REPRESENTING MEASURE DRAWINGS

The act of making drawings is central to architectural thinking. If one looks back into the renaissance history, the invention of perspective has a tremendous impact on the conceptualization of anthropocentric architecture. The renaissance painter also produced the art form that resonated with the spirit of the time. The drawings are an interface between imagined worlds departing from the existing one. The act of representation conceptualizes the projected reality, armed with interpretative capabilities. The history of architecture exemplifies the act of representation as a bold departure from the existing plethora of objectification. The development of successive domes to cover large space has systematically evolved in representing the ideas from history and not simply by making measured drawings. The dome constructed with packed tufa stone in the pantheon on a circular plan has been successively represented to produce dome with pendentives and orthogonal geometry.

The central argument here is questioning the need for measured drawings as a medium enough for the prime acquisition of fundamental knowledge on architecture & the culture and values system of the past?. Even the answer is yes then the question of such knowledge for architectural thinking/ architectural context learning as a projected reality is highly questionable on the ground that architecture can’t be reduced to the sum of fetishized parts put to gather. The argument gets even sharper when one brings the discourse of representation in the making of measure drawings.  It seems so natural, so inherently necessary to raise the questions as the nature of measure drawings are so obvious, so predictive because it has a role in the making of architecture.

The current medium of measure drawings is holding the making of measure drawings in a particular way, which is so intimate and becomes passive recipients of imagination in its production, especially it lacks syntactical argument. The act that enables the understanding of tactile and tectonic argument as an imagined and constructed past for contemplation is brutally obscured in the act of fetishizing measure drawing. In addition to that, the measure drawings are often fascinated by fetishism which in turn manages its enigmatic distance between reality and its projection. The technique of drawings also has a life span, it has an ability of projection. The work of Bernini, Bramante or Andrea Palladio in the classical era or  Le Corbusier,  James Sterling, Peter Eisenman of our time, are few who have projected a reality with the act of representing past with peculiarities and manage to evolved with architecture that projects, speculates and does not restrain.

The measure drawings are done so frequently by almost all the institutions and almost in the similar template that it obliterates the process of getting a distant view or conscious awareness about the broader context of possibilities of representation and historical narratives. As a result it flattens the tactile or the syntactical argument and it remains either in the domain of routine technology (flat skills with no speculative ideation) or object fetishism.

The measured drawings are conventionalized over a period of time with a parochial and narrow agenda. It needs to engage the agenda of revelation and discovery of newer possibilities and it can happen only through a grasp of dialectics between historicity and its contemplation towards contemporary architectural paradigm. The current measure drawings are based on descriptive geometry and must take steps towards representative paradigmatic tools.

Drawing Credit: KRVIA | Study Tour |Braj | 2018
The Braj documentation attempted to represent the sacred and ritual narratives through study process at KRVIA