Architecture - Drawn. From the Middle Ages to the Present by Birkhäuser

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ARCHITECTURE– DRAWN

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ARCHITECTURE — DRAWN From the Middle Ages to the Present

Klaus Jan Philipp

Birkhäuser Basel

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11 1 INTRODUCTION

15 16 17 21 21

Foreword

Definitions Geometrical Projections The Architect as Draughtsperson History Themes

31 27 2 PLAN, SECTION, ELEVATION Plan 50 Shadows and Perspective 63 Elevation Shadows 65 Section 82 Variants of the Section 98 Combined Drawings 114 Combinations of Orthographic 114 Modes of Representation Complicated Plans 126 The Drawing-Model Paragone 134 Non-Perspective Projections: Isometric 138 and Axonometric 3 PERSPECTIVE 167 168 170 188 193 203 212 217

Architectural Space Perspective Contradictions Narration in Perspectives Criticism of Perspective Competitions around 1900 Attacks on Perspective The Survival of Perspective

239 4 NO END IN SIGHT Architectural Drawing and the Stylistic 240 History of Architecture New Media 244 The End of Drawing? 245

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Explanatory captions are provided only for images not discussed in the running text.

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My enthusiasm for architectural drawing was sparked in 1988, when I worked on an exhibition on Revolutionary Architecture for the Deutsches Architekturmuseum in Frankfurt, a task that gave me the opportunity to look through drawings in numerous archives and museums. This proved to be a stroke of luck in that the particular fascination I found in the drawings by architects active at the time of the French Revolution of 1789 played a significant role in attracting me to this field. Several years prior to this I had spent time studying architectural drawings from the Middle Ages. Here again I was lucky, because I was able to rediscover the only extant plan of Amiens Cathedral and study it in connection with other late medieval architectural drawings. My particular interest in medieval architectural drawing, which is obvious in this book, stems from this experience. From these early beginnings my interest in the topic developed over the years. I gave a series of lectures and published several essays on specific themes, such as the axonometric projection and the floor plan. In 2008, together with my wife, Dr Susanne Grötz, I was able to mount a small but high-quality exhibition titled The Fascination of Architectural Drawing in the Stihl Gallery in Waiblingen, which specializes in drawings. If not before then certainly by this period, the first ideas for this book were emerging. Although a huge number of books have been published and exhibitions held on topics around architectural drawing, these are for the most part limited to individual collections, architects, or epochs. Moreover, many relevant archives and museums have made their collections of architectural drawings available online, so that specialized collections are now easily accessible. However, we are still lacking a synopsis of the development of architectural drawing from antiquity to the present. The reason for this is obvious: the number of drawings after the Middle Ages is so large that any overview necessarily remains fragmentary. I became increasingly aware of this fact in the process of writing and compiling this book, and thereby also of the magnitude of the venture I was undertaking. I can only hope that the selection of examples presented here is in fact representative of the history of architectural drawing. What is of central importance for me is that they are drawings of a high aesthetic quality, the contemplation of which is a source of profound pleasure. On the other hand, I have great confidence in the structure of this book around the different representational modes and in the fact that even today architectural drawing – despite computer-aided design (CAD) and building information modelling (BIM) – has not become obsolete and indeed remains as vital as ever.

FOREWORD

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1.1

1.1 JOHN HEJDUK (1929–2000) Presentation drawing for the Lancaster/Hanover Masque, 1980–1982 Coloured pencil and graphite on transparent vellum paper 92.4 x 153.5 cm

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The large-format drawing with floor plans, elevations and sections testifies to the joy of inventing architecture and representing it graphically. The beholder is led into a fictional world and confronted with designs that confuse, acknowledge and delight him. They have the potential to become reality if the beholder immerses himself in them. The drawing is part of a group of 45 drawings and four collages for John Hejduk’s “Lancaster/Hannover Masque”.

The project is comprised of nine large final drawings, in which all the structures that form the “masque” are represented, and forty smaller sketches and collages. All the drawings and collages as well as Hejduk’s descriptions of the structures can be found in “The Lancaster/Hanover Masque” (London: Architectural Association and Montréal: CCA, 1992).

