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Robert Hewison
Ruskin famously said that, the teaching of art is the teaching of all
things, setting his pupils at the London Working Mens College the task
of representing, by drawing, a white sphere by shading only. It had to
be done in a particularly Ruskinian way, not as an outline, but by
shading, so that the shape of the sphere emerges as the paper darkens.
The illustrations with this paper are selected from drawings members of
the audience made during the talk.
Ruskins commentary on this exercise was, It has been objected that
a circle, or the outline of a sphere, is one of the most difficult of all lines
to draw. It is so; but I do not want it to be drawn. All that this study of
the ball is to teach the pupil, is the way in which shade gives the
appearance of projection. This he learns most satisfactorily from a
sphere; because any solid form, terminated by straight lines or flat
surfaces, owes some of its appearance of projection to its perspective;
but in a sphere, what, without shade, was a flat circle becomes merely
by the added shade, the image of a solid ball; and this fact is just as
striking to the learner, whether his circular outlines be true or false. He
is, therefore, never allowed to trouble himself about it; if he makes the
ball look as oval as an egg, the degree of error is simply pointed out to
him, and he does better next time, and better still the next. But his mind
is always fixed on the gradation of shade, and the outline left to take, in
due time, care of itself.
Ruskin was not trying to turn working men into artists. As he told
them, I have not been trying to teach you draw, only to see. Clear
sight, accuracy of observation of both image and word, was a mental
discipline that Ruskin taught consistently, and he believed that the best

way both to instil that discipline and test the accuracy of a persons
perception was through the practice of drawing. He believed, however,
that accurate perception, refined by the practice of drawing, was more
than an exercise for the eye, it was also a facility for the mind. Speaking
at the opening of St Martins School of Art in London in 1857, he told
the students that, Drawing enabled them to say what they could not
otherwise say; and ... drawing enabled them to see what they could not
otherwise see. By drawing they actually obtained a power of the eye and
a power of the mind wholly different from that known to any other
discipline.
This remark is significant when we consider recent investigations of
visual cognition, which show that the eye and the brain work
dynamically together, and that vision is active engagement, not passive
reception. Semir Zeki, Professor of Neurobiology at London
University, argues in his book Inner Vision: An Exploration of Art and the
Brain that one sees with the brain, not the eye, and that what he calls
the visual brain is involved in a process of comparing and sorting that
amounts to understanding. Ruskin seems to have anticipated this idea
when he wrote that sight was a great deal more than the passive
reception of visual stimuli, it was an absolutely spiritual phenomenon;
accurately, and only to be so defined: and the Let there be light is as
much, when you understand it, the ordering of intelligence as the
ordering of vision. For Ruskin, to achieve a clarity and nicety of vision,
it was necessary to go back to the beginning and recover what he called
the innocence of the eye.
But, as Zekis studies show, peoples eyes are not innocent. Part of the
activity of visualization is the sorting and comparison of remembered

From Ruskinian drawing exercises to advanced mathematics with architecture, painting and sculpture in
between representation of ideas and objects lies at the heart of intellectual endeavour. Edited by Jeremy Melvin.

Representation

During Robert Hewisons talk, the audience was invited to try Ruskins exercise of representing a white sphere by shading, without lines. Here are some of the attempts.

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images so as to establish a constant version of the things that pass

