Chapter 2

Drawing and Strategy

Watching a building under construction fascinates almost everybody, and following the design progress of a project before construction (often riddled with frustrations) is even more fascinating. Unbuilt projects can also contain several layers of development, intentionally or not, or consist of particular roles played out by particular drawings. In a few cases, a whole set of intentions can be summarised by a single drawing. Perhaps they spring from the comprehensiveness of medieval panels or ancient scrolls in which a whole series of interdependent events are separately located, but then to be read as part of a comprehensive strategy.

Maps are more intriguing since they must incorporate a whole range of criteria that happen to physically coincide - sometimes quite oddly. But then, real-life urbanisation contains a myriad of circumstances that somehow have to coexist. The poor old map has to try to either concentrate on one aspect such as the location and name of streets, or deal with the business of drawing out the significance of one system and the displacement of another. My earliest memory of such things was in my father's office at the end of the Second World War where the walls were covered in a variety of different maps: some with flags and pins, some with strings, some with patches. With him, I visited the sites of large mansions in the English Midlands where he would make or implement decisions to requisition them for use by the army. Thus at the age of six or seven I quickly began to make connections between the flags and lines and consequently started to invent maps myself.

On the walls of restaurants or the homes of ambitious neighbours were etchings of towns: 'A Prospect of Nottingham from the South-West' or such. The convention was to make sure that the castle and the churches were prominently visible among the endless scratchings of the etcher. Common houses and trees were (I suspect) filled in to a formula?

So imitating these became a complementary game to the map-making, though the essential difference took some years for me to recognise. If my route into architecture lay somewhere between the mansions, the pins and the etchings, perhaps I should have noticed the links and the differences. In a sense, I am now about to discuss certain architects who present the equivalent of the 'Prospect from the South-West' - a drawing that purports to show the whole conglomeration, but has hidden within itself some deliberate hierarchies and distortions. If the aim was to heroise the city, it comes pretty close to the intention of many architectural propositions.

The map, on the other hand, aided by abstraction and the necessary choice of a symbolic language, has the opportunity to insinuate a strategy. It relies more on the intelligence, the experience, and the interpretational skill of the map reader. It is open to scrutiny and plenty of misinterpretation can occur.

The Seen, the Unseen and the Seductive

Being inspired for many years by fellow Archigramer Michael Webb's Temple Island (1988) project and having heard him lecture on it several times, I am bewitched by the drawings themselves as much as by the narrative. By this time, Webb had already produced the definitive Furniture Manufacturers Association Headquarters (1957-8), Sin Centre (1962), Cushicle (1966) and Suitaloon (1967) (we shall meet some of these later). He developed a drawing style for each - as appropriate. Yet Temple Island meant more, for it not only exists as a major essay in observation, perception and geometry, but is located in his home town of Henley-on-Thames - the languid, genteel home of the Henley Regatta, an event that centres on rowing on the river. The movement of a boat along a straight stretch of that river is the key to his proposition regarding the spaces behind the trees. The tantalisation of the unseen. The constant reconfiguration of this unseen as you move forward. That this master of the extant physical object should choose to deal with the unseen was in itself exciting. That he should then wish to celebrate two special objects was admissible. The Temple on its island is a romantic nod towards an unavoidable link between the Romantic and the classical. By contrast, the other celebrated object, the submarine, is the creation of the geometrical hypothesis itself. The submariner must lie prone and observe through a small porthole, having the perfect conditions for observing the spatial dénouement.

Michael Webb, Temple Island, Henley-on-Thames, Oxfordshire, UK, 1988. Oil on prepared illustration board, 65 × 65 cm.

Michael Webb, Temple Island, Henley-on-Thames, Oxfordshire, UK, 1988. Oil on prepared illustration board, 140 × 98 cm.

Mark Smout and Laura Allen, Village for a Retreating Landscape, Happisburgh, Norfolk, UK, taken from the Augmented Landscapes projects, 2005. Paper and pencil.

It is as if these three conditions - the map, the Romantic island and the vehicle - must exist in extremis, while still being absolutely necessary to each other.

In a similar way the Norfolk objects that the London-based architects Laura Allen and Mark Smout lay out along strips of beach and flatlands in their probings of urban and rural landscapes have a similar interdependency; as illustrated here in Village for a Retreating Landscape (2005).

At first sight, the inclusion of Los Angeles architect Eric Owen Moss's Fun House (1980) might seem to be odd at this point: very much an illustrative piece, high in its visual coding and picturesque in the extreme. Yet look a little closer. This is an early work and predates the plethora of formal exploration that underwrites his more recent buildings in the regenerated studio town of Culver City near LA. The Fun House clearly enjoys itself - all along the line. The collage drawing here divides into a left-hand strip which is a fairly straightforward (if decorated) axonometric of the two semicircular 'pavilions', and a larger, right-hand conglomeration of surfaces, patches, bits, pieces, interferences plus some occasional nods in the direction of tectonics (but not too many).

Eric Owen Moss, Fun House, Hidden Valley, California, USA, 1980. Collage, pencil and ink on Mylar.

The strategy is one of seduction: to establish a certain credibility that we are dealing with architecture and to then open up a Pandora's box of goodies. If the form of the house is not enough - come inside and really have fun!

The Pandora's box offered by Cedric Price in a project for a Pavilion in Perth, Australia (1983) emerges item by item, based on the dispersal of a wide range of components: screens, posts, trusses and rotating elements are the parts of a composition that never needs to be seen as a totality. It is much more to do with accumulation and action, and the appropriate devices for a certain moment in time. Similarly, the drawings and graph-paper patches themselves are deftly chosen fragments: a scrapbook almost, presented (deliberately?) as such. Price again uses his cartoon-like technique and straightforward handwriting. One is expected to review the whole page as it comes: as a series of equally important elements of a componented plan, with the architect spontaneously (and with considerable intelligence) thinking on his feet. The drawings are thus a totally unfiltered representation of this same directness.

Cedric Price, Pavilion in Perth, Australia, 1983. Plans, sections, elevations and details: reprographic copy, 14.7 × 20.9 cm.

Bernard Tschumi, Parc de la Villette, Paris, France, 1982-98. Drawings created for the publication La Case Vide, Architectural Association (London), 1985.

The Strategy of Implementation vis-à-vis Confrontation

Returning, again in train with Cedric Price, we find Bernard Tschumi caught in a far more loaded situation. After all, the Parc de la Villette (1982-98) was one of the Grands Projets for Paris. It was won against stiff competition, and a discrete strategy of implementation needed to be invoked if Tschumi himself were not to be left with the reputation of the overall concept and a few minor corners of building, but a myriad of strange buildings by others fleshing-out the concept.

A programme matrix of red, Neo-Constructivist pavilions had to be spelled out simultaneously in a degree of explicitness that made them seem both likeable and possible and at the same time consistent with the abstracted statement that they could be key to a marked and coded territory. The set of eight drawings described as planches scénographies constantly reiterate the grid of red squares, with a sequence of panels that explore the linkages, the geometries and the application of pavilion to path. They begin to play with the possible variants of pavilion (box) to antennae. On one drawing they jump down in scale to remind us of the total park.

Elsewhere they describe the armatures of paths crossing or glancing. The underlying dynamic running behind the mannerisms of the parts is clearly a development of the Manhattan Transcripts (1979-80) theme (see Chapter 1). Here, it has to be formalised into a series of pieces that talk across to each other through space, rather than collide. Here, the language of its description (just as with the language of its execution) has to be more publicly acceptable than stark black-and-white. The red...