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1 INTRODUCTION

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1.2 1.2 GIOVANNI BATTISTA PIRANESI (1720–1778) The staircase with trophies (sheet 5 in: Carceri d'Invenzione), 1761 (after 1778) Etching on paper 76 x 53.2 cm

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1 2 3 4 5 6

Alberti (1988), p. 19 Thoenes (2004), pp. 142–44 Grassi (2001) On the model–drawing relationship, see Oechslin (2011) See Thoenes (2004), p. 144 Milani (2007), p. 17

This book is devoted to architectural drawing; it presents the history of drawings made to illustrate architecture. These drawings serve to clarify an architectural idea by rendering it in artistic terms. The two-dimensional drawing is a necessary medium of communication that operates on three levels. First, there is the practical application of drawings. In order to produce buildings of a certain complexity, drawings that render the structure on a small scale are required to guide the building process. This was already known to Leon Battista Alberti, who more than 550 years ago, in the middle of the fifteenth century, wrote in the first chapter of the first book of his treatise De re aedificatoria (On the Art of Building), ‘The art of building comprises outlines (lineamentis) and execution (structura)’.1 This remains the conditio sine qua non of architecture today: without a plan, a section, and an elevation a building cannot be erected by tradespeople on a building site, because in order to do so they first need to know what they are supposed to build, which is what they are shown by the drawings. In spite of new technologies and media, we have as yet no alternative to such architectural drawings, even if the drawings no longer necessarily have to be drawn or plotted on paper but can be portrayed in an animated three-dimensional version on a computer monitor or even a VR headset. This also applies to drawings that document existing historical buildings for purposes of study, restoration, and remodelling. Although such building documentations do not constitute independent artistic achievements, they nevertheless interpret the depicted building in an individual way and are thus also objects of historical interest. Second, for architects, drawings are the medium in which they design the object that is to be built, in which they develop in two dimensions what is later to become reality as a three-dimensional object. Alberti distinguishes here between perscriptio and lineamentum. The latter refers to drawing as a medium of artistic invention or intellectual conception, whereas perscriptio refers to the drawn elaboration of a project that concludes the planning process and provides the basis for construction.2 Over five hundred years later, the Italian architect Giorgio Grassi makes a comparable argument, albeit using different words. Grassi also distinguishes between two types of drawing. On the one hand we have drawings whose main purpose is to serve the process of architectural invention – sketches, often in colour, that define particular moments and subsequent phases of the design process and define alternative solutions and overlays; and on the other hand there are drawings that he refers to as oleografiche and which presume to attempt to anticipate the building in realistic form, although they are ultimately only a trivial substitute for built reality.3 A substitute for such drawings would be a three-dimensional model of the structure.4 But to build such a model, drawings are needed – plan, section, elevation! The process separating the first sketch and the presentation drawing that shows the building as it could look when constructed is usually a long one, requiring many further drawings, which are used to check and reject alternatives, before the participating actors can agree on a mutually satisfactory solution, one that gives consideration to actual buildability. Whether this result can actually be realized or has a utopian character ultimately does not play a role in determining the quality of the drawing. Third, drawings can have relevance for architecture even in cases where they do not directly refer to a concrete object or one intended for construction. We are talking here in the first place about sketches produced while travelling, at the office, or in whatever other contexts architectural or urban-planning structures are sketched, and which provide a record that may be revisited in the future as part of a design process. Sketchbooks are the architect’s library. Sketches help architects achieve an understanding with themselves. Sketching entails a creative process that is not necessarily tied to the material realization of the idea. Because such sketches are known to date back only to the Italian Renaissance, their development has been – perhaps prematurely – linked to the invention of perspective by the Italian Filippo Brunelleschi at the beginning of the fifteenth century.5 In addition, there are drawings that also do not have a concrete reference point but which are nevertheless fully developed renderings of architectural content. Such autonomous architectural drawings were produced from the mid-eighteenth century onwards and refer neither to realizable projects nor to utopias. Rather, such drawings shift dialectically between the analysis of architectural themes and the poetics of their representation.6 Notable examples are the famous etchings by Giovanni Battista Piranesi, the disconcerting works of Franco Purini, the disorientating and disorientated drawings in the Micromegas series by Daniel Libeskind,

INTRODUCTION

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1.3 1.3 FRANCO PURINI (*1941) Due case, 1980, Ink on paper 54 x 35 cm

