerned with ideas such as chaos and cosmos, infinitude and emptiness to the Platonic ideas of Chora and Topos; from medieval ideas of godly space to early modern developments such as Brunelleschian Perspective and Cartesian space; from enlightenment ideas such as Kant’s Copernican revolution, in which space and time became categories of mind rather than categories of the world to late modern and post-modern constructivist theories such as those of the phenomenologists, J.J. Gibson and Gilles Deleuze. Rather than just contextualizing and describing these models, we spend a lot of time making sure that the student is able to apply the concepts in the analysis and critique of concrete spatial situations and objects. Students are encouraged to don the glasses of a particular concept and approach specific examples in the other parts of the course. In this way students learn to free themselves from unhelpful habits and the mire of pre-conceived notions determining their outlook normatively.
their observations (picture 2). We purposefully do not tell them how to do this, it is up to them to explore the possibilities, after which the various approaches used are discussed and evaluated. A second exercise is to draw the same space ‘blindly’ (picture 1), with which we mean that the student is restricted from looking at the paper she is busy drawing on. In this way the eyes explore the space, but cannot control the hand to make it follow the acquired logic of a way of coding that space through, for example, the learnt tricks of spatial organization and perspective. Because they are not allowed to look at the paper they are forced to course exclusively on observation and an intuitive sense of relationships and their logic. The result is thus dependent on the realization that the draughtsman has to let go of preconceived aesthetic schemas and ideas of the correct. Normally when we draw, we are continually checking the actual drawing, to see whether it matches correctly the actual situation. However, correctness is very much determined by the visual schema’s we learn from others, rather than from our own observation. When drawing blindly, preconceived order breaks down as the observing eye cannot correct the drawing hand. Order collapses and in the realization the focus of the draughtsman shifts to the pictorial exploration of the hand. One student testified that after a while her hand stopped drawing as soon as she stopped observing.
4 THE DRAWING WORKSHOP It is important, we believe that the student learns to look critically at his own perception of the environment he finds himself in by considering his own perceptions, the conceptual instruments he uses and the assumptions he makes. The course is about making students conscious of what they do. They are shown how our habits of perception and our thinking are both determined by silent assumptions that are descriptive, evaluative and prescriptive. They soon experience how difficult it is to distance themselves from such notions. However there are useful techniques that allow students to take a conscious position regarding their own perceptual habits and preconceptions. To help them decondition themselves, both the teacher and the student are required to leave their pictorial comfort zone by drawing from multiple points of view (Schaeverbeke, Aarts, Heylighen 2015). In what follows, we will illustrate some practice-based examples of drawing assignments, which aim to extend the language of drawing. 4.1 Conceiving space - representing space The first assignment confronts the student with diverse ways of experiencing and imagining space. Their first confrontation with a space of their choice is devoted exclusively to observation for a period of 20 minutes. Afterwards they are asked to document
Pictures 1 & 2 & 3 from Lisa Moosdorff; resp. two “blind” drawings, drawing from memory after observation, drawing by observation.
A third exercise requires the student to draw the space according to the laws of perspective and a fourth is to reconstruct a perspective representation using documentation such as plans, elevations and sections (pictures 4 & 5).
Picture 7 Andrea Dolfsma: drawing with perspective construction.
Pictures 4 & 5 Justin Agyin; resp., drawing by observation, perspective construction.
The drawings by Andrea Dolfsma (pictures 6 and 7) show, in her own judgement of them, that the construction in perspective gave her drawing a totally different expression and missed the untidy or messy character of her room, which is more visible in the drawing from memory
Pictures 6 Andrea Dolfsma: drawing from memory.
