Design Representation

Although we mostly work on our indivdual architectural projects, once a week, we combine with 3 sections and having "Design Representation" class. This is a full day of lectures and drawing on site, teaching us how to represent ideas through diagrams and in quick rough sketches. We go out into Cambridge and field sketch the same things, comparing, and discussing techniques and which ideas were successful or unsuccessful.

The first week, our design representation project was a bit entertaining. We did "blind contours." This means you go to a site, and sketch what you see, without ever picking up your pencil or looking at the paper. It turns out looking like a 5-year-old scribble, but it's really interesting because you can see the general shape of what you were going for, and it always occurs that there is some kind of shading/layers involved where we put more pressure with our pencil.

(Pictures of my blind contours to come)

    The Second week, we practiced working on vignettes, small sketches representing just exactly what you see in front of you. We went to a home built by the famous architect, Le Corbusier, and had to draw 10 sketches of 10 different views we see as we walked up a ramp. This seemed tedious, as each sketch looked similar, however afterwards, we could glance at the images and realize what was changing and what was static.
    Our next assignment was to use this idea of sketching vignettes to sketch the process of our walk from the dorms to the studio. This was our interpretation of the walk, so we could represent it however we wanted, using vignettes. It was a map of the space, but could be created with all of our imagination. Mine is seen below. The  triangular walkways are meant to represent "tunnel vision" as we turn the corners and look ahead at the long walk down the street. We were to represent the entire space, even if we had never paid attention to it. So in the lower right corner, you can see that I have never even looked to the left when I walk to work, I always am so focused on getting to the studio I don't take the time to look around. These vignette drawings were done on site, in a sketchbook, and copied onto this larger sheet of paper in an arranged fashion.

A final assignment of ours was to re-create a 1x1 inch square provided to us on a 12x12 inch sheet of paper.  We were to draw exactly what we saw using charcoal or conte crayon, including shading and shapes. Little did we know that these images would be combined together with all of the architecture sections to create a larger image. Here is the combined images, which we displayed on the wall in the studio. My 12x12 inch square is in the second row from the top, 3 from the left. I had a fairly boring section, and the crayon our section used was lighter, but nevertheless it was an awesome assignment!