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7 8 9

Dethlefs (1996) Sonne (2011) For example, the Codex Coner compiled around 1510; see Liu (2011) 10 Frey (1921), pp. 8–9 11 Ponten (1925) 12 See Goodman (1995); Bruyn (2008) speaks of instructive arts

and the fantastical, apocalyptic drawings of Lebbeus Woods. Here we are dealing more with statements on architectural themes that could also find a place in designs but which cannot be classed as preparatory works for a realizable project. fig. 1.1–1.5 It should be noted that authorship is unambiguous only in the case of sketches and such autonomous architectural drawings. When it comes to construction drawings, presentation drawings and their preliminary stages, and building documentation the question of authorship can often not be resolved and thus it is permissible to put it aside in the present context. Many architects used and use specialists for the presentation of their designs, which nevertheless remain the architects’ intellectual property, even if drawn by a third party. With the development of advanced representational techniques, it is now increasingly the case that the production of elaborate renderings is done by professional firms rather than architects themselves. This is also not a new development; its precedents date back to the nineteenth century, when John Soane had the architect and draughtsman Joseph Gandy produce wonderful perspective renderings of Soane’s designs. Relatively little is known about the division of labour in architectural offices in former centuries. Sources are silent on the question of whether Donato Bramante or Balthasar Neumann drew their grandiose plans themselves. On the other hand, the organization of the office of Johann Conrad Schlaun in Münster is well-documented: work was done there collaboratively and numerous members of staff were involved in the production of plans based on the ideas of the resident architects.7 The twentieth century saw the emergence of architects specializing in drawing, and today there are innumerable firms that exclusively produce so-called – mostly hyper-realistic – renderings of architectural designs. Nevertheless, it remains important that the artistic idea driving the rendering is the architect’s, and that in the drawing the architect communicates his or her spatial ideas or does so via a third party, and is thereby able to trigger a fascination that evokes new worlds in the imagination of the beholder, whether layperson or architect.

DEFINITIONS Among the media of architecture, the drawing is the oldest and most distinguished. The model, the photograph, film, and digital media were later additions and represent architecture in their own medium-compatible ways.8 The drawing has for a long time been held in higher regard than other media: drawings by renowned architects were already collected during the Renaissance in the sixteenth century.9 There are now an enormous number of architecture archives and museums holding extensive collections of architectural drawings. In the 1980s a process began at an international level that saw architectural drawings come to be regarded as on a par with other forms of artistic expression rather than as peripheral phenomena. The establishment of specialized architecture museums accompanied this reassessment of architectural drawing as an artistic medium, a form that is not only produced for practical use but which is or can be an artwork. Art scholars were already beginning to focus on architectural drawing about a hundred years ago, studying examples from important collections in detail. In 1921 Dagobert Frey, art historian and first researcher of Vienna collections rich in architectural drawings, attributed a dual significance to architectural drawings: ‘On the one hand, it is a purely conventional means of clearly defining a spatial idea and communicating it to the artisans executing the idea […], on the other hand, and beyond this convention, it is itself an artistic object in which, although the architectural idea does not find its definitive realization, the artistic idea finds direct expression and is able thereby to achieve a suggestive effect.’10 It should be noted that Frey separates the architectural idea recorded in the drawing from the realization of this idea in the built object. For him, architecture fulfils itself only in its realization. However, in the realm of the history of architectural ideas, architecture that has not been built and is only represented by drawings is just as important as what has been built.11 Ultimately, the real goal of drawings is a structure that can be experienced in four dimensions. If we are able to understand the design of architecture as an allographic art in that it produces scripts or notations which – like the notations of musical composers – are meant to be executed by others (craftspeople, instrumentalists), then the great value of architectural drawing becomes clear.12 As Frey writes: ‘The relationship between the architect and the executed artwork