The first assignment shows students that there are widely divergent approaches in the representation of space. This aspect is of course also explored in the later assignments, but the particular exercise, by separating the hand from the eye, dislocates the silent habits and continuities of perception and representation, thereby producing a very different image of the same space, containing very different information about the logic of relations. The phenomenological and Wittgensteinian approach in philosophy similarly look at meaning not in the things themselves, but in their active relations and their use. The ‘I’, the body and its environment are immersed in a continuous negotiative process in thinking about what to do. Once students have learnt to let go of preconceived notions of representation, blind drawings select and relate the information they show on the basis of different criteria, giving us a compelling view of how space is experienced and used. How for instance the staircase is walked (picture 1) by Lisa Moosdorff. In the perspectival drawings made by the same student we see a much more cerebral and constructed approach. The contrast between the “blind” drawings and the drawings that have been constructed on the basis of perspectival logic is enormous (pictures 1 & 3). However it is even more remarkable when comparing them to the constructions made from plans, sections and elevations, based as they are on Euclidian or rather Cartesian space (picture 5 & 8). Cartesian space in the work of the mathematician is a conceptual model in which the position of something can be expressed in coordinates using three numbers each representing a point along the X,Y and Z axes respectively, of a continuously calibrated space. In this way the relations between points are expressed in standardized distances, angles and vectors. Examples of representations of such spaces are flat projections, axonometries and converging projections such
as perspectival constructions. During the drawing workshop students are introduced to various systems of representation and to get them to try them out and to discuss the way these systems achieve an effect on the beholder of the image (picture 8, 9 & 10). Students are given examples of various types of projection, including various forms of perspective and how these systems have been used by artists. In this exercise students’ work with a space of their own choice and experiment with as many different kinds of projection as possible, annotating each with a few remarks about the effect the projection has on the object represented.
cloud is no more accurate as a representation of the cloud than the word ‘cloud’. No language of representation, in word or image is isomorphic to the real world (Peckham, 1967). Wilson and Wilson see learning to draw as the learning of a sign-system, learnt not by observing reality itself, but by imitating the signs used and developed by others. Only after learning the sign-language themselves, do students begin to explore the reason why things are depicted in this or that way and to observe which situation demands certain shapes to be used. Apparently we need models to imitate. An Egyptian image seems comparable to a child’s drawing in the way the objects are represented (figure 11 & 12). The objects are shown from the side from which the object can best be recognized as that object. The Egyptian image captures nature in a strict elementary way, concentrating on essentials. In Egyptian culture it was important to represent completeness and give clarity as to the identity of the object. The Egyptian architect Hassan Fathy refers to this tradition using the rabattement, the geometry of rotating a plane to align it with another. After the exercise the drawings made by the students are discussed and compared with historical examples. 4.2 Portraying and Framing
Pictures 8 Student’s work; drawing different kinds of (parallel) projections and perspectives.
At the start of the assignment and during the lecture course examples are used to show the many and diverse ways of translating a three-dimensional world to a two-dimensional surface. In each of these approaches the meaning emerges in the way that these various projections have been used. The child’s drawing shows how various objects are assembled and represented in a way that makes them recognizable. It is important to strip our approach to such drawings from our educated, adult eyes which have learnt to see the world in a perspectival organizational scheme. Perspective creates a totalizing image in which the logical relations between things is exclusively approached from the point of view of the ‘I’. When the perspective is only used as a system, blindly following its “rules” without any connection to the world around us, the outcome is a drawing that has little to do with any reality. Wilson & Wilson (Wilson and Wilson, 1986) assume that any drawing is not so much a representation of reality but is itself a sign. A cloud is a sign and the drawing of a cloud as well as the word ‘cloud’ are also both signs to us. The drawing of the
In the workshops, parallel to one of the lectures on this subject, students investigate how “portraying and framing”, one of the titles of the philosophical lectures, influences the atmosphere of the image. They make different studies while they are observing an (architectonic) object and try to analyze the outcome afterwards (pictures 11 & 12).
Pictures 9 & 10 resp. child´s drawing and Hassan Fathy, Villa Hasan’Abd al-Razik, gouache exhibited in 1973.
How does my point of view –a higher or lower point of view-, my angle of vision – close to the object or from a bigger distance and the way I frame the object, influence my image of that object? Those are questions that lead students in their research, making drawings that can be compared. How do we, the observers of the drawings, “read” the images? What is it the other person observes? Here we enter the
world of visual literacy. Glenda C. Rakes, professor of instructional design and technology, defines visual literacy as the ability to accurately assign meaning to visual images, combined with the ability to create and communicate with such images (Rakes, 1999). Visual literacy implies that images and drawings represent a language or a symbol system on their own. Visual literacy implies that pictures can be “read” and that meaning could be communicating through a process of reading them. (Kress, Van Leeuwen, 1996).
Pictures 11 & 12 student’s work; drawing an object which is in front of them, using point of view and framing to manipulate the expression and spatiality of the image.
non-material and negation (Maslen M. and Southern J. 2011, Edwards B. 1989). Negative space establishes a relation between a form and its background. The change of focus forces the draughtsman to study the interaction between form and space, between subject and its surroundings. Within this exercise an object is studied not by drawing the thing in itself, but by building its contours from the surrounding space (figure 13). This exercise avoids our inclination to start drawing lines with the lines functioning as a boundary between objects and the space around them. Drawing negative space breaks with one’s perceptual habits. (Schaeverbeke, Aarts, Heylighen, 2015).