partially and fleetingly before us. What we have seen influences what
we now see. What we have been taught to see shapes our vision. And as
we see we also feel and think. Ruskin believed that the unconscious, or
semi-conscious ideas that come as we look at things could interfere with
the truth of our perception. In cultural terms, peoples eyes can be
corrupted by conventions of one kind or another, most especially by the
ways in which they are taught to see. That is why Ruskin stood out
against not only the conventional tastes that rejected the fresh visions
first of Turner and then of the Pre-Raphaelites, but all three of the
principal means by which visual perception was formally shaped in the
nineteenth century.
First, he learned to reject the gentlemanly amateur tradition of the
Picturesque, the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century
watercolour landscape tradition in which he had himself been trained.
Second, he became the implacable enemy of the official, governmentpromoted method for training artists and designers, the so-called South
Kensington system managed by the Department of Science and Art.
Third, he was critical of the training of fine artists, as exemplified by
what he called the base system for teaching students in the schools of
the Royal Academy, which, he said, destroys the greater number of its
pupils altogether; it hinders and paralyses the greatest. His reasoning
was important because it went beyond criticizing the framing of
conventional Neo-Classical perception by studying from the antique.
Teaching of art began with training the eye and the hand but it had
also to develop the mind. No art teaching, said Ruskin, could be of use
to you, but would rather be harmful, unless it was grafted on something
deeper than all art.
Sight was intended to lead to insight. Ruskin did not confuse
imitation with representation. He regarded the pleasure derived from
imitation as the most contemptible that can be derived from art,
because mere imitation is mere deception. What Ruskin wanted to get
at was the truth. Truth in painting, he said, signifies the faithful
statement, either to the mind or the senses, of any fact of nature. These
facts of nature could be discovered by diligent visual observation. But,
Imitation can only be of something material, but truth has reference to
statements both of the qualities of material things, and of emotions,
impressions and thoughts. There is a moral as well as material truth; a
truth of impression as well as of form, of thought as well as of matter,
and the truth of impression and thought is a thousand times the more
important of the two.
Further, Truth may be stated by any signs or symbols which have a
definite signification in the minds of those to whom they are addressed,
although such signs be themselves no image nor likeness of anything.
Whatever can excite in the mind the conception of certain facts, can
give ideas of truth, though it be in no degree the imitation or
resemblance of those facts.
True sight leads to insight, true insight leads to revelation. This
triadic structure corresponds to his theory of the imagination: first what
he called the penetrative imagination saw clearly and deeply, then the
associative imagination brought these perceptions towards unity, while
the contemplative imagination meditated on and expressed the
spiritual, symbolic truths so revealed.
The whole of Ruskins art theory, in a sense, comes back to
representing the sphere, an exercise in the first order of truth. We
cannot begin to talk about representation, until there is something to
represent, and if we do not know what it is that we wish to represent,

know it physically, through the co-ordination of hand and eye, and

know it morally, through the openness and clarity of our vision, we will
never be able to begin our journey. As Ruskin famously said, The
greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see something,
and tell what it saw in a plain way. Hundreds can talk for one who can
think, but thousands can think for one who can see. To see clearly is
poetry, prophecy, and religion all in one.

Christopher Le Brun
When Caspar David Friedrich claimed that, The artist should paint
not only what he sees before him, but also what he sees within himself. If
he sees nothing within himself he should also forgo painting what he
sees before him , he not only captured the essence of Romanticism;
he also posed a fundamental question with which art has been
concerned ever since. If, as Friedrich states, perception and imagination
throw up truths at least as important as objective reality, the issue is
how to find ideas and techniques for representation which avoid
contingency and randomness, and allow the work of art to establish
significance and meaning.
Representation in art achieves significance (or depth) when it relates
to a shared background of memory and association. I would argue that
culture is established by critical accumulation and diminished by
substitution. Just as in the forest, great trees depend for their size and
majesty on dense and diverse brushwood, so new layers and
developments in art have a symbiotic relationship with individual works
which nourishes their potential to convey meaning.
George Steiner described the way literature achieves this level of
resonance as the field of prepared echo. With this image, he vividly
conveys the working of the canon of Western art. It is the agreed
given of what is seen, through the test of permanence, to have value,
and allows density of meaning to build up. Without this density,
high culture is impossible. In such a field new ideas and how they
speak within history can be rapidly and intuitively understood. An
analogy in the visual arts might be to picture a loose grid, existing in
three spatial dimensions and evolving over time. Within it,
compositional formulae and repeated patterns in favoured
dispositions come to acquire meaning. We see them superimposed
comparatively in our imaginations. The differences and symmetries

Opposite, Christopher Le
Brun RA, Aram Nemus Vult,
1988-89. Oil on canvas,
271 x 444cm, Astrup
Fearnley, Museum of
Modern Art, Oslo.
Right, Philip Guston, 19131980, Dial, 1956.
Oil on canvas, 72 x 76in
(182.88 x 193.04cm),
Whitney Museum of
American Art, New York.
Purchase 56.44.