DEFINITIONS

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is fundamentally different to the relationship of the painter and sculptor to their works. The building is not directly created by the architect’s hands as the painting and for the most part the sculpture are by the painter and sculptor. Whereas in the case of the painter the creative thought uncontrollably translates itself into creative physical movement and the artwork in its genesis and progress repeatedly and retrospectively pollinates, reshapes and clarifies the artistic concept anew, the building must be worked by many different hands between design and execution in order to make the artist’s plan a reality. The architect is not an artisan as in their essence the painter and sculptor are; he is the conductor of a giant orchestra, the director of a colourful cast of artistic, technical and manual labourers.’13 A composer’s score, a choreographer’s notations, and an architect’s drawings have much in common. They work with abstract signs that one must learn to understand, for they are not self-explanatory. They are based on long-practised cultural techniques. Many people are capable of making out the score of a piece of medieval choral music purely on the basis of the abstract symbols of the notes and are able to sing these notes accordingly. In a similar way, the abstract lines of the forma urbis produced between 203 and 211 CE merge into a legible city map of Rome in late antiquity.14 fig. 1.6 The lines give rise to the site maps and ground plans of streets, paths, houses, theatres, and temples. The process of reading a two-dimensional city map and using it as a means of orientation is self-evident and is comparable to the way we access architectural drawings more or less intuitively. Everyone can at least approximately describe the floor plan of their house, apartment, or room. Although we are not aware of it, this entails a significant achievement in terms of abstraction: a three-dimensional space, which is perceived in motion, i.e., including the fourth dimension, is projected onto a two-dimensional plane. This complex process unfolds in the opposite direction when a floor plan is observed and a spatial concept of the depicted building and its rooms is generated. Of course there are boundaries that limit the layperson and can only be traversed by a trained architect. Schooled in three-dimensional thinking, the architect has the capacity to represent in a drawing that which the layperson can only imagine, a drawing that in turn enables the layperson to gain an idea of the building. Vitruvius, the Roman architect and author who shaped the essential foundations for our understanding of architectural representation over two thousand years ago, during the reign of Emperor Augustus, defined this relationship as follows in his Ten Books on Architecture: ‘All people, not only the architect, can judge what is good; the difference between the layman and the architect is that the layman can only know how a building will look when it is finished, but the architect, as soon as the idea has formed in his mind, already has, before beginning the execution, a precise idea of how the building will be in terms of charm, possible uses and utility.’ 15 Vitruvius will be referred to several times in the course of this book because his influence on theoretical reflection on architecture and the media of architecture has proved more enduring than that of any other theoretician. However, the kind of media presentation of architecture required today in diploma and master’s theses, competition submissions, and building applications cannot be traced directly back to Vitruvius but actually first developed in the course of the eighteenth century. It was during this period that the representation of a building using a site plan, floor plans, elevations, sections, perspectives, and architectural and constructional details slowly became established. These different modes of architectural drawing date back in part to the Middle Ages, but they only really became the norm in the early twentieth century.

13 Frey (1921), p. 7 14 http://formaurbis. stanford.edu/index.html 15 Vitruv. (1987), p. 299 (Vitruv. 6.8.10) 16 Zumthor (2004), p. 7

GEOMETRICAL PROJECTIONS Architects produce drawings that can be used for construction. They know how the lines they draw can be implemented as a guide for building a house. Peter Zumthor has expressed this as follows: ‘[…] drawing is the score of a space: every line is like a note on a score; it plays with the space […] When I plan, I always translate the lines of the drawings in space’.16 This translation of the line into the space is a projection. This projection does not have to involve spatialization by means of perspective; rather, it emerges, as it were, in the mind of the architect, who transfers it to paper. The production of a house from this projection requires many further steps and drawings, which must include a plan, a section, and an elevation. The application of mathematical or geometrical techniques in this process can be seen as both self-evident and an object of critical interrogation; the latter because, since the Renaissance,

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17 Vitruv. (1987), p. 63 (1.6.6–7), p. 405 (9.0.4), pp. 405–7 (9.0.6) 18 Liefferinge (2010) 19 Ackermann (1949) 20 See Wendland (2017)

