Pedagogical Basis

I became aware of the long term contribution freehand drawing has to offer in the thinking and practice of architecture as a student of architecture at McGill university in the late eighties. Contrary to the contemporary situation in Quebec schools of architecture, drawing was then a compulsory course in every session and summer throughout the bachelor program. It fostered a sensitivity to the sensuous world that all other courses could not approach. Today, some thirty years on, I teach drawing at the university of Montreal’s school of architecture, constrained by the exigencies of a single first year thirty hour course. This has forced me to identify and focus my approach on what I believe to be the germinal potential of drawing in an evolving technological pedagogical and professional context. Integrating this approach within a conventional model drawing studio curriculum established many years beforehand constituted yet another difficulty.

My teaching in this situation has consequently revolved around several key objectives, the overarching one being to enable students to develop an awareness, sensitivity and ability to connect with drawing as idiosyncratic medium for thinking through (qualitative) processes of design. This implies above all liberating or opening students up to their ‘tacit’ bodily logos by tapping into their innate gestural rhythm, energy, and impulses and helping them recognize and acknowledge their expressive potential. In the image saturated environment in which they are immersed and which is amplified in the discipline of architecture, this only becomes possible if they can embrace their unique gestural ‘schema’ as a differential force rather than reject it as an ‘inability to draw’. The first step in releasing this potential is to have them for(e)go form, to relinquish the (self-)imposed necessity to represent, and to recognize rather, form’s expressibility, its generative force, in-formative form. Drawing then becomes only about process, eclipsing the obsession with product.

The live models (dancers) with which I have developed complicity over many years have proved fundamental to this endeavour. Once students cease to see the body as object of depiction and begin to feel with it the forces at play, a whole world of riches opens up. In Merleau-Ponty’s words :

'Subject of a movement from which form is born, the body is also the privileged object of drawing which in any motif – as well as out of any figuration – seeks the relation to corporeality, that is to say to the possibility of a gesture around which space is configured, a play of tensions is animated, a being is exposed and communicated.' (my translation)

Thinking the relation of body to space, the manner in which body and architecture reciprocally affect one another, their conjunctive corporeality, may be a good entry into unpacking these riches. The body as resonance chamber, architecture as resonance chamber : the body resonates in potentiality, a potency; perhaps like the fiddling strings of a bass with-in architecture’s resonance chamber, itself resonating with the vibratory 'cosmic' environment. Architects endeavour to fine-tune these interacting potencies, potentialities. Certain achieve this by attuning to invisible forces at play, not quite intangible since we feel the affective vibrancy of space (air) if our sensory engagement is prodded, awakened. Ambiguous, undefined perhaps, but we can tune into the moving vibrating and intensified air activated by the dancer in relation with her environment, its fluid flows engulfing the body, absorbed, reverberated and propelled by corporealities producing currents and vortices, swirling, spiralling, circling, siphoning the air between them. We can sense in the wake of the moving dancer, all that is drawn in and transformed into re-vitalized air. Gil and Lepecki speak of the ‘space of the body’ created by, or emerging from the movements of the body as an intensified one, invested with affects and forces that imbue it, and the objects within it, with a diversity of textures and emotions. We might also think of this as a vitalized atmosphere : the binding vibratory medium of lived architecture.

But the live model teaches us still more about architecture as we come to understand through the feeling body internal forces that structure and generate matter. Fluid movement that gives life to the body, to corporeality : the flows of breath taking and giving back to the surrounding air, the spiralling currents through our veins, the vortices generating the rhythms of our organs, all flowing in symbiosis with the enveloping space itself constituted of flows and vortices. These tensions, contractions and dilations of the body are not unlike those of architecture.

'We live [space] wholly, as embodied space. The arch of the dancer’s back imparts a totally different feeling than an arch of steel, plastic or concrete. The arch of a dancer’s back is formed of our own body-of-space. We feel the lifting and arching through our own embodiment - through which, in our lifted, back-arched leaning we also feel the upward soaring and backward leaning arch of steel. Our body-of-space is the origin for our perception and understanding of space in general.' Fraleigh

What renders this apprehension so visceral in the experience of drawing with a live dancer is that as moving bodies ourselves, and through kinaesthetic empathy, a very special bond is created in the immediacy of the event to which we only have to respond spontaneously. In the act of drawing we are carried by the dancer, which awakens in us the rhythms enacted by her. It is only after the fact that we may fully realize or cognize what we have experienced.

It becomes clear through this practice that this-our body in movement is formative form, form continually forming itself in movement. And drawing consequently becomes formative, forming iself through gesture in the process. Form remains open, generative, germinal in its temporal passage, unfolding and infolding, carrying through, transforming and extending the rhythm of the previous trace into possibilities for the next. And this I believe is where drawing merges with thinking as process. Formative form becomes operative with the movement of thought and vice versa, bringing to visibility their co-operative forces of formation, in-formation.

Suspending form in this manner is not to deny its existence or role; there is always a tending toward and from form in this process. Rather, form must not be fixed, enclosed, or it ceases to generate, to breathe, the flows grow stagnant and die out. Form may be a lure but it is a lure into relations that activate the space of the in-between that keeps the movement (of thought and drawing) going, that keeps germinating and multiplying possibilities. In the studio this translates into cultivating the incomplete, the open-ended, the ambiguous : letting go when the drawing’s vibratory im-pulses scramble or exceed any representation, emanate out of the lines themselves dispersing into elsewheres. It also implies the ability to intuitively feel, recognize and seize the generative gesture in ‘line’. In here, I believe, lies the essential potential of sketching as a process of thinking-feeling-moving whether through observation, conceptualization or communication.

Watercolour is a medium of choice that embeds itself wonderfully in this process. It reinforces the underlying notion that the drawer is never the sole player in the act of drawing; drawing in the sense here developed is an ecosophical event. ‘Let the water show you how to play, flow with it, follow its cues and let it carry you’, I tell students as they fight with their brushes trying to force the pigment into its proper place. ‘It’s like swimming; if you fight the flow of water you will drown in exhaustion. But if you let the water guide and carry you, you will effortlessly and joyfully meander across the surface.’ Watercolour is a wonderful resource for connecting with the flows of living organisms, for developing a fluid gesture not unbeknownst to calligraphers. Each drawing medium in fact reveals something of the movement of thought, each medium teaches us something about the act of drawing and about space. But we all connect more intimately with certain mediums, those that seem to best extend our reach onto the world.

This brief account of my teaching experience constitutes the extent to which I have been able to carry drawing forward in the given pedagogical situation. It is from here that I have launched my inquiry into drawing’s potential in the broader and freer context of graduate studies. The experimentation presented on the research platform will resonate with this experience but attempts to extend it into unknown territories, probing its limits and its potential lines of flight.