Architectural Drawings: An Inquiry

At architectural schools all across the city of Mumbai (even India), there is an increasing discontent within the entire faculty body with respect to the quality of architectural drawings (the drafted drawing)  produced by the students. They complain of the lack of understanding of space and the inability to express their ideas of space through the taught skill of architectural draughtsmanship. The faculties who teach architectural drawing today have essentially been trained in an era where hand drafting was the norm and there was an aesthetic value ascribed to the quality of drawing one produced. Such training not only set their architectural flavour, but also their aesthetic choices. Architectural drafting, then, was an art form in itself. Such notions have come under reconsideration not only due to new preferences of production of architectural drawings (drafting and modeling softwares, etc.), but the direct influence of drawings on similar bland urban environment.

Over the past year, I did an exercise several times to ascertain my doubt with the reason behind terrible architectural drawings prepared by students from first till the final year of the B Arch course. I would draw out a basic architectural plan on the board showing various components of a house, using the accepted universal convention of architectural drawing (solid lines in varying intensities for elevation, dark thick lines for section, dotted lines for hidden elements of the building, cut-lines, crosses for voids, etc.).  The plan (typically a one-room house) would have a clear entry, plinth, doors or windows and a courtyard to be able to suggest an open space inside the house.

Then I would turn to the students and ask them to draw out a 3-dimensional visualization (a basic isometric sketch) of the same drawing. Given the bare basic drawing of a single room space, the sketch should not take more than 15 minutes to complete. However, even second year students would find it extremely difficult to draw out a simple room with basic operations of punctures, as shown in the drawing. At the end of this sketching time, I would find a range of responses:

1. The basic proportions of the 2d drawing are lost in the 3d. In certain cases, where the height was not mentioned, students were unable to imagine a comfortable (or at least conventionally accepted aesthetic/functional height) for the space.
2. The levels inside the house / room are not understood. A simple step down for a water body or a single step down for a court containing a tree is apprehensively interpreted with great difficulty as something unusual. 
3. The windows do not assume a logical sill level.
4. Elevation lines of parapets, porticoes or steps or ledges are mis read as high walls, or floor patterns, or nothing –they do not show any signification on the 3d visual.
5. Things that we assume: plinths, steps to go up, ledge to be of low height or parapets of a basic height, are drawn haywire. 
6. Dotted lines of voids, overhangs, roofs or canopies are almost ignored.
7. On being asked about movement, no clear ideas of circulation form in their minds. They would randomly begin explaining the building through a window or a door.
8. Structural systems are never thought of, even if clearly shown in the drawing. They donot structure the drawing
9. The inherent logic of geometric proportioning of plan forms do not occur to them.
10. Thicknesses, materials, etc do not become a part of the reading, even if indicated in the drawing.

This was a big revelation to me. I had to reconsider my entire teaching and talking with the students. Since the essential medium / vehicle that facilitated our discussions and dialogue was drawing, one had to make sure that students too knew the language of drawing properly, without which a conversation is not possible.

Through our learned conventions of reading a drawing, architects immediately visualize a space through the drawing / drafting. The visualization feeds the value judgement and further helps in taking personal design decisions. We are further able to anticipate missing parts of a drawing (representation)while we look at an architectural drawing. We ‘read’ the hidden aspects like structural system, circulation, quality of light, etc which are not evidently shown on an architectural drawing. We expect our students to understand and interpret drawings like such.

The reading of architectural drawings have become binarized into solid and void.  Very few students are able to understand the depth of a drawing. Today, they essentially grasp the contained space within the walls, i.e. the black for them defines the enclosure and the white is the occupied empty space. Beyond this, there is hardly any understanding of any aspect of space - volume, material , texture, scale, etc. that takes place through the drawing. Due to this fractured reading, the thickness of value too is reduced and architecture becomes a process in merely trying to encapsulate a space in novel shapes.

In the process of drawing today, students are increasingly distancing the meaning associated with the lines in an architectural drawing. The process of institutionalization of the architectural drawing (for construction purposes) was an exercise in assigning meaning to different types of lines. Thus, the thick line signifies something that is cut in section, and a thin line in varying intensities signifies the distance of lines in elevation. Dotted lines signify something that can not be seen while symbols of shapes stand for various other things. Through such signification, architecture constituted itself as a discipline. One must investigate some of the first drawings that were ever made - to be able to understand the semantic transformation of drawing to meaning.

We have always attributed the emergence of the abstract painting form to the introduction of the camera. We are now beginning to see the close relationship between painting and drawing, or the artist and the architect. While painting remains an abstraction or a representation, buildings surpass the representational form and manifest into materials that are available for consumption. This consumption feeds lives, hence its essential separation from art is necessary. This is not to say that the artist doesnot make art for his/her living. But paintings directly can not cause physical destruction. In that frame, buildings can be violent and physically bothering.

With increasing multidisciplinary nature of the architecture course, the established institutions through which design ideas are represented (here, the drawing) are beginning to crumble before newer softwares and representations. These new techniques form a new value system, and hence we see a new manifestation in our urban environment.

On the other hand, drawings have to be made extremely simple to read and understand by the layman for easy consumption. I am referring to the mass produced brochures of the mass produced buildings in our environment, which are given out as news paper ads or handed on the streets to passers by during advertising campaigns of reality projects. This process is about converting a drawing into a seductive image. It is the beauty of the image that supersedes the architectural value of the project. In other words, various processes happen:

1. The information is reduced to container and the contained. The drawing eliminates micro information like offsets in walls, room heights, etc.
2. The interest of the customer is in size and not comfort. (the shift of value from qualitative to quantitative)
3. The colour of drawing does not carry any meaning architecturally, but works towards an appealing image.
4. Functional information (like the North sign) become symbolic (for purposes of vastu); and symbolic information (like floor tiling or sofas) become functional (that suggest a certain  lifestyle)

This is perhaps going to be a part of a larger pedagogical work that I may undertake soon.