questions of geometry, mathematics, and – since Gaspard Monge in the early nineteenth century – géométrie descriptive have been so firmly placed in the foreground by architects and scholars that the purported significance of these processes takes precedence over the actual design and building process. To be sure, there have been and are architects who have dealt in detail with mathematical and geometrical questions with regard to their architecture, such as Philibert de l’Orme in the sixteenth century and Guarino Guarini in the seventeenth. However, they are exceptions. As a rule, one requires a certain amount of basic mathematical and geometrical knowledge, as is still offered in the form of – for the most part unpopular – compulsory subjects on the curricula of architecture faculties. Vitruvius himself supplied his readers with several simple mathematical rules that could be applied to every type of architecture. Along with a method for orienting cities, he discusses Plato’s theory of the doubling of the area of a square by making the sides of the second square equal in length to a diagonal of the original square. He also presents, and attributes to Pythagoras, a simple technique for producing a right angle by connecting rulers of three, four, and five feet with one another.17 Such simple and very useful rules and techniques relating to the orientation of buildings, the harmonization of proportions between square elements, or the right-angled positioning of a structure were thus already part of the knowledge base of antiquity and could be applied in practical terms on building sites. At the very latest from the ninth century onwards, when Vitruvius’s Ten Books were in circulation, scientific confirmation of these techniques was available.18 For example, it can be shown that these rules, along with mathematical calculations made at the time, were applied to the building of the polygonal chancel of Notre-Dame cathedral in Paris around 1163. The theoretical mathematics and building practices obviously came from the same scholarly tradition. It can be seen in this context that from the eleventh century mathematics developed into a specialized theoretical discipline whereas building practices developed their own comparatively simple geometrical methods. However, ultimately, the two belonged together. The architects of the twelfth century utilized methods that were closely related to contemporary mathematical theories. For this reason a correction is needed to the purported dichotomy between intellectual and practical work insofar as the mathematical knowledge and abilities of the scholar should not be overvalued nor those of the architect undervalued. Finally, it should be emphasized that the architects of the Paris cathedral were not analysing an existing plan but rather producing a new one. And here, for practical reasons, linear measurement and the use of circular forms as well as certain other geometrical and arithmetical insights proved useful for positioning the chancel pillars (or their plinths) to form an octagon and for doing so in such a simple way that the craftsmen involved could perform the work. Over two hundred years after the construction of the cathedral in Paris this situation had not fundamentally changed, as is evident from historical reports relating to the construction of Milan Cathedral. Between 1391 and 1402 the Milan authorities brought in German and French architects to help with the extension of the cathedral building. In a discussion of statics problems, which was at the same time a discussion of aesthetics, a dispute arose between the Italian inzignerios and the French architect Jean Mignot. The inzignerios asserted that scientia est unum et ars est aliud – science is one thing and art another; to which Mignot responded, quod ars sine scientia nihil est – art is nothing without science. The report then concludes, ‘… ergo concluditur quod quae facta sunt, sunt facta per geometriam et per practicam’ – geometry and practice belong together, like scientia and ars.19 Building is ultimately always about the built result. It is about the ‘translation into the work’ of an idea and about doing so – as Vitruvius emphasized – with fabrica et ratiocination. Construction practices and the theoretical, mathematical, and geometrical superstructure belong together, are interlaced, and cannot exclude one another in the building process.20

THE ARCHITECT AS DRAUGHTSPERSON Although this book traces the development of architectural drawing from the Middle Ages to the present, its focus always remains on the current situation, in which the old tradition of architectural drawing may well be at stake. Three-dimensional animations, simulations, and above all Building Information Modelling (BIM) – software that digitally records, models, and combines all relevant building data – are threatening to call into question and undermine

THE ARCHITECT AS DRAUGHTSPERSON

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1.4

1.4 DANIEL LIBESKIND (*1946) Micromegas. Time Sections, draft, 1979, New York, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) Silkscreen on paper 66 x 91.8 cm

Named after a short story by Voltaire, the Micromegas Project is a series of twelve drawings produced by Daniel Libeskind in 1979 and circulated as a silkscreen print. A wide range of architectural elements, all of which have functions in reality, are portrayed as if exploding over the paper. Nevertheless, there is a certain sense of order in that the boundary area of the image looks like an axonometric view of a building. The charm of the image is based on this oscillation between concrete form and expressive movement.

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1.5 LEBBEUS WOODS (1940–2012) ‘Geomechanical Tower’ from Centricity Series, perspective, 1987 Coloured pencil on Strathmore paper 51 x 50.8 cm

