ABSTRACT
There is an assumption within this book, that architects are not only concerned with the design of buildings, but also how they represent them. The two acts are inseparable. You cannot understand Corb without the paintings, Mies without the collages, Aalto? Rossi? etc. MM
What is the significance of representation in your work?
LTLDrawings, models, hybrids, and other experimental representations are what we produce, as we concur with the now over-quoted Evan’s distinction between drawing and building and the agency of the architect defined through the translation of one into the other. The traffic between representation and building and between representations themselves is what we do. Built explorations are not possible without representational explorations. They did and still do constitute two interrelated means of architectural investigation that sometimes operate in concert and sometimes in parallel. It’s important to note that we are more interested in representations that test or reveal what is not necessarily visible, hence our obsession with section and section-perspective.
MMDo you have influences outside of traditional architects? Comic books? Music videos? Fine arts? If so how do they influence your work?
LTLWe look at comic books precisely because they combine the spatial, temporal and the narrative into a singular form. Unlike many forms of classical representation that present the architectural artifact as a static, unchanging formal condition, comics implicate movement, time, and human inhabitation. In fact, our fascination with sectional perspectives in which the cut through the architecture “frames” multiple occupations and activities may be seen as analogous to the frame of the comic book layout, with the individual panels collectively telling a story. For the Manual of Section we researched the role of section in comic books and were intrigued by how often the section was used to reveal the intricacy of a villain/hero’s headquarters or to legitimize the believability of the inner workings of a vehicle in science fiction. Additionally, we are really interested in the different effects produced by, say, Chris Ware’s use of isometric projection to create a sense of clinical detachment vs., say, Dave Gibbons and Alan Moore scale games in the Watchman made possible through ambiguities in perspective. The consequences of these different representational techniques are very clear in the graphic novel format. We also have a fondness for mining maps, and other techniques for drawing geological formations, where drawings have to make legible that which is invisible.
MMIs architectural representation as important as a physical building?
LTLYes, no, and maybe, precisely because they are different. Drawings prefigure physical building, and representation is both literally necessary as precursor as well as the mechanism through which the 33building is first realized. It also has the capacity to convey architectural concepts and intentions independent of any built reality and often in more powerful ways. The importance of representations should not be determined just by their agency in relation to building. Some of our most interesting representations (the cross-section perspectives for Park Tower, or the Rising Currents model/drawing hybrid used as a projection surface) were not about things intended to be built, but rather defined as experiments in architectural representation itself.
MMAre drawing and representation synonymous?
LTLIt’s maybe a semantic question, since drawing could be understood as comprising one form of representation among others (models, digital renderings, etc.) that fall within the repertoire of the architect. However, if representation is understood specifically as implicating intentionality: an explicit attempt to communicate an idea rather than simply an illustration, then we might differentiate between drawing as documentation (for the purposes of transmitting information regarding how something is to be built, for example) and drawings which are intended to convey a particular interpretation or meaning.
In practice, this distinction might be applied to the split between construction drawings (whose function is utilitarian in nature) and a didactic drawing that is produced to elucidate a specific idea or quality of an architectural proposal. Again, the aforementioned cross-sectional perspectives of Park Tower might be an example. That said, and the reason this is rather difficult to disentangle, is that no drawing type is ever transparent or neutral, and even the seemingly dry and objective construction drawing is already the product of a series of codes, conventions, and biases about how information is conveyed, what information is relevant, etc. So while the two terms are not synonymous, drawing always operates within the realm of representation.
MMDo you begin a project drawing by hand or sketching or painting?
LTLHand sketching based on pure expediency and the immediacy of working quickly and iteratively with a minimum of mediation. It also takes place as a form of dialogue, felt tip pens on white trace, with sketches being passed around, or overlapped, and reinterpreted among the three of us or all of us sketching different versions of the same conditions. Since we are all right-handed and hold the roll of trace in our left hand, the paper unrolls chronologically in the opposite direction from how we read. We also find that when giving desk crits we tend to sketch while talking, with the drawings often exceeding the clarity of words. They also linger longer and become useful evidence of the desk crit.
MMDo you sketch, draw, or represent architectural ideas without a specific project, site, or client in mind?
LTLIt’s an interesting question, as one implication is that perhaps unburdened from these constraints, architectural representation could pursue purer ideas; composition, color, geometry, form, micro-megas, etc. But, truth be told, we rarely draw without some definition of a project or an external reference, scale, material in mind. The drawing is always capable of being about something else. That’s one of its pleasures, and why it can be interpreted or misinterpreted in different ways.