create allusion and resonance. On this imaginary field, memories

gather and grow by association and proximity. In Western painting,
the field comes to develop separate spaces: foreground, middle
distance, background. Each has its own defining archetypes of
colour, character, story and form.
We sense the existence of this implicit format most strongly in
Poussin, Claude and the subsequent development of the Picturesque.
This imaginary, and seemingly tacit agreement within pictorial culture
has had such lasting potency that I think of it, certainly in relation to my
own work as an artist, as virtually a death-defying given of apparently
transcendental significance. In modern times it breaks to the surface in
Czanne, and then in Cubism. In rising to explicitness, however, its
effect is changed fundamentally.
Since the late nineteenth century, these complex features of
compositional memory which dominate the pictorial, relational art of
the West, have been tested. During the twentieth century, aesthetic
characteristics such as formal reduction and singularity, rather than
illusion and metaphor, become pre-eminent. Truth resides in the

concrete and the objective. Simplicity is synonymous with honesty.

Only the everyday (always the street and never the palace) is authentic.
In the case of the first generation of American abstract painters such
as Rothko and Clifford Still, a grand and brave simplicity is certainly
achieved. But I would argue that their work is still (in mid century) in
touch and dependent on art historical memory and references to the
former model. At such close range (50 years) their aesthetic denials and
adventures retain meaning.
Yet the possibility for creating this web of meaning, allusion, memory
and association did not of course entirely disappear in the twentieth
century. The pair of exhibitions at Tate Modern on Constantin
Brancusi and Donald Judd early in 2004 shows the contrast. Each finds
the poetic in apparently irreconcilable worlds. Subjective compared to
objective, carved to assembled, refined to raw. It is a division which
runs through twentieth-century art between the associative and the
putative re-presentation of reality. A powerful example of the
persistence of this imaginary field in late twentieth-century art is seen in
the work of the painter Philip Guston. He, like me, has felt the

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the ground to create car parking below a green belt, how ground form,
roof shape and structure ease the flow of air and invite movement of
people. Having a degree of familiarity with Dublin probably helped the
thinking for the Millennium Spire to happen quickly. It was an intuitive
idea which became architectural, sculptural, and structural. I wanted
the stand at Crystal Palace to capture the essential form of the bowl
Joseph Paxton created. It sweeps up to the stage, reflecting sound and
air, like a leaf in the park. The urban scene is full of images that carry
meaning, which may lie, for instance, in a technical effect or perhaps in
memory. A small intervention may alter the balance between images
and profoundly affect their meaning, and it is in sifting and synthesizing
these ideas and influences, helping to understand their repercussions,
that language is so powerful. As words develop into images they pick up
and evolve knowledge.

Four images by Ian Ritchie RA, clockwise from left, The Spire of Dublin (monument for Ireland); White City Shopping Centre; Alba di Milano; Crystal Palace Concert Platform.

compelling pull of this invisible model which suffuses Western art.

Gustons paintings with their tidal shifts towards and away from
representation, show a grid-like sensual abstract painting
interpenetrating figurative, illustrative pictures. Depictions and
thought-touches seem to emerge from the wealth of the painters
memory, giving them an interiority akin to the reflexiveness of
literature. His paintings exist within a mature metaphysical realm for
the projection of emotion and form.
What I am arguing for is a more organized form of subjectivity along
the lines of Caspar David Friedrichs injunction. It is a Classical and
informed subjectivity, depending on thoughtfulness and reflection, and
its effect is to allow pictures to maintain their elusiveness and privacy
even when their meaning is manifestly present in the public realm.

