Abstract:

How does the architecture student learn to draw? What? When? These are all legitimate questions, strictly related to the context in which they are formulated. In fact, there are many ways to learn to draw and there are more numerous variations that different practices can take in relation to the context and the defined approach. In this contribution we present a didactic activity proposed to first year of Architecture in the Drawing and Survey Atelier: it is the experience of redrawing a published project, with the intention of educating students in the conscious and critical reading/understanding of graphic sources.

To understand the educational potential within which the activity is done, it is necessary to make a first distinction between what is the architectural drawing for the project, the translation into signs of an idea so that it can be realized, and the drawing of the built environment, the representation of a complex reality with all its details. From the educational point of view, to educate architectural drawing we propose a first approach to reading the project drawing, a representation that ranges between the synthesis needs and the descriptive needs and therefore its critical reading offers the ideal context for reasoning on some specific representation tools that are appropriately introduced by thematic lessons: purpose and scale of representation, graphic language, standards and graphic codes. The last point to be introduced is the concept of ‘copy’, because if in a non-specialist culture copying means the modality of transcriptions in signs of an observed reality (and not only looked at, then passing from a partially passive practice to an explicitly active one), in our specialistic context, working on drawing, the redrawing of a project represents more than a simple copy but also a translation of the meaning and its reinterpretation. The experiential approach of redrawing a graphic source, chosen appropriately so that it can lead to understand how the elements considered significant for the description of the analyzed object have been identified and what their appropriate graphic syntheses are, hangs around with the students throughout the first year between individual practice and team work, between digital (CAAD) and traditional (PENCIL) drawing, thus offering critical hints for comparison of the ‘same’ practice. The choice of the graphic sources to be analyzed is fundamental for this goal. All graphic sources can be used, but they must be correctly interpreted and, by way of example, we chorally read some representations of Mario Botta’s Museo d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto. In this way we identify, among many others, three types of sources to refer to: monographs, professional journals, images from the web. The critical guided reading of the aforesaid supports allows to range between observations of a specialized graphics and considerations of a communicative and/or informative types, highligthing the subjectivity of each representation, reiterating the continuous dialogue between subjective and objective interpretation that always characterized the field of architectural representation. The comparative reading of some outcomes highlights different interpretations of the same graphic source and multiple in-depth analysis regarding the completely absent information; consequently, architects’ education therefore critical copying is a tool for learning to draw for architecture.

Keywords:

Architecture, drawing, redrawing, copying, published project.