Architects Sketches

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Product Description

Concepts from architects’ minds evolve through sketches and as a mode of transference are conveyed to the finished building. This book compares qualities of sketches to reveal unique approaches to the instruments of thinking in which all architects engage. It provides new insight into the relationship between architectural sketches and the process of creative manipulation. Sketches comprise a thinking mechanism, and through the qualities of ambiguity, quickness and change, they initiate a dialogue for architects. As a medium to facilitate communication, recording, discovery and evaluation, their pertinence lies in their ability to exhibit both the precise and the imprecise. Exploring four related theoretical approaches, play, memory-imagination-fantasy, caricature and the grotesque, the book shows how imprecision stimulates imagination to conceive new forms in the dialogue of architectural sketches.

Architects Sketches Review

ARCHITECTS' SKETCHES DIALOGUE AND DESIGN

Since I am writing this particular review for Vine-Amazon, I feel I should relate some of my qualifications for so doing.

I majored in art and Architecture in undergraduate school, among other things, and I taught college classes in architecture and became tenured as a Professor Of Art, Illustration, Advertising, and also in Architectural and Exhibition Design. In that capacity, I preferred the more creative problem solving aspects of architecture to the drone of endless drafting of working drawings. I assisted in the design of a number of churches, hospitals and schools in Chicago and specialized for a number of years in Sacred and Liturgical architectural art in the USA and Canada.

In fairness, to the author against which I have neither prejudice nor ill feelings, it is incumbent upon Professors at many Institutions of Higher Education to publish. It is both a happy and a sad commentary on the tenure requirements, and is a Baroque as it is archaic, except in certain disciplines. Here I would have expected something of tangent value for budding architects, among which many have sparse skill in sketching.

That being said:
If you are seeking a book brimming with brilliantly sketched architectural studies, this is not the one. If you seek a book filled with full and half page black and white and/or full color masterpieces of architectural sketching, this isn't it either. If you are seeking large sketches by some of the all time great architects, like Frank Lloyd Wright, or Eero Saarinan, or Alvar Aalto, Antoni Gaudi, or Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, forget this book, this is not the one.

However, if you seek a book, which analyzes sketches and sketchers, and not so many good sketches, and not so many large sketches at that, and is more like a textbook, with a 1950's psychological, philosophical, reference book style, then this is indeed the book for you.

I buy art and architecture books to look at outstanding examples of art and architectural sketches and photos and step-by-step design processes that ARE helpful.

The author is qualified as an architect and has taught at "several schools in North America, including Texas AM, University of Minnesota and University of Utah," and is currently the Chair of the department of Architectural Science at Ryerson University. She holds a Ph.D in Architecture from Georgia Tech, along with a professional degree in Architecture (M.Arch) from Virginia Tech. She also worked as an architect in the office of Kevin Roche John Dineloo Associates, Hampton Connecticut, and therefore I am certain she knows what she is doing, however, and I mean this as no aspersion upon Ms. K. Schank Smith, the book embraces all I dislike about some books, which try too hard to make art/architecture disciplines that which they are not. Architecture, like art, involves giftedness and analyzing that to death gives entree' to the death of creativity.

Was I to title this book based upon its content it would be called, Dialogue, With A Few Scattered and Not So Artistic Design and Architectural Sketches. For me a book which is created for those in the visual arts and sciences, as both art and architecture are, should have a preponderance of large visuals. Instead this book contains an Overwhelming preponderance of verbiage. The Art of architecture is aesthetics combined with the science, which is the structural, mathematical, scientific aspects, which need study, utilizing calculus, and a degree of engineering skills. Sketching is, though vaguely related, quite another thing.

It is a given that while fixating on the creative in sketching, which most often serves as the ideal, the later-and-yet--to-be-sorted-out, are the final working drawings with all technological matters including engineering applied in order for it to become functional and buildable.

When I am about to create a painting or to design a stained glass window, or a structure, I freely sketch sans worry about structural strength, anatomy, and physiology, thus making those refinements after the spontaneous, creative first step is completed. Look at Michelangelo's sketches and later at his finished drawings and paintings, whether for paintings, sculpture or buildings, the functionality comes later, that is why the early drawings are called "sketches."

The sketching of anything from figures, which are a mainstay of my art, is a process like a black hole which both absorbs and presents spaces, negative and positive, in an intuitive, reflexive, natural outpouring of a divine giftedness from God.

Sketching, painting, designing are at their very best a display of the hand of God in the mind of man, and the thinking process flows, but not as a mechanical working drawing, as, instead, intuitive, as intuitive as the Two Slit test finds the waves/particles.

This book is a wordy, complex, tome. It seems to be a text or reference book for a Ph.D in the psychology and philosophy of architecture, if there need be such a discipline, not in the creation and application of architectural knowledge.

This book is more an intellectualization of the sketching process, an over-thinking of a thing, which is spontaneous instead. Her earlier book Architects' Drawings is more user friendly for the working architectural student, but still it seems to favor words over visuals.

If it were my project it would be 80%-95% visuals and the remainder words. This book is exactly the opposite. If it were mine the reproductions would be full or half page-sized, not mere dots on a huge landscape of words. It would also carry the sketches of the great architects of all time and the photos of the finished products along with a step-by-step of much of the process.

I asked, where are the brilliant sketches of Alvar Aalto, Antoni Gaudi, Eero Saarinan, and Frank Lloyd Wright, Louis Sullivan, Michangelo, Imhotep, Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, Pierre Lescot, Thomas Jefferson, Dankmar Adler, Reed and Stern and Warren and Wetmore, William Van Alen, Shreve, Lamb and Harmon, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Jorn Utzon, Minoru Yamasaki, Robert Adam, Steffen Ahrends, Gregory Ain, Leon Battista Alberti, Galeazzo Alessi? I could go on and on, but the points are these, books about visualizations should have a vast collection of large pictures of the sketches and if possible, step-by-step from sketch to finished product.

The process of learning mathematical formulae and their application is, for the most part, quite different from creating art forms, though at a certain level all creative thoughts are interrelated. In the visualization of anything, most often with successful artists, the idea supercedes the application.

The creative stage of art or architecture or for that matter anything else is first, though often unrecognizable by the artist, instantaneous, spontaneous, and reflexive.

I do not think this book is for the aspiring artist/architect, I think is for those who wish to talk about what we who create, instead simply do. When people ask me to discuss my art, I do as a baseball player should, I demure. Art is to be done not intellectualized. Every bit of art or architecture I have seen which was intellectualized over by its creator, was not worth the discussion. I don't talk about my art, I just do it, so should all who create two and three dimensional designs and buildings. They either look great and/or function well, or do neither. Art is art and functional art, like buildings, should be seen and experienced, not explained, tirelessly and tiringly. 'Nough said, or perhaps far too much said.

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