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Ian Ritchie: language to architectural calligraphy

My design process always starts with an idea, and ideas can come from
many sources. Some might be environmental; others are functional,
social or structural, or sculptural in the case of the Jubilee Line vents,
but they exist as ideas without a clear representation. The meaning and
value of an idea lies in language, so I find language a fundamental tool
for exploring ideas. As a student in Liverpool and spending a lot of time
at the Everyman Theatre where the poet Roger McGough opened up
my appreciation of language, I saw how words can investigate rather
than determine an idea. This is a pre-drawing form of representation

which I develop through language. Through draughting and

redraughting, words help to concentrate an idea and bring it into focus.
How this happens varies. The outcome might be descriptive or
abstract; sometimes it may depend on metaphor and at other times it is
more literal.
Once words have given a theme or idea some existence, the next
challenge is to capture it visually. In the past I used models, moulding a
piece of plasticene to find the form, but more often now I use Japanese
or Chinese brushes the calligraphy of the title. The idea must exist
before I can paint around it, but using different techniques of
representation helps to develop it. Alba di Milano, for example,
originated as a beam of light. Milans reputation for making fine cloth
suggested the idea of weaving, so it started to evolve into a cloth of light
woven from fibre optics, which emit light when broken. My first
painting was a black line on a white piece of paper. Using ground on
copper plate, the etching reversed that, turning it into a flash of white
against a black ground.
For White City Shopping Centre I wanted to capture ideas about
shopping that I had described in writing. I had written about how air
might flow through the spaces and the roof modulate sunlight, about
how there could be views and routes to parkland on either side, and
how the effect might reconfigure the relationship between shopping
and the city. An early ink drawing conveys those ideas, initially formed
in words, with a few simple brushstrokes, showing the manipulation of

Roger Penrose
I write as a mathematician who finds drawing and other forms of visual
representation immensely helpful. I can think of several different ways
in which such visual imagery can be important in mathematical work.
In the first place, there is the following major division:
Internal, ie, aids to ones own mathematical understanding
External, ie, aids to the conveying of such understanding to others.
There are many different ways to think about mathematics, and there
are considerable differences among mathematicians as to which modes
of thinking come most easily. I think that the main division between
such modes of thinking comes with the visual/geometric, on one hand
and the verbal/algebraic/calculational, on the other. On the whole, the
best mathematicians are good at both modes of thinking, but my
experience has been that with mathematics students, there is much
more difficulty on the geometric side than on the

algebraic/calculational side. As for myself, I find that geometrical

thinking is what comes most naturally, and I often try to convert
mathematical problems into a geometrical form first before I feel happy
about trying to solve them. However, I frequently find difficulties when
trying to convey my understandings to other mathematicians, or
students, if I use too geometrical a formulation, as they tend to be
happier with algebraic/calculational types of argument.
However, there is a curious paradox here. I am often asked to give
lectures to non-mathematical (or mixed) audiences, and then the
request usually takes the form use lots of pictures, so the audience will
find it easier. This is generally good advice, and it is certainly the case
that pictures rather than equations are normally much better for
conveying information even fairly technical information to lay
audiences. The puzzle is: why is it that professional mathematicians,
and those aspiring to be professional mathematicians, give the
impression of being more unhappy with visual types of thinking than lay
members of the interested general public? Here I venture, as a solution
to this puzzle, that there is a selection effect, arising from the fact that it
is much harder to examine visual mathematical ability than
calculational or algebraic skills. When I was in my final year as a
mathematics undergraduate, I chose geometrical subjects for my
specialist topics, but I believe that I fared a good deal better on the
algebra papers than on the geometrical ones. The reason was that
although I did not have difficulty in solving the geometrical problems, I
found it to be difficult, and particularly time consuming, to express this
understanding in words, as was necessary. Moreover, in mathematical
arguments, an appropriate degree of rigour is always needed, for
arguments to be acceptable. This is often difficult to express adequately
with geometrical reasoning, even when such reasoning may, in essence,
be perfectly correct. Accordingly, those who rely on geometrical types

Left, Fig 1; centre, Fig 2; right, Fig 3, The Creator Having Trouble Locating the Right Universe by Roger Penrose, mixed media 29x25cm.

