Waterlands Part III
SuperStudio 6
Professor Paul Clarke, Professor of Architectural Design
Peter McNie, Teaching Fellow
People nowadays think, scientists are there to instruct them, poets, musicians, artists, etc. to entertain them. That the latter have something to teach them; that never occurs to them.
Ludwig Wittgenstein (1940)
Over the past few years the WaterLands studio has explored different conditions and landscapes associated with water in Northern Ireland: the North Coast, Lough Neagh, Strangford Lough and the Upper and Lower Bann. This year the studio will begin by exploring what is essentially the source of many of these conditions: the Mourne Mountains, and in parallel with the circular trajectory of the journey of the year and of the design process itself, consideration of the hydrological cycle.
The writer, mathematician, and mapmaker Tim Robinson in his books Stones of Aran LABYRINTH, and Stones of Aran PILGRIMAGE, contrasts two different ways of understanding and exploring a landscape — in this case the island of Aran off the west coast of Ireland. The two books take different trajectories: one he calls ‘labyrinth’, in which he moves across the land in an inward spiral encountering the field patterns, roads, rocks and so on; the other he calls ‘pilgrimage’ in which he circumnavigates the island along the coastline in a clockwise circular movement discovering the inlets, channels, ports and harbours. Taking the latter as an important influence, we aim to chart different ways of looking, interrogating, and discovering landscapes at different scales: cartographic, social, spatial, material, intellectual, maritime, and so on. The theme will be contextually, spatially and abstractly defined this year by the aqueous journey from the mountain by a river to a Lough, though the Lough venturing Northward, and then back again to the mountains. The Mourne Mountains and the upper and lower Bann Rivers which pass through Lough Neagh, will be the studio’s adopted ‘site’ for the year. This will begin collectively in the mountains before we depart on our different journeys, and then returning collectively to the mountains in a cyclical motion, akin to that of the water cycle.
The title WaterLands (now in its third iteration) is taken from one of the sections in Robert Macfarlane’s book Landmarks — which is structured as a sort of taxonomy of journeys and conditions: Flatlands, Uplands, Edgelands, Northlands, Coastlands and so on. The book takes the form a series of episodic essays framing the individual journeys, between which are set a series of glossaries, to describe and collect words and landscapes related to the specific journeys undertaken. This mapping of words provides a rich understanding of the associations and sounds of the different landscapes. It is required reading for the Studio as is Unfolding Irish Landscapes (information below). This year we also introduce the book The Living Mountain by Nan Shepherd to our library of influences.
‘…Scholars, I plead with you, Where are your dictionaries of the wind, the grasses?’
Norman MacCaig 1983 from Landmarks
The term ‘pilgrimage’ adopted by Tim Robinson suggests both journey and ritual, but its etymological origins relate more specifically to that of the ‘foreigner’ travelling across lands unknown, but with a defined destination in mind. As such the gaze of the ‘traveller’, finding and following a route, and the nature of the ‘unseen’ ground, enters into the experience and ‘knowledge’ of the land, will inform our own approach in the studio and the landscapes we encounter. The unfolding and unravelling of these landscapes is dependant on the research and ‘fieldnotes’ of our collective ‘journey’.
We will start the year firstly by a short architectural conversation by imagining a structure to Look-out and Look-in. A place to discover and register inner and outer perceptions. We will then collectively map the Mourne mountains through making a collective drawing from individual maps. By making our own abstracted maps / drawings this will act both as a source of inspiration — in terms of a layering of ideas and readings: abstract and literal — and as a physical encounter to explore the forces of land and water. You will be encouraged to make several of your own visits to the ‘site’ at different times and using different forms of reference and research material both digital and analogue. On your visits you should be carefully recording and documenting what you see and feel. In particular keeping a notebook / sketchbook / field-notebook, like Tim Robinson making your own notes, maps, collecting words and drawings as you discover the different aspects and unseen layers of a specific landscape and place.
Considering the scale, the diverse topography and geography, and the open nature of the land / water relationship of Northern Ireland, the first part of the Studios work will be to begin to draw, record, measure, familiarise, map and explore the extent and limits of each territory. At times we will consider larger landscapes before moving in closer to particular sites and contexts.
