Kristina Luce

A Proposal for a 3-Credit Hour History Elective for the M.Arch. Program Called:

The History of Architectural Drawing and
Its Implications for Design

Course Description:
This course is designed to familiarize architecture students with the historical precedent
of their own design techniques. On a concrete level, it is an examination of the history
architectural drawing including the development of the triadic system (plan, section and
elevation). We will deal with the Classical use of drawing, but our exploration begins in earnest
during the 13
th
century as scalar drawing emerges. We will examine the shifting techniques of
drawing as it takes on a more and more determinant role in architecture (as the profession
became distinct from masonry/building and drawing becomes the architects representative on
site), and we will question what drawing conventions reveal about the role of the architect during
various periods.

On an abstract level, this course is an examination of the innate creativity within
representational systems. Like other forms of representation (for instance, perspective or
photography), architectural drawing techniques are the result of intensely creative historic efforts
to solve the problem of representation. As architectural design incurs different problems than
the making of a naturalized image, architectural drawing exhibits different traits from these other
forms of representation. We can look at drawings evolution as the alternating selection and
rejection of these distinguishing traits. Moreover, this selection process can reveal how architects
conceptualize the problem they are trying to solve because drawing technique influences
ideation. Drawing types evolved in response to the conception of the architectural problem, but
they also shape how the architectural problem can be conceived. (e.g. Is architecture a problem
of form and its arrangements, or of space and its?) These predilections, both periodic and
individual, are reflected by how design is represented.

Perhaps most interestingly, drawing is not solely an historic problem. It continues to be
the hallmark of the architect. The most basic premise of this course is the proposition (after
Robin Evans) that drawing is the principle locus of conjecture in architecture. Therefore, we will
also explore the geometric and conceptual frameworks that the conventions of architectural
drawing impose on design, and we will question how representational techniques mold
excogitation: how they can simultaneously facilitate, inspire and limit creativity. This awareness
can inform a students use of contemporary processes of design. Therefore, this course will also
ask students to question their own location of architecture and to define possible auxiliary routes
towards their own ideals of creativity in design.

Our readings will draw from a variety of fields including: logic, psychology, art history,
and of course, architectural history.





Kristina Luce
Course Objectives:
Upon completing this course, the student will
1. be familiar with the common conventions of architectural drawing and be able to cite
historic examples of their use
2. be able to associate drawing conventions with periods during which the conventions were
established, revived or emphasized
3. be aware of the frameworks that representational practices place on ideation and be able
to cite historic examples where understanding an architects representational system
influences the interpretation of the building.
4. will identify the framework of his/her graphic techniques which in turn influences design
outcomes, and will propose alternate techniques which may be fruitful for his/her
process.

Assignments:
1. Drawing Project (20%):
As a group, produce an elevation (orthogonal or oblique) using either the linear or radial
proposed Brunelleschi technique. Document your procedure using photography, sketches
and/or diagrams to explain both your mensuration and drawing technique. Check the
accuracy of your drawing with several traditional measurements of crucial distances, but do
not use these distances to correct your drawing. Teams will then be paired and students
will resolve a scalar plan from the two drawings (construzione legittima in reverse). Provide
a short essay evaluating your experience with respect to other techniques you have learned to
produce drawings of existing conditions. (Were the experiences equivalent? Did you learn
more/less about the building using the Brunelleschi technique? Do you believe that you see
the building differently than you would have if you had documented it using traditional
measuring techniques?)

2. Historical Research Project (40%):
Using Wolfgang Jungs essay on Borromini as a model, write a 10-15 page essay examining
drawing and its link design. You may adjust the scale on either side of this equation (i.e. you
may examine one drawing, several drawings from one architect, or a drawing convention of
the period vis a vis one design, one architects work or a shared concern of one period of
architecture). However, you must relate how these two aspects inform one another.
Alternatively, you may choose to discuss what a particular drawing type which we do not
may reveal, in relation to other types of drawing, tells us about the role of the architect during
this period. Present your findings to the class during a brief (10 minute) presentation.

3. Self-Analysis Project (20%):
Analyze one of your own designs based on the presentation drawings you created. Ideally,
you will have determined the presentation requirements largely on your own, however, if you
do not have a project where this is the case, you may analyze how the presentation
requirements molded your understanding of the design problem. What does this project
reveal about your architectural intent and how might you better engage your conscious
intentions through the explicit choice of drawing techniques?

4. Reading and Participation in Class Discussion (20%)
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Kristina Luce
Preliminary Course Organization:
Assignment Modules: 3 Weeks Total
Drawing Project: Two Weeks
I have designed this project to engage students with early mensuration and drawing
techniques in order to form a counter-point to their internalized understanding of scalar
drawing. I believe this exercise will demonstrate the active creativity that was involved in
the early drawing techniques better than reading alone. The exercise is based on an
extension of Jehane Kuhns hypothesis of Brunelleschis technique. Students will be
divided initially into four groups to produce four drawings of the same building: linear
orthogonal and oblique elevations as well as radial versions of these. Groups will then be
re-assembled to construct a building footprint. A short reflective essay will be required of
each student, and we will examine the techniques and differing results as a class.