1.5

GEOMETRICAL PROJECTIONS

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traditional modes of architectural representation. Representations are now being replaced by the simulation of buildings. In 2014 the American architect David Ross Scheer was already proclaiming ‘the death of drawing’.21 This is a claim that needs to be examined. Architects have always been interested in representing their ideas about buildings in such a way as to enable their clients to form a mental image of the future building that is as close to reality as possible. As a result, architects have always searched for and also found ever more appropriate representational possibilities. The drawing has always had primacy in this development – and it has by no means been rendered superfluous. Drawings facilitate discussion and allow for wishes to be immediately made visible and testable. Moreover, equipped with a pencil, the architect is able to express his or her ideas to all other people participating in a building project, in particular technical planners. Where words fail, a quick, adept sketch can quickly clarify the situation. However, with the exception of a small number of examples from the Middle Ages, this book does not present or deal with sketches. This is above all because it is very difficult to demarcate such sketches from sketches by other visual artists that are based on the same principle: the more or less spontaneous, individual transfer of an idea onto paper by hand. The main focus of the book is therefore on presentation drawings, because they constitute the form with which the architect addresses the public after formulating the initial idea in sketches or diagrams and before producing execution plans that cater to the other demands placed on the design. The drawings have been chosen based on their argumentative significance rather than their artistic beauty. Nevertheless, all the examples presented here are of a high aesthetic quality, irrespective of whether the draughtsman sought to achieve this quality or not, or whether he was even capable of producing such a quality. Good architects, as Adolf Loos emphasized a hundred years ago, do not emerge because they can draw well: ‘The best draughtsman can be a bad architect, the best architect a bad draughtsman’.22 With their drawings, architects need to be able to make themselves understood by craftspeople, nothing more. On the other hand, architects must also justify their work to clients and be able to show them how the house the architect has designed will look and the impression it will make. A capacity for clear representation is thus required, including the representation of materiality and atmosphere. With his diagnosis of the significance of drawings, Adolf Loos, whether consciously or not, associated himself with an occupational profile of the architect stretching back to Vitruvius. At several places in his Ten Books Vitruvius demands that the architect should be a peritus graphidos, an expert in drawing, 23 and that he must master the graphidos scientiam, the science of drawing, in order to represent the forms of his work.24 However, the architect did not have to be a painter like Apelles; it sufficed if he was not without experience in drawing (graphidos non inperitus).25 Vitruvius presents the types of drawings he is referring to in the very first chapter of the first book, and in the process draws on what is probably a very old tradition, but one of which our knowledge is only fragmentary. The ways of representing the ‘disposition’ of a building, which the Greeks called ideas (ideai), were ichnographia, orthographia, and scaenographia, i.e., floor plan, elevation, and perspective.26 In order to present an architectural idea these representational modes are necessary and sufficient. In other places Vitruvius also refers to the qualities of drawings; he himself adorned his Ten Books with a small number of no longer extant drawings dealing with very specific technical questions that were very difficult to explain using words alone.27 Along with the practical illustrative functions of the representational modes of floor plan, elevation, and perspective, Vitruvius also points to an aesthetic function of drawings. In the foreword to the second book he relates the story of the Greek architect Dinocrates, who, in order to introduce himself to Alexander the Great and attract his attention, anointed his body with oil, laid a lion skin over his shoulder, placed poplar leaves on his head, and took a club in his right hand. The king noticed him and asked him to present his concerns. Dinocrates took the opportunity to present a visionary project in a drawing (formae), which the king found very pleasing (delectatus).28 Obviously, it was already possible in antiquity to prepare and present a drawing in such a way that it could trigger aesthetic enjoyment. Vitruvius does not tell us whether the drawing presented by Dinocrates was a floor plan, an elevation, or a perspective. From today’s standpoint, we might expect a perspective that presented the project as it would have looked if executed. But it could also have been a floor plan or an elevation.

21 Scheer (2014) 22 Loos (1962), p. 307 23 Vitruv. (1987), pp. 24–25 (1.1.3); on the following see: Corso (2012) 24 Vitruv. (1987), pp. 24–25 (1.1.4) 25 Ibid., pp. 32–33 (1.1.13) 26 Ibid., pp. 36–37 (1.1.2) 27 The drawings deal with the entasis of columns, the curvature of horizontal lines (scamilli impares), and the construction of the Ionic volute 28 Vitruv. (1987), p. 75 (2, praef. 2)

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29 For example, Haselberger (1980), (1983) and (1991) 30 https://formaurbis. stanford.edu/ 31 Philipp (2017) 32 Hubert (2017) 33 Böker (2005), (2011) and (2013)