Like a surveyor discovering for the first time the land they have been asked to map, how do we begin to understand it: qualitatively, quantitatively, historically and spatially? How to measure it? What is embedded deep in a physical landscape, its history, its names, its settlements and its people? Can and should this be done by walking it, studying the maps, speaking to people, and reading about it? Place names, rock features, settlement patterns, roads, and so on, are all part of the layers of meaning and memory that need to be disentangled? Critical to this process of looking and interpreting each landscape, is the dialogue between that of land and water as it moves from height to finding its own level at the sea. Humbolt’s drawing reveals an ecology of height and gravity.
Ranging from the scientific to the surreal, drawings and maps will be discussed, studied and invented, while the essential tools of architectural drawing will be deployed and explored. Thinking and drawing at different scales will be part of the working methods of the studio. Drawing is considered as our research methodology. Questions of why and how drawings, maps and diagrams are made; how they are used and interpreted by geographers, architects, artist, archaeologists, and so on. Drawings and the interpretation and reading of them, will form a key part of the approach and working methods of the studio. Drawings will be made individually, collaboratively and collectively. Drawing will become the language of the studio.
Having specifically declared this research enquiry into the nature and medium of drawing, the studio is related to the Drawing: Methodology, Making + Media Research Cluster.
We will gather and discuss different practices of drawing over a wide historical period. Robin Evan’s essay Translations from Drawing to Building will act as an initial primer to begin discussions on how drawings function, the act of translation and considering the space between drawing and building. Over the year we will explore how different drawings can be used and how drawing can become a personal voice in helping to position your own work and approach. The overlap between maps and architectural drawings will be explored in what we will call a search for the cartography of drawing. Drawing as a form of thinking, as an automatic action, as a performance, as a way to engage both the hand and eye, in the shaping of ideas and perceptions of space, material and light, and of things half-seen or imagined. The river Bann is itself a line drawing which we will explore and redraw many times.
Scale and the zooming across different scales both digitally and intellectually will become important in our research and projects. Mapping, drawing and design become intertwined as both process and practice.
Drawings should be explored on both horizontal and vertical surfaces. Like a shifting territory itself a drawing should be discovered: a space to explore, map and make our own.
The cartographers of Jorge Luis Borge’s tale On Exactitude of Science were faced with a dilemma of drawing and scale: how to map the contours and spaces of their territory, when with each new drawing the lines and shapes became equivalent to that of the actual city and landscape itself? The drawing and the physical land had now merged into one. Inspired by this we will explore how the processes of drawing at different scales and projections can reveal a personal topography of looking, and a propositional field for ideas and projects.
On Exactitude in Science
In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West. still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.
purportedly from Suárez Miranda, Travels of Prudent Men, Book Four, Ch. XLV, Lérida, 1658
Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions, translated by Andrew Hurley.
WaterLands Drawings
We will specifically focus our work, projects and research around the primary relationship of land and water: land space, water space and their interface through inhabitation and use. Charted through the figural and narrative dimensions of drawing, as well as the extensive digital capacity to zoom in and out of the actual landscapes in google earth: towns, roads, datascapes, measured studies, historical maps, we will consider drawing (digital and analogue) as a physical and material thing in itself. We will seek out ideas in the ‘thickness’ of the map.
You will be encouraged to make many of your own ‘pilgrimages’ along the line of the river, the paths through the Mournes, and to define your own areas of interests, which may form the basis of individual projects. Collectively we will make, draw and discover the unique space of the Mournes, but you will need to begin to define what aspect of the WaterLands — physical and intellectual — you want to focus on.
Each of the WaterLands SuperStudio year groups will be set different tasks and different locations but which collectively relate to the wider themes and investigations of the studio. You should carefully collate your own ideas, perceptions, influences, and observation, on a daily basis in your WaterLands notebooks: Your own WaterLog. Over the year there should be a number of these.