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of understanding are at a disadvantage in examinations, and

consequently they become under represented in the mathematical
community at large. My own experience with visual imagery and this
applies within both the above categories (internal and external), though
with a somewhat different balance within each is that it can take many
forms. There are, indeed, various ways in which I have found visual
representations to be immensely valuable. In my own work, either as an
essential aid to mathematical understanding and research, or for
expositional purposes, I can distinguish at least four categories:
(a) Schematic diagrams representing mathematical concepts.
(b) Accurate representation of geometrical configurations.
(c) A precise diagrammatic notation for algebraic calculations.
(d) Cartoons, often whimsical, to illuminate key points.
My notebooks are full of sketches depicting (a), the pictures
frequently represent mathematical structures of higher dimension than
is apparent. The configuration in Fig 1 is a drawing of mine from an
article Mathematics of the Impossible,* and it illustrates a nonperiodic tiling of the plane from just two different birdlike shapes. The
type of precise geometrical notation that I frequently use, in accordance
with (c), is illustrated in Fig 2, from another notebook of mine. The
(whimsical) cartoon of Fig 3 is one that I have used a number of times in
lectures, and it illustrates the extraordinary precision with which the
universe must have started up (at the Big Bang), in order to be
consistent with observation and with the Second Law of
Thermodynamics. I feel honoured that it has been exhibited as part of
the Royal Academys Summer Exhibition 2004 under the title The
creator having trouble locating the right universe.
*The Artful Eye, edited by Richard Gregory, John Harris, Priscilla
Heard, and David Rose, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1995, p326.

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Abigail Reynolds
Ruskin established a clear line between drawing and comprehension,
arguing that drawing triggers looking, and looking leads to
understanding. But Robert Hewisons discussion of Ruskin suggests
that he saw the entire benefit came in producing a drawing, leaving
open the question of whether seeing a drawing has the same order of
significance. In art, Richter points out, seeing is the decisive act, so how
the artist can enable the viewer to share this central act completely
becomes the vital issue. I am especially interested in how art can
become a tool for thinking, and potentially elevate the viewers thought
process over the artists. Art should open an avenue for active thought.
Having made Mount Fear, which represents crime statistics as a
mountain range, I am looking at developing further strategies for
representing the abstract by sculptural and physical modelling. Among
these was my work as artist in residence for the Oxford English Dictionary.
The OED is already a representation in at least two senses: its content
represents culture through time, and its aesthetic represents authority.
It is constantly changed and updated, and although it outwardly aspires
only to be descriptive, mapping change in language, its aesthetic of
authority confuses this by being set up as an arbiter of what is and is not
correct. But in shaping the chaos of experience and imposing order, the
OED has points in common with art.
I approached the OED by looking at systems and structures of
meaning in lexicography and art, connecting the experiences of my first
degree in English and my second in Fine Art. The OED itself is

Abigail Reynolds, Exchequer 1, photo-collage 2004.

Abigail Reynolds, working drawing for The Frozen Sea, 2004.

interested in opening up discussion of the place of lexicography and

dictionary-making in our culture to a wider audience, but I am
especially drawn to it because, as a project, it teeters on the brink of
folly. The hubris of documenting all of language, a moving target, is
almost monumentally absurd, and also heroic. It can never be done.
My year as Artist in Residence at the OED had many joys. The
simplest of these was, when asked where my studio is, to be able to
respond in the Dictionary.
Of course, when I say Dictionary, I mean a department of 70
lexicographers, whereas my questioner imagines a set of 20 volumes. I
mean an ongoing daily process; they think of a printed authority.
Suddenly, in this gap, emerges a mental image of me, shrunk like Alice
moving through a world of words. It is a really enjoyable disjunction,
and one which lies at the centre of my approach to creating a visual art
work that responds to the OED.
I started to produce word mappings quite soon after arriving in the
department. Paul Klee, when drawing, would take a line for a walk. I
spend time taking words for walks. Choosing a word, I sniff around it,
following cross-references and other hints in the OED. The word group
grows and is shaped over time as I add and subtract semantic and
etymological links, arranging and re-arranging until a satisfying form
evolves. Words have a shape which can amount to a secret history of
their mutated meanings over time. What I find important in this phase

