Here is a little piece which I would have submitted to the FORUM section of B_Nieuws had we not gotten two rather long and well-written ones. In comparison, my piece would have been somewhat lame (and tame). But here it is, just for you guys (and girls).
Working in the amazing B_Nieuws press team has its advantages, one of them being that you pretty much know the news and topics for the upcoming few months, and this makes contributions to forum marginally more topical.
Now to the point: I seem to notice that our education, certainly in these early Bachelor’s years is being controlled by the Sketch Mafia. Every single time you want to express yourself, your educator looks you in the eye and whispers dramatically: ‘Sketch it!’ Analysis, ideas, rules, almost everything needs to be sketched.
On one hand, I agree that sketching and drawing must be one of the very essential media of communication between architects, urban planners, engineers and the public. And while we’ll all be experts in sketching, some of the best architectural ideas are sold by a combination of text and drawings. Thus, while one essential skill is being nurtured (or thrust upon us?), another is being neglected. I’m not claiming that I’m an expert, but consider a passage such as this:
‘Arab cities are full of building, started and never finished, and finished and then abandoned… Still existing in the simple Arab town, an interchangeability in which the neutral cube contains a cell which can change; from home to workshop; green-grocery to a paraffin store; an alley of houses in whose midst is a baker, made into a Souk by simple expedient of adding pieces of fabric over the public way’
From “How to read and recognize MAT-building”, Architectural Design, 1974
With this elegantly written passage, Alison Smithson tries to capture an image of a pre-modern Arab town and show the very characteristics that appealed to her. A simple sketch would not do. While a picture is worth a thousand words, a masterfully written text is equally evocative, yet subtler, giving way to personal nuances in interpretation. This is why a piece of text can appeal to more people than a sketch or a drawing depicting the same idea.
Not all great architects are great writers, but many are. We at least should mention Rem Koolhaas’s Delirious New York, or some passages from Le Corbusier’s books, in which his urban plans and their images, now so often associated with dystopia, are made to sound incredibly seductive due to the author’s masterful command of the written word.
In my humble opinion, students should be allowed to use both drawing and written word to express their ideas. These methods of communication should not be treated as mutually exclusive, but as parts of a coherent whole.
Peter S
Posted by petersmisek 