Visual distribution of cognition

This phrase ‘visual distribution of cognition’ can also be simply a fancy word for drawing according to Dan Roam¹, who is the bestselling author of several books on drawing and visual thinking. But this phrase, for architects, primarily can reveal the subtle difference in meaning between drawings and diagrams. Drawings are generally descriptive and diagrams are abstract. Diagrams form the integral process of design process.

So if I break this above phrase into three parts and probe a bit more. Starting from the last word ‘cognition’, the dictionary meaning is “the mental action or process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through thought, experience, and the senses”. Architecture has a lot of cognitive load. So if I take the case of courtyard of WCFA , the college where I teach now. It sits at the heart of our campus and forms the core of campus activities.The life of the college revolves around this single space and forms the DNA of campus life. How can I make this experience more tangible for purpose of design understanding. We can use diagrams to decipher the quality of this space. Thats when we need to fragment and distribute this experience visually in the form of drawings. These are simply called ‘diagrams’, but when if you label it as ‘visual distribution of cognition’, the meaning becomes precise and neat. So in this sketch below is ‘distributed’ layers of the courtyard. So the perception of the place gets better. Diagrams work well usually when presented in clusters. Because a single layer can sound reductive sometimes. And diagrams are supposed to be reductive, as they reveal one prominent idea at a time.

So I can use a diagram to make the students ‘see the same things’ as I see. It brings a bit more clarity in the discussion. It was interesting to decipher what they are already familiar with. It can also lead to understand the potential of conceptual understanding built on real and familiar examples. The concepts built around the familiar, establishes a ground for understanding unfamiliar examples. Through discussion we identified many layers for this courtyard. Each layer can be separated and tied to a similar cluster of examples, as D.K.Ching does in Form, Space and Order. This suggestion of universal principles that can be appropriated to suit particular conditions.

The photo above is the exploring this concept in the class and below is the notes i took after the class so i can build on it later.

01 . I came across this phrase in his interview with Roger Dooley in Brainfluence podcast. The link to the transcript

Drawings with measurements

Drawings have capability to hold memory and fix experience. I had casually drawn some of the plans of the rooms i had stayed which i found interesting. Going through my old sketchbooks, i think casual exercise might have more potential. As a small test, i have picked up some sketches here (most of them are not bigger 5″ wide, drawn in the corner of the page) and try to write from memory what i can remember of those spaces. To my surprise, they have some triggered some strong memories of being in that place : like the balcony jutting into the street, mosquito net over bed, a study table.. Looking back i think it is the study table, which has triggered to make these sketches. A place to draw is also important to support the act of drawing. Another unique trait of these drawings are dimensions. They make the experience of the specific. It allows one to mentally appropriate a place. I get a sense of relief, when i guess and get the size of the room right (which does not happen always). The dimensions help to understand scale better. Here are some of my drawings (1 to 4) and from others (5 to 7) which i admire.

LAnka1 — 01 : The room on the left is the one i stayed in Galle in 2016. I very vivdly remember this room for the small balcony (4’6″ wide by 1’6″ deep) which cantilevered into the street. It was a secondary street, so not much noise. A balcony door which also was a window, so we had to engage with its constantly. So i had to keep it open most of the time. The room on the right was a room in Colombo. Even though it was a small room, it was carefully done. Just simple white walls and elegant wooden furniture. Geoffrey Bawa is a household name here. Both the hosts (non-architects) were aware about his works. This was also the first time i tried Airbnb. So both these rooms were homestays. Looking at a place by staying at a home stay carries a different texture, by giving a sense of the non-touristic view of the city.

02 : I vaguely remember the details of this room in Sri Lanka (2010) . Again this was part of a homestay. I remember having authentic SriLanknan breakfast in this place. I think there was a old and heavy study table by the window looking at the corridor. This was more like a hostel. And a very strong memory of sleeping inside mosquito net on the posts of the bed. It was like a room within a room.

Rooms 3 — 03 : This drawing (2018) is from practice. A dead end enquiry (one of many) on a small renovation. I like this drawing, because I think I got the proportion of the rooms bit right here when compared to the top two. A little yellow makes the interior bit distinct. I also used a digital tape here, a useful tool for single-person-practice like mine.

Masingudi — 04 : This drawing (2019) is from a resort in Masinagudi. A great room with wonderful views. A distinct nature of this room was that you arrived at a small foyer from the verandah in the front. This foyer had room length mesh with blinds but no glass, which had a distinct quality which was neither that of the verandah nor of the room inside. It captured a subtle shade of enclosure in between them.

jerwood — 05 : Chris Eckersley won the Jerwood Drawing Prize in 2011 for this drawing. Chris is my recent find and can’t stop admiring his drawings. This measure drawing is of his stay at Le Corbusier’s *Unite d’Habitation* in Marseille. It captures the the atmosphere of the room through dimensions. Each and every object in the room is measured here. He writes in his website “I’m interested in proportion, anything from Serlio to the Modulor. Is there such a thing as ‘good proportion’? – certainly some things look more ‘right’ than others, and so this has led me to the idea of measuring as a way of finding out. I’m always amazed at what measured drawings can reveal. This type of drawing need not be to any scale, but has something of a survey about it. It can tell you quite a lot”

Screen Shot 2019-07-20 at 2.58.02 PM — 05. Another brilliant one by Chris from his Instagram

28 - Principal — 07 : Foster’s mesaure drawings of the Post Mill Cambridgeshire as a third year student shows inclination of inner workings of technology. A trait very evident is his later practice,

Foster’s Drawings

Attached below are drawings made by Norman Foster as a third year student!