MMDoes the drawing medium and method affect the result, the form?
LTLThe method of representation will always drive a specific way of engaging the project. If a design is explored exclusively through axonometric projection, which tends to emphasize geometric relationships and volumetric form, it will evolve differently than if studied principally through 34perspective, which privileges perceptual effect. The drawing type inevitably inflects what can be understood and what relationships are made visible. The bias toward section and certain forms of perspective in our own work, for example, reflects and reinforces our interest in the intersection between materiality and performance, perception and form.
That said, in practical terms, we tend to keep multiple types of drawing, as well as models, operative throughout the design process, looping various forms of representation together and working between them. Each of these representational strategies reveals something different and allows for the exploration of diverse aspects of the project in question—whether questions of assembly, optical effect, or spatial organization.
MMThe diagram began as a way to describe form without form or geometry, but it has become an expedient simplification. What role does the diagram play in your work?
LTLFor us the project is never completely reducible to the diagram—any building, even a simple one, is always infinitely more complex than the abstraction of the diagram. However the diagram in its very simplification is valuable both for its capacity to communicate an idea (to a client for example) as well as to provide a kind of conceptual template against which the inevitable complexity of the building can be measured and shaped. But therein lies the problem, which we try to avoid. The clarity of the diagram is useful for its legibility to make an argument, but it’s not the goal to literalize or to build the diagram. We prefer an architecture of contradictions, of incompatible diagrams, or at least where the implication of the diagram is resisted in the development of the project. For example, with an early childhood education center in Arkansas, the diagram is of a panopticon (radiating corridors of classrooms, forming a center within an overall figure of a circle on the site), yet the development of the project undermines the precision of that panopticon—the hallways all misalign and the building is the accumulation of arcs that appear to constitute a circle but has no single center.
MMAre the plan and section less significant than they once were?
LTLIn academia we think this is certainly true, as the conventional progression from plan and section to three-dimensional form has been inverted and students now work from a digital model and extract plans and sections retroactively. Section’s significance is now often though iteration as a means to translate complex 3D forms into buildable units. For us there is, however, something critical lost in this process as the agency of these orthographic drawings and their inherent abstraction becomes lost. In other words, their instrumentality is canceled out. The ability of a plan or a section to be distinct from the whole, to be abstracted from the burden of image is something we find extremely useful, and we rely heavily on the differences revealed in a plan and in a section. We design in section, we design in plan. We have spent the last few years writing a book about section because we believe in a section’s inherent qualities: ability to reveal the invisible and material, resistance to image, engaging of inhabitation without subjective optical limits, etc. For us, section’s significance has not waned.
MMHow important is geometry to your work?
LTLWe tend to employ geometry as a means to an end, rather than as an abstract system valued for itself. In other words, we are interested in geometry less as a kind of hidden code or embedded DNA that predetermines every aspect of a project’s morphology and more as an instrument that contributes to the legibility of the project and its components. Geometry also becomes a means to orchestrate performance and to manipulate perceptual effects. For example, in a project like that 35for Rising Currents, the trapezoidal geometry that articulates the landscape both creates an overall legibility of spatial organization across an expansive territory, and has a performative capacity, since each slopes in section as well as wedging in plan to engage the variations in the tide.
MMWhat is the role of collage in your work?
LTLIf collage plays a role, it’s in the means by which we hybridize representational techniques, most specifically in what we call “overdrawing.” Here we overlay hand-drawings (3H leads on mylar), with digital models, to benefit from the edge, line, threshold, and detail of the former with the color, tone, and surface qualities of the latter. It’s an extremely slow process at odds with the expediency demanded from rendering software.
MMWhat do you imagine is the future of representation?
LTLThis is a challenging question, and while we have no definitive answer, we do think that one of the things that’s emerging in the wake of and to some degree in reaction to the ubiquity and sameness of the photo-real digital rendering is a proliferation of a broader set of techniques—some of which seen to intentionally forego any pretense to verisimilitude and to situate themselves in a realm that is explicitly different from any notion of simulation. MOS’ own use, mirrored in other practices, of drawing types like axonometric or other forms of projection comes to mind, perhaps as a kind of resistance to the superficiality of the glossy, development image. At the same time there seems to be more desire (at least among students) to experiment with “rendering” in ways that similarly resist the photo-real and perhaps our own desire to somehow conflate drawing and rendering are in this direction. A broader range of effects are clearly achievable and in recent years, architects have been woefully unimaginative in how they take advantage of these possibilities. In this sense, hopefully the future will be far more diverse and experimental, with a proliferation of techniques and voices superseding the market-driven homogeneity.
