Isaac Cobo i Displas, Claude Saint Arroman
Unit trip and project site: Toledo, Spain.
“Drawing is the principle locus of conjecture in architecture”
Robin Evans
Unit E proposes to explore the relationship between drawing and architecture on the basis of speculative proposals over the city of Toledo’s existing fragments. Drawing inspiration from the history of architectural drawing traditions and meticulous architectural detailing, the unit will design new architecture that connects with old buildings, within a hypothetical program that integrates past, present and future.
Since the 13th century invention of the scaled drawing system, architects have indulged in imagining spaces and built form through the means of orthogonal drawings, perspectives, projective drawing and, more recently, through physical models and computer renderings.
Pursuing this urge to draw and communicate ideas, the unit will analyse the perspective drawing technique invented by Fillipo Brunelleschi to visualise perception, scale, proportion, geometry and light. Extending his linear Perspective Machine by combining it with Polaroid photography, the unit will start its exploration by recording how we perceive architecture and its urban context. The students will extensively photograph four brutalist buildings. The aim is to educate the eye into recording details and architectural effects, to understand relationships between buildings and open spaces, solidity and emptiness.
The unit will visit Carlo Scarpa’s extension to the Museo Castelvecchio , to study its rich spatial effects and focus on the architectonics of the juxtaposition of new on the old. Exploring Scarpa’s sensitive macro and micro levels of interventions, the students will collectively develop a catalogue of details, including construction techniques in brick, stone, steel and concrete. They will thus familiarise themselves with the concept of integrating materials, observing how they age and perform with time.