I remember seeing these drawings as a student from USD library (even though we had a small collection in the initial years, it was very resourceful). This small library was my only source to the outside world, as it was early days for easy internet access. If i remember correctly, it was in the fat monograph number one, where i came across these drawings. I was amazed at that time, how one could draw with so much care, an ordinary mill like this. I recently came across these again in pages of Norman Foster Foundation, a very resourceful place which has some crazy documentation of most of his works. It is common to preserve professional stuff with a lot of care (usually one gets to know the value of archiving/documenting only late in student life). Foster has preserved all his students works, even his first year student design projects, including the history sketchbooks. This archive is a timely reminder for us to document properly. One can sense in these drawings, the seed of ‘Fosterness’ is already evident in the way he is measure drawing an ordinary looking functional building. The care to observe details of how things are put together, a strain which he carried over in his practice.

In an interview, he talks about this building :

“This is one of the buildings I measured as a student while in Cambridgeshire. I measured a group of buildings, a big barn, a thatch barn, and a post mill, which you can see here. It’s not about old buildings being really rustic and picturesque and part of our heritage, but making the point that there are valuable lessons to be learnt from these buildings. Most people would probably not think twice about these. Because these buildings were so functional people often ignore the aesthetics of them. Maybe I’m trying to be too clever, maybe your readers will think I’ve lost my marbles or something. But it’s a very personal thing, and it’s one of the first buildings I measured, and one of the first buildings I looked at with an architect’s eye.”

Two ways of looking at a ‘lota’

“The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function”

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Here are two ways to look at the lota.

One pragmatic and other one abstract.

The first extract is from Eames India Report, 1958 (The Government of India asked – both Charles and Ray Eames – for recommendations on a programme of training in design that would serve as an aid to the small industries; and that would resist the present rapid deterioration in design and quality of consumer goods.) In the report they had used the lota as an object of reference for their discussion

“Of all the objects we have seen and admired during our visit to India, the Lota, that simple vessel of everyday use, stands out as perhaps the greatest, the most beautiful. The village women have a process which, with the use of tamarind and ash, each day turns this brass into gold.

But how would one go about designing a Lota? First one would have to shut out all preconceived ideas on the subject and then begin to consider factor after factor :

The optimum amount of liquid to be fetched, carried, poured and stored in a prescribed set of circumstances.

The size and strength and gender of the hands (if hands) that would manipulate it.
The way it is to be transported – head, hip, hand, basket or cart.
The balance, the center of gravity, when empty, when full, its balance when rotated for pouring.
The fluid dynamics of the problem not only when pouring but when filling and cleaning, and under the complicated motions of head carrying – slow and fast.
Its sculpture as it fits the palm of the hand, the curve of the hip.
Its sculpture as compliment to the rhythmic motion of walking or a static post at the well.
The relation of opening to volume in terms of storage uses – and objects other than liquid.
The size of the opening and inner contour in terms of cleaning.
The texture inside and out in terms of cleaning and feeling.
Heat transfer – can it be grasped if the liquid is hot ?
How pleasant does it feel, eyes closed, eyes open ?
How pleasant does it sound, when it strikes another vessel, is set down on ground or stone, empty or full – or being poured into?
What is the possible material ?
What is its cost in terms of working ?
What is its cost in terms of ultimate service ?
What kind of an investment does the material provide as product, as salvage ?
How will the material affect the contents, etc., etc. ?
How will it look as the sun reflects off its surface ?
How does it feel to possess it, to sell it, to give it ?

Of course, no one man could have possibly designed the Lota. The number of combinations of factors to be considered gets to be astronomical – no one man designed the Lota but many men over many generations. Many individuals represented in their own way through something they may have added or may have removed or through some quality of which they were particularly aware”

The other extract is from Heidegger’s canonical essay – ‘The Thing’ , where he talks about what makes a jug a ‘jug’. Even though i never understood the essay completely, there are some valuable insights from it

“What is the jug? We say: a vessel, something of the kind that holds something else within it. The jug’s holding is done by its base and sides. This container itself can again be held by the handle. As a vessel the jug is something self-sustained, something that stands on its own.

What in the thing is thingly? What is the thing in itself? We shall not reach the thing in itself until our thinking has first reached the thing as a thing.