of my work is the methodology of visually mapping information and the

psychological and emotional dimension that comes out of it.
The Frozen Sea installation began in the word check-mate. Following
its semantic and etymological connections took me through the various
strands of the meanings of words such as check, exchequer, chess,
jeopardy, hazard, and draughts. Having mapped check to a level that
satisfied me (about forty terms), I set about the problem of materializing
this map. No map can convey every detail to a reader, as the
information would be overwhelming. I chose to focus only on the
relations between words. To know if and how words relate, their
relative ages and etymologies have to be known. As my map contained
semantic links, this too would have to be recognized. I chose three rules
to describe the word map in three dimensions: semantic = beside,
etymological = on top of, word age = volume.
For The Frozen Sea I decided to create a study, with desks, chairs, filing
cabinets, a full set of the OED, blackboards and so on. Having gathered
my objects, I ranked them by volume and assigned a word from the
check word map to each, based on the simple correspondence that the
largest volume should represent the term longest in use, the smallest, the
word that had been in use for the most fleeting moment. Having
assigned objects to words I arranged them according to my three rules:
objects representing words that related semantically were placed beside
one another; those with an etymological connection were stacked

horizontally. The room became a working study and simultaneously, a

grid with X and Y coordinates.
Richard Long maps his journeys through the landscape in stones
and sticks, objects to hand. I have mapped my journey through the
forest of words in anglepoise lamps and chairs, also with objects to
hand. The Mexican artist Damien Ortegas recent work Matter and
Spirit places text and materiality in disjunctive conjunction. Michael
Craig-Martins 1970s work An Oak Tree looks at the mysterious
chemistry of naming and duality of matter and sign. I situate The Frozen
Sea in relation to these works.
To return to the experience of the viewer the installation is
activated when the viewer begins to piece together the logic behind the
study. The work operates as an invitation to the viewer to think through
the process of decision and doubt that has created the form. It is a
detective work. This is a strategy that I employ to activate the work. The
decisive process of seeing is a re-perceiving. As in a conspiracy theory,
things are not what they seem. Every element of the piece has a dual
meaning. The desk is indeed a place where a lexicographer has been at
work, with the fetishization usual in the preserved studies of thinkers
like Darwin. It is also a tool that has been used in the task of working
out, and also directly represents a word in the group being mapped.
The title was chosen to suggest a momentary fixing of a flow of particles.
The arrangement will give way to another as another word is mapped.

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Graham Modlen, Office of Zaha Hadid

Drawings by Zaha Hadids office are powerful representations of ideas
and possibilities and when I started there I had to fathom out what
they might represent. The drawings I had seen previously for the Hong
Kong Peak project stimulated me to think forward, to wonder that if
you could do that to Hong Kong, what were the possibilities for other
cities? I soon realized that this type of drawing is a process where everything is to be re-imagined, shattered and then put back together again.
It is as if we are asked to suspend belief and to turn the project round
graphically and re-present it. Drawing allows different people to invent
and interpret, and contribute to the process. It is a real studio system.
One of Zahas earliest commissions was a rooftop conversion in
Halkin Place in Belgravia. The drawings show the flat interior with the
walls blown away and the plan drawn within a floating isometric projection. Fittings and furniture are sometimes on the floor and sometimes floating. The wall is drawn as if it were a new plane through
which light shines. It has a sort of surreal air to it. But the drawings
also re-imagine the home ground; certain elements become recognizable; you can make out the streets with the familiar duality of a regular
edge to the street and a serrated back edge. The technique of drawing
she inaugurated has become a hallmark of the office. It allows anyone
in the office, whether they know London or not, to reinvent it and show
us how it could be.
By the time of the competition for the Grand Buildings site in the
mid-1980s, the techniques for drawing had evolved into a collective
effort. The project was an opportunity to reinvent or imagine an idealized version of Trafalgar Square. In the drawings the square itself
might be recognizable but what lies behind it has changed. The river
gets lost and there are several strange undulations. Various people in
the team contributed perspectival drawings, representing their ideas
or knowledge of the city but, I think, they were put together with
Zahas steadying hand.
In the office are sketch books of drawings by Zaha, which are something like diaries. They may not refer to any particular project, but
they are forward thoughts and reflections on past ideas. She can present them to the studio in a way which launches everybody off, or she
may say, theres a sketch I did which may ... but you will have to study
it. We tease out what might relate to the project in discussion. It may

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Zollhof, Dsseldorf, by Zaha Hadid Architects.