HISTORY What is certain is that the modern architectural drawing inherited from the thirteenth century has a much longer tradition. However, the historical record is not continuous. We have carved drawings from prehistoric times, floor plans and elevations from ancient Egypt, and carved drawings from Greek antiquity that demonstrate problems and deal with matters such as entasis and curvature in the orders of Greek columns that were only comprehensible for the specialist.29 Preserved examples from Roman antiquity include, along with other schematic ground plans, the forma urbis referred to above, which contains not only the layout of the city but also information on individual buildings.30 Then comes a long period from which we have no examples. It is in the Plan of Saint Gall, a medieval monastic compound designed in the ninth century, that we first find a connection between antiquity and the Middle Ages. fig. 1.7 However, the plan cannot be described as an architectural drawing in the sense employed in this book; it is rather a schema that shows and labels all the areas and individual buildings of a monastery. It does not indicate how to construct the monastery, as became evident in 2010 when a building project (Campus Galli) based on the plan was begun near the town of Messkirch in the Allgäu region. The main problem with the implementation of the plan is that the distances between the buildings as drawn are far too narrow to allow for the transport of materials to the respective building site! The first ‘real’ architectural drawings are found in the so-called sketchbook compiled around 1230 by the French architect Villard de Honnecourt (c. 1200–1235). Villard apparently travelled to cathedrals around France, where he made sketches that included ground plans, elevations, sections, and quasi-perspective drawings that document the three-dimensional quality of polygonal building elements. In fact the sketchbook of Villard de Honnecourt already contains everything that will characterize architectural drawing over the following centuries. It can be assumed that Villard was able to refer back to an old tradition. His drawings do not search for a new form of representation but are, as it were, perfect and largely correspond to the formal guidelines employed in contemporary architectural drawing.31 It is thought that comparable drawings on a smaller scale had previously been made on boards covered with chalk or lime in building workshops, drawings that simply disappeared after the construction phase because they were no longer needed.32 It was apparently only from the thirteenth century onwards that drawings were done on parchment and then stored in building workshops or with the building client. From the fourteenth century onwards, when paper, which was far less expensive, began to be used, the stock of architectural drawings that were preserved and handed down grew continuously. Nevertheless, up until around 1500, only about a thousand architectural drawings had been preserved.33 From this time on the number grew exponentially, and from the sixteenth century onwards it became incalculable.

THEMES This mass of material demands concentration and a selection of examples that foreground the respective historical site of the drawings. Ultimately, what follows here is concerned not only with presenting different representational modes but also with the representation of historical change. For this reason, the book is analytically structured, and proceeds chronologically within each chapter. Rather than a homogeneous, continuous history of architectural drawing that follows the course of general architectural history, with the drawings confirming the respective stylistic changes, priority is given here to the analytical presentation of continuities, thereby more readily revealing the fact that certain representational modes have been utilized in almost unchanged form for centuries because they have proven effective and – as yet – no better replacement has been found. This applies above all to the floor plan and the other orthogonal drawing modes discussed in the first chapter. Plans, sections, and elevations have been used in the representation of architecture since the thirteenth century, when cathedrals began to be built that were so large and complex that scale drawings were required to construct them. The drawings that have been selected from the enormous number of modern architectural drawings are those that initiated important developments. For example, the book traces the ongoing impact of medieval drawing modes that were further developed alongside the changes ushered in by the Renaissance, above all in relation to central-perspective representation. And a development is retraced that enriched these representational conventions with ever-new ideas without resulting in the fundamental

THEMES

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and irreplaceable features of plan, section, and elevation being questioned. This approach has also been selected in order to be able to present, beyond the continual and at times abrupt changes in conventional representational modes, the actual qualities of architectural drawing in relation to other visual arts all the more clearly and convincingly. Also included is documentation of existing buildings in cases marked by the development of representational modes, for example to explain certain construction phases, modes that were then adopted into general representational practices. The third chapter is devoted to all the attempts to represent architecture in a two-dimensional medium in such a way that its three dimensions can be experienced. Late medieval architects were already developing methods designed to this end, which were later suppressed by the use of central perspective. Following the rediscovery of the Ten Books on Architecture by Vitruvius in the middle of the fifteenth century, the concept of scaenographia caused considerable disquiet among architects. The concept was identified with the central perspective invented not long before by Filippo Brunelleschi, although Vitruvius’s definition does not necessarily point in this direction and construction based on central perspective was unknown in antiquity. Nevertheless, central perspective was used to represent buildings in such a way as to make them more understandable to the layperson and to give a clearer idea of the building that was to be constructed than that provided by orthogonal drawings. However, due to its picturesque quality, perspective architectural representation encountered resistance from architects who felt that only the orthogonal representative method was appropriate for an architectural drawing. The mere fact that the foreshortening of a perspective drawing means that the precise measurement of lengths is impossible made such renderings suspect and led to efforts to find more suitable representational techniques. Already in the sixteenth century the form that later became known as cavalier perspective, which was developed in the context of fortification construction, provided a way to produce quasi-perspective representations that

