Drawing Samples

Fragments from processes of drawing:

Duchamp, Concept, & Achre

nude descending a staircase, 1912

readymade, 1923

Anemic Cinema, 1926

1 mile of string, 1948

Giotto is the iconic artist of the "bridge" moment between medieval and renaissance art. What Giotto epitomizes is the shift from figural and illustrative art into an art of geometric and spatial intentions. These shifts are never as momentary as art history would sometimes make them out to be. They are really made of a whole series of developments across broad ranges of time. Nevertheless, it helps us understand the changes across histories if we mark periods and movements across history's surface.

A significant period of evident shift in art history occurred between 1913 and 1968. In general, culture was being impacted by the changes in scientific thinking around relativity, thermodynamics, and quantum physics. It also reeled from the first fully mechanized war- the war where the vast majority of incredible numbers in death were mediated by an industrial mechanism. Art had to come to terms with industrialization, mechanization, photography, cinema, and consumer culture across this time frame. Art had to boil itself down to it's minimum and most foundationally "artistic". What did art do that nothing else could do? What was art created in time, not paint or metal? The career of Marcel Duchamp epitomizes and spans this period.

Giotto and the Renaissance painters codified spatial systems into painting. The impact of this codification on the architects of the time was incredible. Brunelleschi and other early Renaissance architects saw quickly that, these perspectival techniques in painting could be translated into parallel techniques in their own discipline. There's more difference between projecting perspectival space onto a 2-D canvas and projecting perspectival space into the landscapes and cities with buildings than we give credit. They're really less the same thing than we think. That's because these architects did such an incredible job of making the translation of an operative, systematic, performative condition- the craft and translation of a subject.

For the next 400 to 500 years of the renaissance and the enlightenment, the idea was qualified, tested, and systematized further. Ideas were taught to be explored through a system of Hegelian dialectics or oppositions.

At the outset of the 20th c. art was questioning of the idea of the subject of art- a work of art's "Concept". What form could a concept take in art? What was a reasonable subject? What relationships exist between subject and form? Could art be reduced to simply a concept or an index? Was art a work, a process, or an idea? These are questions that the work of Duchamp represents for the 20th c. in the same way that Giotto represents for the trajectory of the 14th c.

As this questioning has rolled into architecture, like in the renaissance, the effect on architecture translating the systematic shift in representation has been intrinsic. Architecture, freed of a necessary subject, has become a sort of language based in the processes of design.

"From the late 1960s until very recently...architecture has been very "process" driven. That is to say...architectural form is the outcome, or registration, of a series of a series of design procedures. These procedures are in control of the architect, carried out by graphic mean, and have their own internal logic. That logic in turn is seen to be embedded in the architectural object as meaning and formal organization."

Stan Allen, "Trace Elements" in Tracing Eisenman

Giotto Painting & Architecture

This is Giotto. He's considered the main hinge between the Renaissance and what all came before it. The Renaissance (the age of humanism) seems to have been a big shift for western culture and is the birth of the ideas and principles of what we now call architectural practice.
Watch this video of Giotto's work and think about words like:
Perspective
Figural
Illustrative
Extending
Narrative



We'll be talking about this in the next few weeks and working past it. Give it your consideration.

assign.#1:Palladio/Le Corbusier

Here are some pairs of buildings, one designed by Andrea Palladio (1508-1580) and one designed by Le Corbusier (1887-1965).

• (Pall) : Palazzo Chiericatti in Vicenza, 1550
  
• (LC) : Palace of Assembly at Chandigarh, 1950

JDockery, Bolor Enkhbat, Din

• (Pall) : Villa Foscari in Venice, 1560
  
• (LC) : Villa Stein (Garches) at Monzie, 1932

Doug B., Garrett, Nic

• (Pall) : Palladian Basilica in Vicenza, 1548
  
• (LC) : Mill Owner's Association Building in Ahmedabad, 1951

Kelly Clemmer, Claire,

• (Pall) : Villa Cornaro in Padua, 1552
  
• (LC) : Villa Shodan in Ahmedabad, 1951

Christi, Christina, Cody, Brittany Young

You will select a (Pall/LC) to research, model, and draw this semester. You will claim a pair by making a comment to this post stating which pair you have chosen to study. If there are three people already listed to study the pairing, you must choose another pair- first come, first choose.

Once you've made your selection you should go to the library and find everything there is about your two buildings. Students sharing pairings are encouraged to break up the research as long as you trust the other person to do a thorough job of research.

To research Palladio:
Look through books on Palladio, the Cinquecento, Italian Renaissance architecture and do a scan of the Avery Index for periodical mentions of the project. In books rich with imagery and text about your building, review the footnotes to see where the author is finding their sources.

To research LC:
Look through books about Le Corbusier, periodical mentions of the project found via the Avery Index, and a hunt through the Le Corbusier Archives (white series of books on LC on the 9th floor in the research area).

Collect anything you can find as a set of paper documents in a three ring binder with two sections. You want drawings, photos of models, and photos of the building. Use of any available online digital models is prohibited and will be treated as serious cheating. Do not use source material from the internet, only library research.

I will meet you in the library on the 8th floor at the south tables at 10:00AM to discuss the project and your research. I will take roll. A simple formal model the size of a fist of each building is due at the beginning of class on Wednesday. You may use what you deem appropriate material(s) for model making.

Introduction

Due to a family issue Girmay is returning to Ethiopia. We will miss him and we all wish him well in the matters he will face.

I am Brian Rex. I'm the Chair of Instruction. I have taught this course for 13 years and was the studio coordinator for ARCH2502 for 12 years, five of them here at TTU. I'll be with you all for the next week and will be overseeing the teaching of this course for the rest of the semester. We're arranging to bring in a new teacher to come in and work with you and I on the project we're going to do.

Stop working on what you are working on. We're going to start something new. We're going to start something new because your new instructor and we have something better for you to do.

We're going to restart the studio work on an analysis project. More on that in the next post.