Picture 13 Simone Creemers, some of her studies exploring the spatial effect by not drawing the object, but only the surrounding space.
4.3 Form and residual form Usually when a student is asked to make a drawing of an (architectural) object, he/she is focused on representing the object, very often without drawing the surrounding space, or framing the image, which itself creates a space around the object, be it undefined (picture 13). The intention of this assignment is to create awareness that the space surrounding an object is as important as the object itself. Students are asked to draw the object without drawing it, but rather concentrating on the surrounding space. Students thus learn to play with the role of hierarchy, questioning what determines a space, the object or the surrounding or negative space. Negative space is an established exercise within art drawing courses. It is often linked to a Buddhist’s awareness for the
5 THE SEMINAR In the seminar the workshops and lecture courses link up explicitly. The students are asked to analyze, critique and creatively explore a particular instance of space or spatial representation. The first year it was a two-dimensional pictorial representation of space (an art work such as a painting, a print or a drawing), which needed to be transformed by adding a dimension (Pictures 14 & 15).
movement of people through the space, shifting from moment to moment. The contrast illustrated the difference between Gilles Deleuze’s “striated” and “smooth” space, a concept that featured during the lectures (Deleuze 1987). They also observed how the bridge changes from an ‘I’ perspective, walking through the bridge, to a ‘he’ perspective, observing someone walking through the bridge from afar. Seen from the inside the strict articulation of the structure and the windows gives a feeling of indeterminate infinity from a single point perspective. Seen from the outside, the bridge looks like a long horizontal beam hanging in the open air. Their inspiration was the work of the Dutch artist Jan Dibbets, who uses photographs of spatial elements to encourage people to think about our spatial observation. In the end the group made two objects, one was a set of photographs composed in a flat circle –representing the observation as seen from “he”, the other object was a set of separate photographs hanging in vertical frames, arranged on a circle which could turn around, representing the observational position of the ‘I’ viewpoint (Pictures 16 & 17). Within those two models the students brought together all the aspects they mentioned as specific for this space.
Pictures 14 & 15 students work for the seminar 2015. Resp. Hein A., Hillenius T., de Rooij W & Meeuse M., Nuijten B., Wijers C.
Picture 14 shows a 3 dimensional object made after The Red Studio from Henri Matisse, 1911 and picture 15 shows an extension of the Church San Ignacio made in Perspex and projected as a shadow on a rounded surface. This was made after Andrea del Pozzo’s painting, the Triumph of St Ignatius on the ceiling of the San Ignacio Church in 1680. This year students were asked to choose a specific space they wanted to investigate and which could at the same time be used for the drawing workshops. The experience they acquired here helped them investigate the meaning of the concepts of space dealt with during the lecture course and by transforming the space with the help of those concepts using an established work of art as a point of departure. One group of students chose one of the bridges connecting the first floors of each building on our campus. The group researched the historical background of these bridges, investigated descriptions of the space in words and in images, the function of the space and observed how people behave there while looking at the light and temperature and contingent circumstances. They noticed a difference between the strict organization of the space, with the strict rhythms of its mullions and vertical tie rods, and the
Pictures 16 & 17 students work for the seminar 2016. Hemesath J., Creemers, S., Kromhout W. The 3 dimensional object (left) representing the ‘He’ perspective as seen from outside the bridge and the 2 dimensional work (right) representing the ‘I’ perspective, as seen from the inside of the bridge.
6 CONCLUSIONS One of the main questions for the educational part of this conference is: “Which didactic principles best prepare students to take a well-argued position to face future societal challenges?” Of course we don’t have any idea what the future will bring, but perhaps one of the most important future societal challenges will be dealing with the globalization and increasing complexity of the world. This requires a multivariate point of view, based on a well-grounded understanding of our own ways of understanding spatial relationships and their representation. It is necessary to understand and become aware of what your own position is regarding the things about you and what determines those relationships: “What is my personal viewpoint from where I start observing the world, how does it work, where does it come from and what are the viewpoints of the people surrounding me?” In a global complex world students need to have the capacity to consciously and carefully analyse and transform their own point of view so as to make them at least compatible to those of other people they have to cooperate and collaborate with. We have to at least be able to consciously step out of the shadow of the ‘I’ perspective, developed during 15th century to see how a view of the world is a philosophical construction showing how theory and practice are in fact intimately and inextricably linked. References
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