be the silhouette that has some significance, or perhaps one image is

laid over another to fathom out the kernel of the plan. The result is
multi-layered and the original thought may become indistinct.
With computers and copiers we can deal with all sorts of distortions.
We can twist plans, build up layers and distort distances. The introductory images of the Rome Contemporary Arts Centre were reliefs
built up from two or three layers of cut card to give depth to the ground
in plan. That then feeds ideas about the roof structure and for walls
which descend and create outdoor spaces.
At the Mind Zone in the Millennium Dome, our task was to represent the workings of the mind through an interaction of architecture,
art and an understanding of neurology. Its form of three overlapping
snake-like shapes resembling curving lasagne layers and forms, was
described as piece of sculpture and exhibitry itself with smaller elements of sculpture and exhibits inside, something like a Russian doll.
The position of the steel trusses related to circulation patterns and the
domes shape; we tickled and pushed it with cantilevers and distortions.
The idea was that people walking along ramps would come across
exhibits that aimed, for example, to play with visual perception, communication and identity. One of the exhibits was a built spatial perspectival trick comprising a 4m high sculpture by Gavin Turk which
distorted distances. Another was a computer program which reworked
a photograph of yourself to change gender, race and age.
Our drawing techniques are ways not just of representing, but finding and developing ideas. For example the mid-construction views of
Cardiff Bay Opera House were drawn on black paper, but from the
use of white paint, for example, it seemed to me an idea came about
the use of light. In another, earlier project from 1993, based on an exdockland site in Dsseldorf, which combined a radio station, hotel and
media offices, the team made a number of exploratory works including
a mixed, hybrid perspective which was as if wringing a cloth. Out of it
came different views represented in one painterly composition.
Representation is part of the process of thinking.

Paul Schtze
When I make pieces based on architecture, I aim to document the
experience of a building rather than the building itself. Peter
Zumthors Thermal Baths in Vals captivated me partly because the
building seems to have its own internal weather systems. Each room
achieves its own micro climate with distinctive temperature, humidity
and tepidity. Some spaces also link with the exterior bringing an
unexpected haptic transparency. Rooms register as much on the skin
as the eye or the ear. There are extraordinary acoustic phenomena
articulated by varieties in scale, materials and ceiling heights. I was
struck by how rich an experience the building would offer to someone
who could not see. While its visual impact is considerable, the
architect has addressed each of the senses extravagantly. Another
feature is the way its water surfaces appear as part of the
compositional mass of the building and yet are occupiable as spaces.
This produces an almost eerie intimacy with the materials and the
structure itself.
The Janta Manta series takes the remarkable structures built as
astronomical observatories under the Mughal Emperor Jai Singh II.
Their form determined by need, they have a minimal amount of
ornament, but they make an engaging collection of sculptural forms
which seem strangely contemporary despite being several hundred

Paul Schtze: From the Garden of Instruments III, 2004. Lightbox, 92 x 128.4cm. Edition of three. Copyright holder: Paul Schtze. Images courtesy of Alan Christea Gallery, London.

years old. There are three of these complexes in India and while I have
seen only the one in Jaipur, I chose to model the Delhi structure
familiar to me only from incomplete accounts, plans and photographic
records. I was keen to make an idealized version which I think reveals
more of the hubris but also the beauty of these three structures.
After we had made a CAD model of the site, I attempted to
deconstruct the buildings by projecting animated views onto a moving
stainless-steel mesh armature and re-filming the result. Most elements
in the buildings are visible, and their essence survives being pulled
across a complex series of curves. I was interested to see how the basic
geometry would withstand this sort of distortion of representation. It
is an example of what I call vertical memory, where the essence of
compressed experience survives this sort of mangling. This also relates
to our own inability to recall accurately which gives rise to a poetic
sensibility forced to rebuild objects and experiences in our own minds.
If there is a common grammar, each small part might contain the
phraseology for the whole.
When I introduce sound into a work I use Dolby Surround which
defines a pronounced spatial configuration. I do not want a sense of
front or a formal planar way of seeing a building. I want the same
flexibility in experiencing representation that we take for granted in
the experience of the represented.
One of the two films to which this project gave rise has a sequence

