Asheville Summer Drawing Workshop

The Alchemy of Drawings, Matter and Light, Recto and Verso

Festina lente
(make haste slowly)
Francesco Colonna

The aim of this unique workshop is to investigate drawing as the locus of the merging of professional and theoretical reflexivity. In developing proper drawings, the main effort is breaking down of stereotypes and reductive categories that are so limiting to richness of theoretical thinking and professional communication.

A project for a treatise of 11 pages (recto and verso) on drawing materiality will be elaborate by every student illuminated by lecture reviews and in consultation with the instructors during daily meetings. The proposed project is way to understand drawings as recognizably artificial constructs, ideological instruments in a permanent dialogue regarding contemplation and negotiation.

The union of theory and practice is the result of drawing sapience. In the act of drawing, designers deal on the one hand with the multiplicity of realistic lines and imaginary lines and on the other hand with the association of literal and metaphoric lines.

Drawing sapience has an estimative character, a hedonic response that occurs immediately on stimulus contact, before reflecting on the warrant for any evaluation. Rather than valuing what we produce after the fact, we savor during its making and in so doing we hedonically respond as the evaluative component of our design experience. The material at hand used for the translation is the figuring image and is the catalyst of design imagination.

Drawing is based on right timing. The concept of 'right timing', of seizing the opportunity, is the essence of the concept of Kairos. Kairos, that is Occasio or Opportunity. For the ancient Greeks there are two different kinds of Time, straightforward chronological, historical Time, measured with clocks and calendars, and the less tangible, mercurial, unpredictable Time of chance, of opportunity, synchronicity, Occasio as it was called by Cicero. Chronos, the god of linear time, is traditionally depicted as an old man, slow-moving with a long beard. The god of opportunity, Kairos has winged feet, to hover and dance, randomly crossing the solid planned trail of Chronos. These two aspects of time are inter-related woven as the warp and weft. Astounding drawings happen when they cross or merge. We often think of the duration of time as a resource ("We have three months to complete the project"). We need to be equally aware that the second way of looking at time is also a resource ("Now is our window of opportunity") and is often the scarcer of the two. Both types of time are resources for the architect. Patience in drawing, often overlooked as a resource, is more than the willingness to wait: it is also the willingness, to facilitate rather than to dominate and to know when it is the opportune moment.

Drawing does what produces pleasurable effects in its making not knowing the result yet. Quality is the measure of architecture embodied in a drawing. An architect can measure quality by looking at the relationship between architectural elements and drafting ingredients used to construct the drawing, the intelligence accumulated in the drawing, the drawing's economy, and its delight in drawing imagination.

Drawing imagination is one of those critical faculties of the human mind that defies adequate definition. To describe it as "creative, conscious, thought," is inadequate, because each of these building blocks remains fuzzy. One might argue that definitions are unnecessary because we have an intuitive understanding of this phenomenon, and can safely assume that all other people (barring those with cognitive pathologies) engage in the same types of mental activity that we consider being architectural imagination.