Drawing time

The release of the book-catalogue for the exhibition “The Marriage of Reason and Squalor”, devoted to Pier Vittorio Aureli’s drawings is the perfect opportunity to compile a list of notes on drawing time.

Pier Vittorio Aureli, The Marriage of Reason and Squalor, Black Square Press, Betts Project Architecture Gallery, 2014.
I have often thought of writing a piece on drawing. I wanted to reflect on the meaning of drawing with no specific purpose, an end that is not the rendering of a project for construction. Drawing like everyday writing, autonomous research, an activity linked to the passing of time, thinking time. We know that, after spending this time, the produced words will generate architectural ideas. I have never tried it.
Pier Vittorio Aureli, <i>Untitled 3</i>, 2001-2014, ink on paper, 50 x 50 cm
Pier Vittorio Aureli, Untitled 3, 2001-2014, ink on paper, 50 x 50 cm
I shall seize on the opportunity offered by this book-catalogue for the exhibition “The Marriage of Reason and Squalor”, published by the relatively young Black Square Editions for the Betts Project Architecture Gallery in London, to  compile a list of notes on drawing time.

Pier Vittorio Aureli’s drawings in this exhibition reflect the slow work that precedes, or sometimes follows, the architectural themes addressed by Dogma projects.

This exercise is a prelude to compositional architecture – and by this I mean architecture that systematises several project scales – which can only be achieved via the exact opposite. A non-compositional exercise excludes all types of programme, bonds with the city and design reflections except for imposing rules that must be correctly applied.

Pier Vittorio Aureli, <i>Untitled 6</i>, 2001-2014, ink on paper, 50 x 50 cm
Pier Vittorio Aureli, Untitled 6, 2001-2014, ink on paper, 50 x 50 cm

Aureli’s visions are the fruit of a particular choice and the primary technique is that of the regular broken line, the tools being pencil and ink; the paper format is always the same, 50 x 50 cm and the theme buildings with no specific programme.

So we are faced with particular drawings and models that have lost or never had a prescriptive function and that are primarily drawings and models of things in which a, more or less knowingly accepted, idea of a thing is easily developed...[1]

Once established, these models can be translated by a project or applied in subsequent revamps. We must be good at extracting meanings from this exchange that go beyond the forms and past the mere graphic portrayal; we must be able to think architecture differently.
Apart from the aesthetic quality of Aureli’s drawings, I wonder why an architect should work on pictures that portray architectural ideas, regardless of the technique chosen to mark the white paper. I shall start these notes with key words extracted from the texts in the catalogue and that form a brief dictionary on the action of drawing
Pier Vittorio Aureli, <i>Untitled 9</i>, 2001-2014, ink on paper, 50 x 50 cm
Pier Vittorio Aureli, Untitled 9, 2001-2014, ink on paper, 50 x 50 cm
 Research: an architect’s ongoing research must be conducted with different methods and exercises, of which drawing is one. Drawing produces reflections in the form of abstract architecture that works on our imagination. They have nothing to do with the reality of the constructed space but anticipate potential directions to pursue; they create the conditions in which architecture can be thought out.
Spatial organisation: architecture is defined via spatial configuration and, in this particular case, the space is generated by the simple development of a system of circumscribing walls. The wall is a constraint with which to mediate the relationships of the individuals inhabiting the urban space and potential configurations emerging from these exercises explore the possibilities of this mediation between interior and exterior. They define possible combinations.
Pier Vittorio Aureli, <i>Untitled 19</i>, 2001-2014, ink on paper, 50 x 50 cm
Pier Vittorio Aureli, Untitled 19, 2001-2014, ink on paper, 50 x 50 cm

Paintings: drawings are images expressing their author’s poetic.  The fact that even the title of these drawings is a reference to a painting (a 1959 painting by Frank Stella) shows that it is vital for architects to experience the other arts and to look to painting and the image as a place in which to form their own concept of world. We must not forget that the key action of human knowledge is to find the way in the face of chaos by positioning images and signs.[1]

Drawing is finding the way, choosing which elements to portray and seeking the constraints of the discipline.

Paradox: paradoxes – affirmations that actually, or appear to, contrast with common sense – release us from a host of structures and conventions. We manage to transform passing time into thinking time.

Today, people often say that a return to drawing is a return to the past but nothing could be farther from the truth. Thinking images through is thinking the future.

Pier Vittorio Aureli, <i>Untitled 24</i>, 2001-2014, ink on paper, 50 x 50 cm
Pier Vittorio Aureli, Untitled 24, 2001-2014, ink on paper, 50 x 50 cm
Time: this word is never mentioned in the foreword (but is indirectly described in Thomas Weaver’s afterword). It is a vital component of drawing, which is registering a certain reality. Drawing time allows theoretical thought to settle in our minds and drawing measures the time spent thinking. The passing of time serves to develop a parallel direction, a digression that more often than not lies outside the end product.
How to look: firstly, the act of looking is a collective action available to all but achieved by few. Drawing is a way of looking. First, we look inside ourselves and then we carry forward our personal concept of architecture, noting down its distinguishing traits, day after day. Immediately afterwards, we look outside to observe the real-life potential of this inner gaze.
Returning to Aureli’s drawings, we can say that they form part of a specific Italian architectural tradition, with Franco Purini or Costantino Dardi inevitably springing to mind. It is based on different moments of reflection in which the drawing exercise occupies a large space. This exercise produces pieces of architecture-in-waiting that, despite rejecting a precise programme, are waiting sheet after sheet, to turn into something better defined, which is not necessarily architecture.
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Note
1. Emanuele Garbin, In Bianco e Nero, Quodlibet Studio, 2014
2. F. Saxl, Commemoration speech by Aby Warburg (1929) aut aut 321-322 2004

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