in drawings
I want to see therefore I draw.
Carlo Scarpa I could take a big piece of paper and draw the whole thing, but I prefer to concentrate.
Santiago Calatrava
In Chapter 2 we investigated some aspects of the special nature of design that makes it so interesting to study. One of the features identified, which has partic- ular significance for the arguments in this chapter, is how design is characteristi- cally holistic. A single feature of a good design solution can simultaneously solve many aspects of the problem. Design solutions and problems do not map onto each other in predictable or theoretically describable ways. This means that designers cannot really break down problems in the way classical natural science researchers do. Designers have no way of knowing in advance which aspects of the problem can be integrated into which solution ideas. For this reason the designer seems to have a special way of thinking which is integrative. In fact the predominant style of thinking that design students tend to develop during their courses is one in which they drag issues into a debate and widen the terms of reference rather than one in which they focus and analyse. Of course this is cog- nitively extremely demanding, since it seems everything must be thought about at once. This means keeping in mind, as it were, many disparate factors, which on the face of it have little or no relation to each other. While they may not appear to be related in the problem, eventually they may be solved by the same idea in the solution. So how do designers perform this mental juggling act?
The evidence suggests that the drawing acts as a kind of external memory in this regard. Putting something down on paper is always a useful way of remembering that you have to do something. The ubiquitous ‘to-do’ lists of modern time management software are a powerful testimony to that. For the designer it seems likely that drawings offer a more graphical version of this aide-mémoire facility. While exploring a complex set of issues for which there are no logical or theoretically correct subdivisions, the drawing can act as a way of ‘freezing’ some features for a while as others are explored. The propositional
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drawing is also the designer’s way of making, recording and testing hypotheses. The propositional sketch becomes a sort of graphical ‘what if ’ tool.
An architect trying to organize the plan of a complex building might draw one or two spaces that are required to be very directly linked thus creating a larger clump the configuration of which might for a while act as such a design hypothesis. Such a drawing is acting as a way of saying ‘What if we fix these spaces like this?’
So what are the characteristics of drawings that might do this job well? Several features seem to be highly desirable to make a propositional drawing contribute usefully to design thinking. We must remember that at this stage the designer may not have a complete solution and may know very little about the rest of the solution configuration or characteristics. For this reason the drawing should only show what is temporarily fixed and highlight what is being investigated. The drawing should not suggest that the design currently answers questions which are not yet being addressed, and should not imply that more is known about the solution than is really the case. Similarly the whole style of the drawing should indicate the level of precision or resolution which the designer feels at the time of making the drawing. So we have two requirements here: one about content and one about style. It sounds pretty tricky to achieve, but in reality designers do this all the time, if only one can ‘read’ the drawings they make accurately. They seem to achieve this partly through training and partly by repeated and extensive practice. However, it is clear that designers choose the type and content of their drawings with these factors in mind. They also choose the style of their drawings to match their level of certainty and commitment to the ideas being expressed.
When I interviewed leading designers about their processes many of them wanted a piece of paper in front of them before they would begin the conver- sation, or would break off in order to fetch one if it was not there to begin with. Many designers report feeling almost unable to think without a pencil or pen in their hands. When I interviewed John Outram he left the room to bring in a sort of pencil tin in which there were many felt tipped pens, crayons and other similar media. He was able to select from this tin as the conversation pro- ceeded and he made his points. He could select big rough pens and smaller more precise ones. Richard MacCormac discussed this habit in considerable detail and talked of his ‘thinking pencil’ (Lawson, 1994) and of how he needs to use different drawing instruments to mediate different modes of thinking at various stages in the design process:
These different frames of mind involve different instruments for producing and rep- resenting what you are doing . . . whenever we have a design session or crit review in the office I cannot say anything until I’ve got a pencil in my hand.
The dependency on the drawing instrument and the need actually to hold it while thinking seems very real. Thus even one of our most talented and sensi- tive architects can say that ‘I haven’t got an imagination that can tell me what I’ve got without drawing it.’ (MacCormac in Lawson, 1994) Even the acclaimed Italian architect Carlo Scarpa admits something similar (Murphy, 1990): ‘I want to see things. I don’t trust anything else. I place things in front of me on the paper so that I can see them. I want to see therefore I draw.’