Paper Presentations: One Week
Individual 10 minute presentations of results of the Historic Research Project

Discussion Modules: 9 Weeks Total
Weekly readings and discussion in a seminar environment will be broken up into the following:
Focus One: The history of drawing as it responds to/reflects the design problem
Drawing before the 13
th
Century: Greek, Roman and Early Gothic Examples will be
discussed around a theme of the buildings conceived as typology and detail.
Drawing before the 15th Century: The (re)emergence of early scalar plans and
elevations will be discussed around a theme of buildings conceived through planar
ideation.
Drawing during the 15th & 16
th
Centuries: The evolution of constructed perspective,
triadic form, and the historic place of models in design will be discussed around a
theme of 3-D negotiation/experimentation.
Drawing during the 17
th
and 18
th
Centuries I: The power of projection, stereometry and
descriptive geometry will be discussed around a theme of spaces instrumentalization.
Drawing during the 17
th
and 18
th
Centuries II: The codification of the triadic system and
the emergence of the rendered surface (sciography) will be discussed around the theme
of the battle for depth.
Drawing during the 19
th
Century: Perspective, isometric & axonometric drawings will
be discussed around the themes of Formalism and Rationalism.
Drawing during the Early 20
th
Century: The Modernist rejection of ornament as
manifested by bold lines and the primacy of the plan will be discussed around the
theme of the rejection of draughtmanship.
Drawing during the Late 20
th
Century: Digital permutations of drawing by computer
programs will be discussed around the theme internal versus external visualization.

Focus Two: Architectural Drawing Inflected by other Disciplines
Symbolic Systems: The nuanced differences between the terms representation,
substitution, and notation, as well as the difference between discursive and non-
discursive systems will be discussed around the themes of percept and schema.

If this outline can be maintained the final weeks discussion will attempt to amplify and
synthesize the courses ideas around specific issues suggested by the students.
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Kristina Luce
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Preliminary Reading List:
Readings for this course will consist of selection from a variety of texts, rather than the close
reading of a few texts. Authors included among these selections include, but are not limited to:
James Ackerman, Wolfgang Lotz, Reginald Bloomfield, Lothar Hassleberger, Robert Branner,
Lon Shelby, Francois Bucher, Alberto Perez-Gomez, Robin Evans, Edward Robbins, Daniel
Herbert, James Smith-Pierce, E.H. Gombrich, Jonathan Crary, Alfred Gell, Kathryn Henderson,
Michael Brawne, Nelson Goodman, and Rudolf Arnheim. Some of the more critical selections are
listed here:

Ackerman, James. The Origins of Architectural Drawing in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, pgs 27-66
in Origins, Imitation, Conventions: Representation in the Visual Arts. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002).

Arnheim, Rudolf. Chapter 8: Expression and Function, pgs 248-274 in The Dynamics of Architectural
Form: Based on the 1975 Mary Duke Biddle Lectures at the Cooper Union. (Berkeley, CA: U of California
Press, 1977).

Evans, Robin. Selected Excerpts Translations from Drawing to Building and Other Essays. (Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 1997), and Architectural Projection pgs in Blau, Eve and Kaufman, Edward, ed.
Architecture and its Image: Four Centuries of Architectural Representation. (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 1989).

Gell, Alfred and Eric Hirsch. Chapter 5: The Technology of Enchantment and the Enchantment of
Technology, pgs 159-186 in The Art of Anthropology: Essay and Diagrams (Monographs on Social
Anthropology, No. 67.) (London: Athlone Press, 1999).

Gombrich, E.H. Selected Excerpts from Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial
Representation. (New York: Bollingen Foundation, 1961), and Meditations on a hobby horse, pgs 209-
224 in Meditations on a hobby horse and other essays on the theory of art. (London: Phaidon. 1997).

Goodman, Nelson. Section I:8 Realism, pgs 34-39, Section III:1-4 The Perfect Fake, The Answer, The
Unfakeable, The Reason, pgs 99-122, and Section V:9 Architecture, pgs 218-222, in Languages of Art:
An Approach to a Theory of Symbols. (New York: Bobbs-Merrill Co. Inc., 1968).

Hassleberger, Lothar. The Construction Plans for the Temple of Apollo at Didyma. Scientific American.
253 (1985): 126-132.

Jung, Wolfgang. Tilting Volutes, Bending Cornices and Perplexing Angles and Planes, or How Borromini
Might Have Given Architecture Over to the Anarchy of Imagination, pgs 91-122 in Ackerman, James
and Jung, Wolfgang, eds. Conventions of Architectural Drawing: Representation and Misrpresentation,
(Cambridge, MA: James Ackerman, 2000).

Kuhn, Jehane R. Measured Appearances: Documentation and Design in Early Perspective Drawing.
Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, Vol. 53 (1990), 114-132.

Lotz, Wolfgang. The Rendering of the Interior in Architectural Drawings of the Renaissance, pgs 1-65
in Studies in Italian Renaissance Architecture. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1977).

Pierce, James Smith. Architectural Drawings and the Intent of the Architect. Art Journal, Vol. 27, No. 1
(Autumn, 1967), 48-59.