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The beauty of possibility

United Kingdom Architecture News - Aug 04, 2014 - 12:37 5837 views

Composition, minimalism, complexity and detail characterise this year's Eye Line drawing competition

‘Everyone can draw’, a prominent architect once told me while foolishly encouraging me to take part in a sketching project. Ha ha ha. That’s like me saying ‘Everyone can write.’ As Wittgenstein suggested, in certain environments you can get by on primitive languages of very few words. On a building site (interestingly, he having also designed and built a house) an unskilled worker could theoretically get by on just four, he suggested. Obviously one would not expect that worker to produce an award-winning novel, or even much of a Tweet, with ‘block’, ‘pillar’, ‘slab’, and ‘beam’. Anyway, there neither writing nor speech was required: only basic understanding of what someone else was saying.

That’s no bad starting point: one’s ability to understand the work of others. Reading and interpreting drawings is not so different from reading a novel or poem: we can turn the marks on the page or screen into a world which we can comfortably inhabit. We suspend our disbelief, we put ourselves into those narratives. By communicating an imagined reality, architectural drawing is fiction. The wonder of it is that it can be turned into fact. The glory of it is that it does not have to be.

An architect’s basic drawing tries to convey physical form in an immediately comprehensible manner. This can be very beautiful – note the drawing of a Selmer clarinet by one of our winners, George Saumarez Smith of Adam Architecture. It is as minimal as you can imagine, but all the information is there, conveyed with a superb elegance of line. Other drawings, in whatever medium, go into parallel universes of the imagination – especially, of course, the student entries. Eye Line celebrates the power of architectural drawing for its own sake.

This year’s Eye Line judges were: architect, academic and noted draughtsman Alan Dunlop; artist Susanna Heron (a frequent collaborator with architects); last year’s winner Tom Noonan, presently working on rebuilding his alma mater the Bartlett with Hawkins\Brown; Narinder Sagoo, partner with Foster and Partners who leads by example when it comes to excellence in drawing in all media; and me, supported by my colleague Eleanor Young.

We declared a joint winner in Amelia Hunter of the Royal College of Art, and Kirsty McMullan of the University of Brighton (now Part 1 assistant at Spacecraft Architects). Their projects are both grounded in place: Hunter’s strategy for Maidenhead’s waterways; a museum of the quarries of Portland in Dorset for McMullan. They demonstrate the beauty of possibility.

As Dunlop put it: ‘The second year of Eye Line has produced an even more remarkable series of images from clearly talented young architects and artists. Although the work overall was deeply impressive, the hand-drawn images of the joint winner were stunning and, frankly, humbling.’

Hugh Pearman

The beauty of possibility