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Gallery in London illustrate the development of design ideas through drawing in a particularly interesting and revealing way (Fig. 5.1). This very high pro- file scheme was already very complex before Venturi, Scott Brown were taken on as designers. The site is in Trafalgar Square, one of the world’s great urban spaces. The new Sainsbury Wing had a major donor who was effectively a second client. The original design by Ahrends Koralek and Burton, which had won a high profile competition, was criticized very publicly and notoriously by Prince Charles. The new American architects must have felt the eyes of the world were watching over their shoulders as they drew! In addition to the normal requirements of the art gallery this extension had to relate to the spatial organization of the existing Wilkins National Gallery with its raised ground floor axial planning, and had to provide a major new entrance and yet still give public domain pedestrian access from Trafalgar Square up to Leicester Square. All in all, a pretty demanding set of constraints.
Venturi’s propositional design sketches show some interesting characteris- tics. In particular they illustrate not one line of thought but at least two. These ‘parallel lines of thought’ have been identified and analysed elsewhere (Lawson, 1993). In this case one line of thought appears to be a consideration of the building as a sequence of spaces which are explored mainly through plans. What is apparent here is the way one drawing leads on to another in the sequence. It is also clear, particularly in the earlier steps, that thinking is developing even within each drawing with many lines overlaid on each other (later drawings in the sequence can be seen in Figs 6.4 and 6.5 in Chapter 6). The other line of thought seems to be concerned with the resolution of the urban context and is developed mainly through elevations (Fig. 5.2).
Figure 5.1
A proposition drawing by Robert Venturi for the National Gallery Extension in London. It clearly reveals a line of thought about the building as a sequence of spaces
Figure 5.2
Another drawing for the same project as Fig. 5.1 but this time showing a line of thought about the building as urban elevation
In Venturi’s early sketches in the plan sequence we can see that he is drawing space rather than envelope. There is little evidence of him considering the materiality or structure of the building. By contrast what seems to be in his mind is the sequence of spaces that a visitor to the gallery will pass through and walk around. Many lines are drawn over several times and in some draw- ings this reconsideration is very significant. This represents an excellent example of what Donald Schön (1984) has memorably described as the architect ‘having a conversation with his drawing’. Venturi’s partner Denise Scott Brown has her own way of describing this when she talks of ‘Bob having a facility between hand and mind . . . sometimes the hand does something that the eye re-interprets and you get an idea from it’ (Lawson, 1994). It is certainly apparent here that the drawing is playing a very central role in Venturi’s design process and that the act of drawing is integral to his thinking.
Size of drawing
Much design research, as we have seen, involves pseudo-laboratory conditions. Under these circumstances designers are often not working in the conditions and with the materials they would choose for normal practice. If we study the actual drawings that real practising designers create when they are working we find some interesting and frequently repeated patterns and characteristics. One such characteristic involves the size of drawings done by experienced and dis- tinguished designers, and in particular concerns their propositional drawings. In my study of the design processes of outstanding designers over half of them volunteered information about their preference to use relatively small drawings (Lawson, 1994). Fraser and Henmi (1994) analysed the drawings of Le Corbusier, who sketched prolifically, recording things that he saw as a huge ‘experiential’ drawing database. The vast majority of these drawings were less than A4 in size. The question here is whether there is any important reason other than simple convenience for these small drawings. Michael Wilford, who has not only been very successful in his own name and was for many years the partner of James Stirling, prefers to use either A3 or A4 paper and is quite explicit about this as an office policy (Lawson, 1994):
I like to see things encapsulated in one small image. We have a rule never to draw at a size larger than necessary to convey the level of information intended . . . we always use the smallest possible image.
Indeed many of the drawings I saw on the projects Wilford was working on were actually A4 in size even for huge projects such as Temasek Polytechnic in Singapore, a colossal higher education campus. Similarly the great Spanish architect/engineer Santiago Calatrava generally works on very small drawings for his large airports, railway stations and even cathedrals. For small drawings to be used on such a big scheme suggests even more firmly the significance of this. In fact Calatrava seems to work with several media in parallel. He works freehand in watercolour on an A3 pad, and has generally A5 spiral bound note- books in which he sketches with a drawing pen. Again Calatrava is quite
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explicit about this (Fig. 5.3): ‘I could take a big piece of paper and draw the whole thing, but I prefer to concentrate.’
The highly influential Dutch architect Herman Hertzberger (1991) used a very similar phrase to Calatrava in referring to his preference for working in A3 sketchpads: ‘I insist upon having my concentration on quite a small area.’ In fact Hertzberger went on to explain this in even more explicit terms and the explanation seems to offer the possibility of a more generic reason for this pop- ularity of small drawings among designers: ‘It’s a sort of imperative for me, you know . . . like a chess player. I could not imagine playing chess in an open space with big chequers.’