Historically water was the easiest means of transport, as there were few roads, thus the notion of ‘Sea Roads’. Often these were ‘mapped’ only in the minds of travellers and maritime people who developed an instinctive sense of place, movement and location, which with our technologies of GPS and Google maps may seem surprising to us today. If we think of the maps we first encountered as children in our school atlas: the blue of the seas and oceans, the names of the rivers, the green of the land, the brown of the mountains, we discover our intuitive knowledge of places through these maps.
The work of the Studio will be organised around the balance of individual and group work with specific projects dedicated to each year groups. We will explore different forms and mechanisms of drawing and mapping. Collectively our work will be considered as an abstracted landscape within which — like Borges cartographers — we aim to unravel and explore the duality and dialogue between that of the drawing and map as an abstraction of the physical territory and our own experiences and imagination of it.
One of our key references will be Drawing Matter with whom we will collaborate.
PRIMARY AIMS &
OBJECTIVES OF SUPERSTUDIO
To explore the landscape of Northern Ireland (physical and abstracted) under the thematic title of WaterLands, and to research this ‘territory’ through a series of different year based projects, studies and individual building proposals.
To utilise drawing as the primary investigative, communicative and expressive tool and as a central research methodology of the studio.
To develop, nurture and build throughout the year inter-peer learning and dialogues focusing on specific subject skills, creative and imaginative solutions, creative risk taking, critical positions and reflective abilities
To support and nurture collective working practices, outputs and collaborations that will set the context for independent learning and future architectural practice.
THERE WILL BE
MANY QUESTIONS
How do we perceive and imagine architecture through drawing?
How do different types and methods of drawing create new insights?
Are we drawing what we know, or drawing what we don't know, in order to see and know?
Is drawing simply a form of communication?
How does the method of drawing inform what we are thinking?
STUDIO RESEARCH STATEMENT
Research Questions and Theme
By considering the territory of architectural drawing as a culturally situated practice, and as a multifaceted methodology of research important insights into the different ‘landscapes’ of personal, professional and educational creativity are explored. What are the different ways drawings are produced, and who for? What dimensions do drawings offer in architecture beyond that of a quantitative commodity? Within this wider research area the work of the studio explores limits, frames and translations across scale, place and narrative. The ‘enabling fiction’ of drawings, described by Robin Evans, allows for a multiplicity of practices, a diversity of media, and non-linear explorations of compositional and creative strategies. Drawing is considered as its own material substance. The physical contexts explored in the studio are directly related to differing aspects of water across the Northern Ireland landscape, both in physical and narrative terms, as rivers, coastlines, bogs, hydrological cycles and ecosystems, while also being considered as abstracted maps, waterlogs, collages, timepieces, and so on.
Description and Methods
Drawing as a register of meaning evidences a multiplicity of philosophical, physical, qualitative, quantitative and phenomenological and operational tactics in architecture, with drawing as the primary ‘currency’ of the profession. The studio work aims to explore and unravel: the translatory space of drawing; the cognitive connections between hand and eye; and an exploratory dialogue between hand drawing and digital means. Through considering this space between the digital and the analogue, and between the idea and the building, this research aims to situate and contextualise different intellectual positions and knowledge constructs within a wider cultural and social framework analysis.
Findings and Dissemination
By recording and documenting the multiple practices, and different mediums of drawing, and in particular by examining the relationship of drawing within architectural education, this research aims to uncover new insights through and on drawing while developing and consolidating existing work in this field, such as the documentary film Drawing on Life, the travelling exhibition The Secret Laboratory and the publication and folio of drawings Notations. Dissemination is by studio exhibition, publication and symposia.
Drawings will be used as a critical ‘toolset’ in order to define and encourage different readings of landscapes, spaces, objects, buildings, materials,processes, layers, movements and social patterns, in the context of given sites.
While drawings may be associated as primarily about communication and information, as visual representations and form, they are also abstractions of social and political meaning, and different positions of authorship, power and control. As Picasso has said of his own drawings “…they can be both Innocent and devious….”.