The jug is a thing as a vessel – it can hold something. To be sure, this container has to be made. But its being made by the potter in no way constitutes what is peculiar and proper to the jug insofar as it is a jug. The jug is not a vessel because it was made; rather, the jug had to be made because it is this holding vessel.”

These two extreme positions (pragmatic and abstract) of looking at the jug opens up the possibility of looking at any object or phenomenon with a deeper inquiry.

Watching : Pezo von Ellrichshausen’s Lecture

This blog is a reading around the lecture by Pezo von Ellrichshausen (An art architecture studio founded in 2002 by Mauricio Pezo and Sofia Von Ellrichshausen. They live and work in Southern Chilean city of Concepcion) This lecture was recorded on February 15, 2016 in Columbia GSAAP.

I am conscious and aware the of the value of a good lecture watched online, especially a thought provoking like the one here. My exposure of listening to people who are involved in architecture (academics and practice) outside my college in Mysore was very limited. I remember the first lecture I heard was in third year when I went to student event in Belgaum. My access to video lectures happened in a very minimal way only in the last 2 years of the undergraduate program. A habit very helpful in the exposure to ideas till today. With the ubiquity of the information available, I have a substantial regard for these online lectures. They are wonderful pockets of knowledge. Like this lecture by Pezo Von Ellrichshausen. I was drawn to their work for their crisp drawings and clean aesthetics. Especially the ‘sliced axonometric’. I was showing them as references for students. Even the plans and sections have impeccable clarity. So I was curious to know their process. The drawings always reveal the intention of the process. Prof. Doshi used to say in the design studio at CEPT, that one could sense the personality of the student by the way he or she draws.

It was liberating to hear them talk about how only few fundamental things informs their design. The keyword here is a ‘self referential’ object. Initially I assumed them to be European, as they have a rational clean-box approach. This practice is based in Chile, a developing country like us. Not to say that this clean-box aesthetics belongs only to developed countries. But the lecture throws a very different perspective. There are internal spatial rules, which informs the formation of space in their practice. This process does not borrow any other clues (context, landscape, etc) till a very late stage and only if needed. I find this very provocative in a subdued way. It has become a norm to place architecture inside the narratives of social, political and cultural contexts, which are also very crucial. But it sometimes fail to inform the fundamentals of space making. I admired their approach to keep the process fundamental and focussed, which is very difficult. In their monograph ‘Naive Intentions’ they mention “We do not only believe that there is no possible work of art without an institutionalized system that validates it but also that only a small percentage of that work has the real scope to interrogate the very institution that defines it”

The following two images and interview is an part extract from their interview with Designboom on the exhibit they produced for the second edition of Chicago Architecture Biennale – 2017 (a monumental grid of 729 framed watercolor studies on the wall)

chicago-architecture-biennial-pezo-von-ellrichshausen-designboom-1800

chicago-architecture-biennial-pezo-von-ellrichshausen-designboom-05

designboom (DB): can you talk a bit about what you are presenting for this year’s chicago architecture biennial?

sofia von ellrichshausen (SVE): it is a 3.5m height by 20m long polyptych composed by 729 individual paintings, of watercolors on paper, organized on a seemingly random chromatic and formal arrangement. what appears to be an arbitrary array of minor variations is in fact the systematic erosion of an ideal object, of an imaginary building, based on a prescribed set of rules. this is the fourth iteration of an ongoing series we have entitled ‘finite format’. it is a rather personal enquiry about the possibilities of a sort of ‘hand made’ formal determination in architecture. through a limited number of factors and dimensions we are studying how proportion is crucial for the understanding of character, disposition and identity of an architectonic piece. this comes from our interest in replacing the very notion of form by format. since it is a general outline, or a field of action defined by size and direction, we believe a format contains fundamental spatial attributes of a building.

DB: how did you respond to the overall theme of ‘make new history’?

mauricio pezo (MP): since we never refer to anything beyond the building itself, and somehow assuming a tautological exercise, we are reading history as a wide source of knowledge. in our hypothetical approach, we are speculating with a potential idea of beginning, of the very moment in which history begins. of course, we are reading the call in conceptual terms, assuming history as a constructed fiction. we are indeed interested in basic and familiar forms.

Their spatial investigation reminded me of the formal operations of Sol Lewitt. Both the process looks at systems in which the changing variables creates the the specificity of the form. Lewitt says “ Irrational thoughts should be followed absolutely and logically” I could relate to the investigation carried by Pezo Von to be in this direction with a mathematical precision to these moves. Their process is explicit in this execise they deviced where they have to rearrange a set of wooden blocks in different contexts with a simple set of rules. This spatial exploration is “autonomous by definition, contextual by necessity”, a brilliant reference of their process too.

Cien House (2009-2011) is one of my favourite projects. This is the project which introduced me to their work. Internet is such a place, where one can go to the depths of enquiry as much as required. But its difficult to sieve and remember the good ones. Actually this blog entry is an attempt to do that. Trying to hold the reference for a bit longer without swaying into the next rush of images from Archdaily or Instagram