As it happens, just around the corner form Hertzberger’s office in Amsterdam I found a large open air chess board on which some locals were playing. This surely must have been in his mind when he made these comments. Playing in public is surely a bad enough torment for most of us but there is yet another problem with such huge chess boards. They are so large that you simply cannot ‘take them in’ all at one glance. To see the whole board clearly you must at least move your eyes to scan it or more likely move your head or even walk around. This is because the field of human vision is not regular. Only the central part of the retina, known as the fovea, affords really clear and focused sight, while the peripheral parts of the retina specialize in detecting motion. Such a system is quite understandable from an evolutionary point of view, but may be less well adapted to large-scale chess playing.
For most of us the fovea is such that we can see clearly the whole of an A4 sheet of paper when held at the distance from the eye normally used for drawing. When Calatrava and Hertzberger talk of ‘concentration’ this surely is what they mean. The designer can see the whole thing at this size and concentrate on all the contents of the drawing without losing sight of any elements. Any larger and this particular quality of experience disappears.
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Figure 5.3
An A3 design proposition drawing by Santiago Calatrava. Many of his drawings are also on even smaller A4 and A5 sized paper
Bearing in mind what we discussed in Chapter 2 about the special features of design this perhaps becomes more significant than it might at first seem. The holistic nature of design means that often a single design feature simulta- neously solves many parts of the problem. Designers clearly know and under- stand this and the need to manufacture an integrative response places on them this burden of keeping many things in mind at one time. Having the whole drawing in clear foveal vision would seem a very sensible pattern of behaviour under these circumstances. However, once we study the nature of expertise in design rather more closely in a later chapter yet another reason for this behaviour for using small drawings will become apparent.
The dangers of drawings
Of course the ‘greater perceptual span’ of design by drawing as opposed to vernacular design enabled greater rates of experimentation and therefore increased the risk of failure. The more we innovate from one design to another the less reliable will be the designer’s knowledge of ‘what might work’. But there is another great problem with the process of design by drawing. The drawing is of course merely one form of representation of some features of the object that are not yet made. Every form of representation has its own char- acteristics and therefore strengths and weaknesses in representing imagined objects and conjuring up in our minds the experience of those objects in real use. The drawn image has conventions of views but all those conventions are essentially variations on a theme of geometrical and spatial relations of one sort or another. In other words the drawing is good at representing how the object will appear to the eye and how the various constituent parts of it are related in space. While this may in itself be valuable knowledge it is far from being a complete and comprehensive representation of the features of many commonly designed objects which really matter to their eventual users.
Selectivity of drawings
The Malaysian architect Jimmy Lim asked a conference of architects recently if when they get home in the evening the first thing they do is to take their favourite armchair across the street and sit down to admire their house. The question of course was rhetorical, and unsurprisingly not even one architect present admitted to this somewhat eccentric behaviour. ‘Why then’, he con- tinued, ‘do you all spend so much time drawing the elevations of houses you are designing.’ His point of course was that the experience that matters to the users of a house is far more to do with the interior space than the front eleva- tion. Now it just so happens that Jimmy is a master of tropical domestic inte- rior space so we might imagine he has a vested interest in making this point. However, the generic lesson is well made, which is that drawn representations themselves distort and change the emphasis of our experience much more profoundly than we realize. The drawing conventions of elevation and plan so common in architecture can neither ever actually be seen nor experienced.
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They are the designer’s version of political spin. We see what they for some reason wish us to see. Of course the more serious danger here is that designers come to work not on the real object but on the drawn image of that object as they design. Anyone with any experience of teaching design students will recognize such a danger all too readily. We shall return to this problem of the knowledge embodied in drawings later.
The drawing is somehow so powerful a tool that it can easily become an end in itself. In How Designers Think, I identified a series of common traps which inexperienced designers commonly fall into (Lawson, 1997). One of these was called the ‘image trap’ in which the designer ends up designing the drawing rather than the object the drawing represents. Herman Hertzberger echoed this concern about the role of the drawing and its potential to become the focus of attention rather than a representation of knowledge about an emerging design (Lawson, 1994):
A very crucial question is whether the pencil works after the brain or before. In fact what should be is that you have an idea, you think and then you score by means of words or drawing what you think. But it could also be the other way round that while drawing, your pencil, your hand is finding something, but I think that’s a dangerous way. It’s good for an artist but it’s nonsense for an architect.
The drawing can also restrict rather than enhance the designer’s vision of the problem. In a very early but highly significant study, Eastman (1970) demon- strated this effect empirically. He had asked his subjects to design a bathroom. Eastman records how the kinds of drawings used by his subjects during the experiment actually affected the problems they discovered and solved:
The accessibility to children of sink fixture controls becomes an issue only with the generation of a section representation . . . Generally, a clear correspondence was