Central to all the work in the WaterLands III SuperStudio will be developing your own critical position and ‘voice’ by engaging fully in the studio in all collaborative projects, discussions, reviews and workshops. As the studio has students across different year groups you will be expected to help mentor, encourage, inspire and support each other in developing a creative, disciplined and energetic studio. In particular full attendance on studio days (Tuesdays and Thursdays) is critical.
Together we will
Explore and discover the unique nature of the Bann River as it travels from the Mourne Mountains, to Lough Neagh and out to the Atlantic Ocean
Use drawing as an investigative, imaginative and critical tool for proposing architectural ideas and recording and researching places, spaces and communities
Encourage, debate and develop different individual approaches to architecture and design
Explore different aspects of scale: between objects, rooms, buildings, and landscapes
Reference key aspects of history and fine art as inspiration to inform the work
Consider social needs and the nature communities and contexts
Develop ideas through a rigorous and considered process
Explore projects through all levels of detail with an emphasis on technology, construction and sustainability
Structure and develop individual work within that of a larger collective theme and evidence meeting the Learning Outcomes and the ARB/RIBA Criteria through a comprehensive individual portfolio of work
Inspiration & Influences
GROUP PROJECTS
Semester 1
WK 1 — A Cartographer’s Look-Out/Look-In
WK 2 — Mapping a Mountain
WK 4 — Research (Year tasks)
WK 6 — Projects (Specific to each Year)
WK 7
WK12 — Portfolio Review and Feedback
Semester 2
A Cartography of Drawing
Strangely Familiar
Projects Continued
NOTE. Other short group tasks may be set during the year
SOME PRINCIPLE SOURCE RESOURCES
The area of architectural representation and mapping is large one but in terms of possible references and sources for now, here are a number of selected sources not in any specific order of relevance:
A History of the World in Twelve Maps by Jerry Brotton. Penguin Books. 2013
From Here to There. Kris Harzinski. Princeton Architectural Press. NY 2010
Landmarks by Robert MacFarlane. Penguin Books. 2015
Notations. Edited by Paul Clarke and Peter Maybury. Gall Editions. 2016
Stones of Aran: Pilgrimage by Tim Robinson. Faber and Faber 1985
Translations from Drawing to Building by Robin Evans. AA Publications 1996.
The Hand of the Architect by Francesca Serrazanetti and Matteo Schubert. FAI 2009
Why Architects Draw by Edward Robins. MIT Press. New Edition. 1997
Where You Are? A book of maps that will leave you completely lost. Published by Visual-Editions.com. 16 Writers, Artists and Thinkers
You are encouraged to make full use of the library and to use as wide range of sources as possible. Please consult with your tutors on additional possible sources.
TEACHING DAYS
Tuesday & Thursday
REVEIWS
Generally these will be pin-up discussions on a selective (each year) basis but with dedicated master crit reviews in each semester and studio reviews in week 11 followed by a portfolio feedback session in week 12
PORTFOLIOS
Formative portfolio reviews and feedback sessions will take place at the end of semester 1 (week 12) with summative portfolio reviews and final assessment at the end of semester 2
ASSESSMENT CRITERIA
All studio assessments will be 100% by portfolio at the end of semester 2. This will be assessed on the basis of the combination of individual work, the compilation of group projects, specifically in relation to each year’s Learning Outcomes and the RIBA / ARB shared criteria as identified in the project briefs. A detailed chart of all projects and their assessment weightings and Learning Outcomes will be issued
PROCESS WORK AND PORTFOLIO
A key part of what you do in the SuperStudio is recording and charting your process: the thinking, the studies, research, etc. This illustrates your working methods and development. This is a key part of your assessment at the portfolio review and as such is a diary of how your work is progressing and the testing and rigour of your thinking throughout the year. It is essential that you chronologically structure your process work as you go for your portfolio, and that you compile and photograph models and sketches as you go so that you have a complete ‘diary’ of your day by day, week by week progress. Sometimes this will be in the form of a particular submission pin-up but otherwise it could take the form of sketchbooks, overlays, studies, etc. At each stage we will expect to see evidence of your process work
For more information on this SuperStudio, please contact Paul Clarke