The open sketchbook: collecting ideas

Whether a set of scribbled reminders or a finely detailed record, the sketchbook can be a repository of lessons learned: a distillation, sense of site, or vast library of architectural precedent

It is in the act of collecting, where architects learn from precedent, from things already built. Assembling critiques as well as seeking reference, it is also a way of practising. Through sketching as a form of visual note-taking, the architect’s interpretation of their surroundings and observations are inflected with embodied preoccupations. If this way of gathering is disclosed, origins and influences can be revealed which offer fuller connections between architects’ work. The sketcher rearranges, redecorates, misremembers, fictionalises but in a fluent obliviousness rephrases ideas on paper and sets new conditions for invention.

Wolff Architects

Wolff architects sketch sketchbook architectural review 2

Wolff architects sketch sketchbook architectural review 2

Wolff architects sketch sketchbook architectural review

Wolff architects sketch sketchbook architectural review

Sol T. Plaatje documented the consequences of the South African 1913 Native Land Act in the form of oral histories, sketches and also clippings of plants. Bessie Head later wrote that Plaatje’s book provided an important ‘missing link’ in most Black South Africans’ ‘very broken sense of history’.  These pressed plant clippings are from our research project ‘summer flowers’, taken from forced removal sites in and around Cape Town and from Bessie Head’s house in Botswana.

107 years after Black South Africans were dispossessed by the Native Land Act, we are still seeing the consequences of this colonial spatial violence. We fill our notebooks with these gatherings as a way to remember this history, and as a way to reflect on how our designs could intervene in restorative and ethical ways.

Flores & Prats

Flores prats sketch sketchbook architectural review

Flores prats sketch sketchbook architectural review

Flores prats sketch sketchbook architectural review 2

Flores prats sketch sketchbook architectural review 2

These pages are from a visit to St Mark’s Church by Sigurd Lewerentz in Sweden in December 2019. The sketch was made in situ, containing the spontaneity of direct observation, and fixing on the paper the curiosity about what is being looked at. Drawing is a way of thinking; the hand and the mind go together. As soon as you start drawing in front of something that catches your attention, questions appear and they make you look and draw and look again.

Rozana Montiel

Rozana montiel sketch sketchbook architectural review2

Rozana montiel sketch sketchbook architectural review2

Drawing is an exercise of transforming space into a habitable place. I use Post-Its as graphic aphorisms, collecting the observations and solutions reached in the rehabilitation of public spaces, including the Fresnillo playground, completed in Zacatecas in Mexico in 2018 and the Common-Unity project in Mexico City in 2016. The Post-Its are both process and result: they are non-linear and thematic. They are a way of looking at reality in order to transform it.

Francesca Torzo

Francesca torzo sketch sketchbook architectural review2

Francesca torzo sketch sketchbook architectural review2

For a primary school in Hezhou, in southern China, the architectural proposal begins from continuity with the character, or the cultural expression of, the existing, living archaeology. These watercolours are a search for the spatial relations, in which plans, sections and views merge in one apparently abstract image. They may distil the experience of what is there and rephrase it into something different. These notes on spatial relations do not focus on preconceived ratios nor figures nor icons; form is yet to come, as it depends on the negotiation of innumerable variables.

Nevertheless, the building is all here: staggering beams of concrete on concrete pillars and walls ordered on a gently sloping topography, sequencing rooms and gardens and more, over rooms and gardens.

Peter Markli

Peter markli sketch sketchbook architectural review

Peter markli sketch sketchbook architectural review

I do two different types of drawing. The ones that relate directly to a project are always small – necessarily so, because they express only what is essential, the details are not yet clear. The other kind are the two-dimensional drawings that I use continually to explore certain themes – like the forms of buildings and certain orders, the relation of a single element to the whole, or colour. These are A4 – my preferred format for more than 10 years – and they’re never done in isolation, but always part of a series. This work is not tied to a specific brief, but may be inspired by something I’ve seen in a book, for example. Sometimes I forget what I’ve done, and only go back to drawings after many years. If, decades later, the right conditions arise, then I’ll look again at the idea I’ve drawn.

This piece is the first in the AR’s sketchbook series, in which we have asked architects to open their sketchbook to public conversation, and includes images and text from our July/August 2020 issue on Criticism – click here to buy your copy today

July/August 2020

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