in which I overlay blurred and distorted images. This simple act of

blurring curiously introduces a level of sight which for me becomes
more permanently embedded than conventional means of
representation. It also shows up a particular problem with pristine
architectural photographs and renderings. Their apparently
inexhaustible detail drawing you closer and closer to the surface, until
the photographic grain interposes itself between you and the building
represented.
Using a different approach to representation raises questions about
the habitability of the representation itself; that is, about how it can
invite you past its own surface. I find similar problems in
representation with text and while I use text extensively in my work it
is often in a form which acknowledges this difficulty. I spend some
time labouring over the words and have a programme which will then
display them as a fine grid floating apparently within the image like a
fog. While the meaning is still present, it becomes lost in the image,
almost irretrievable, an obscuring tint across the surface of things.
Their numerous staircases aiming at the sky in elaborate
calibrations and dishes, the Janta Manta are buildings entirely
determined by light, moonlight, starlight or sunlight. That is why I
chose to render the structures in glass. How the building both depends
on light and arose purely from light sets up all sorts of fascinating
possibilities for its representation.

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Sketch for the School of the Future.

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Will Alsop
I am always curious that the biggest critics of our architecture are not
members of the public but other architects. In general the
community responds well to our designs as we can show through
visitor numbers, but something we do lies outside the academic
conventions of how to make architecture. Because academics have to
make their way up the university ladder there are more books on
architectural methodology than even architectural history but they
do not work. No self-respecting architect would follow any of their
principles.
To me it does not matter where you start. Even digital media
simply offer another design tool; it is quick and can be dangerous, but
not completely different to the pencil or other traditional techniques.
The essential starting point is to de-programme yourself, which is
why we work with local communities, by handing them a pencil or a
paintbrush, and at the same time a glass of wine.
Where you work is an equally important part of the question of
representation. In my own studio (not my office) where I work with
two or three assistants, there is a bar which is sometimes used as a
bar, so there is a social function to the layout. But it divides the space
into a dirty and a clean side, with computers, a fridge and a sofa on
one side, a large plywood wall for stapling or projecting things on the
other. The dialogue this invites between clean and dirty is like the
open discussions that take place in art schools: dialogue happens
almost without its participants realizing. Our layout also allows us to
see things and possibly to misinterpret them, which can be as
important in the creative process as understanding.
Here we can recognize reality but also explore its limits. We work
with different scales and techniques of representation. When
architects are usually responsible for the largest artefacts in the
world, it seems strange that they often work at a small scale. The key
is to use the whole body because that gives a relationship between
human scale and the scale of what you want to do.

Continuity is important too, because all our projects are really one
work. An extraordinary concept you might have at the age of 21 is as
valid when you are 56; you just have more wisdom to explore that
concept in other ways, but hopefully with no less vibrancy. It is
important to keep up a process of discovery and invention. Often I
spend time in the summer on Minorca with Bruce Maclean, not
working on any particular project but doing something else. These
sessions might throw up some interesting shapes, forms or ideas
which could find their way into design projects. We would have to do
further studies to interpret how to build them, but in reality drawing,
making and realization are all aspects of the same process.
Discovery is an important part of our activities. We did not impose
the Ontario College of Art and Design on the community; rather it
came out of the community. We extended the park to the street so
people who live on it can walk straight out into the park, which is now
animated by the lively people who occupy the art school.
Our project Not the Tate for Barking Reach in the Thames
Gateway shows how we use various techniques of representation to
explore the implications of particular starting points. At the moment,
the area is not on the mental map of Londoners and most proposals
for it are overly academic. Our proposal is to give a series of large
wooden huts over to the London art schools one of the citys great
secrets and curate a landscape of activity with work in, on or
around each hut, fed by plenty of food and drink and free parking.
In Montreal we tried another relationship between starting point
and means of representation. To engage the public we built a 40m
long tube of canvas for public and students to explore what this piece
of Montreal could be. As it starts to break down assumptions, the
design team begins to interact with the public. In part it is an
exuberant messing about with paint, but it is also a documented
series of ideas. It helps me to find something outside myself; although
mixed with my cultural baggage it also engenders a sense of shared
ownership of the ideas.
In general, we do not talk about designing buildings but about
discovering what they want to be. That voyage of discovery has to be
a very open process.

Medical research building, Queen Marys College, under construction.