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1.6 Fragment of Forma Urbis Severiana, marble plan of ancient Rome, third century, during the reign of Emperor Septimius Severus Marble

worked with measurable dimensions. In the seventeenth century early forms of the axonometric projection and the exploded-view drawing were added, which were discovered anew, as it were, by the modernism of the early twentieth century and dogmatically deployed against central-perspective representation, which was now declared academically doctrinaire. Parallel to this, photomontage, which was also based on earlier forms dating back to the eighteenth century and earlier, was further developed as another means of intensifying the pictorial and spatial qualities of architectural representation. If perspective views, axonometric projections, and photomontage can be seen as engaged in a kind of artistic rivalry – or paragone – with the three-dimensional architectural model in that they represent spatial qualities in two dimensions, then it can be argued that, due to the constant modification of representational techniques, conventional architectural drawings have also gained autonomy as an artistic means of architectural representation. Phases of the ‘realistic’ reproduction of designs using drawings that reproduce the environment of the planned new building from a wide range of perspectives, with vegetation, people, and their actions, and often dramatic lighting situations, have alternated with phases in which the building is presented more abstractly, more as an idea, in expressive charcoal or abstract line diagrams. In accordance with the economy of attentiveness, the competition system has invited the development of ever-new representational techniques, be they the large-format charcoal, pencil, and chalk drawings by Mies van der Rohe; the hyper-realistic drawings by the architect Helmut Jacoby, who, with his studio for architectural representation, worked for the offices of Breuer, Gropius, Johnson, Saarinen, Foster, Gehry, and many other renowned architects; the colourful abstract drawings by James Stirling combining the full gamut of modes; or the expressive, hallucinogenically curved drawings by the early Zaha Hadid. Since the 1980s, a new field of computer-generated renderings has emerged, whose capacity for realistic depictions of designs has today achieved an almost unsurpassable level of perfection. Highly specialized computer programs and equally highly specialized offices outdo each other continually and trigger a reaction in architectural practices that consciously abstain from such hypertrophic realism and present their designs in competitions using hand-drawn, watercolour, or oil-painted drawings. These considerations lead to the discussion in the final chapter – reflecting once again on the entire history of architectural drawing – which takes up the relationship of the carrier medium to the representational technique: from parchment plan to plotter – and ultimately to the renunciation of a carrier medium through the presentation of designs in film or on a computer screen. It can perhaps be expected that in the near future 3-D printers will take over the role of the sketchbook. Whether this represents a gain in terms of communicative possibilities is an open question, and one that should be considered against the historical background of the changes undergone by traditional carrier media: from expensive parchment to lower-cost paper, from paper to oil paper, which made copying easier, from here to cyanotype copying processes, reprography, and finally to the reproducible plot graphic. For it is just as difficult to discern an unambiguous transformation of architecture due to the influence of the different carrier media of architectural drawings as it is to discern such a transformation as the result of the use of different drawing media (pencil or crayon, ink, graphite, Indian ink, watercolours, ballpoint pen, felt pen, collage, etc.). Whether a cathedral was designed on parchment or paper and presented in ink or graphite had no influence on its architectural language. Of more importance were new printing methods and, from the late fifteenth century onwards, the production of architectural treatises that made the formal repertoire, to which only a limited group of

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34 Carpo (2001) 35 Waters (2012) 36 See Popplow (2003), Lefèvre (2004)

people had previously had access, ubiquitously available for reception.34 Such treatises, as well as single sheets35 and other printed matter, communicated new representational modes. This book therefore deals not only with hand drawings but also with prints, which have shaped the history of architectural drawing and perhaps exerted more influence than drawings whose presentation was limited to academy exhibitions or venues attended for the most part only by members of specialist circles. Not included here are drawings produced in military contexts and stage designs. Both of these areas have a close connection with the history of architectural drawing, since well into the nineteenth century architects were also military architects and many were active as designers of stage sets as well. However, these areas underwent their own, independent processes of development, which, while proceeding partly in parallel to those of architectural drawing, ultimately made them independent genres. Tracing the development of the so-called cavalier or oblique perspective drawing for military use fortification construction would also require a recapitulation of the history of engineering drawing since the thirteenth century, which is beyond the scope of this book.36

1.7 Abbey plan, St. Gallen Red and black Indian ink, scored lines, parchment 819 or ca. 827/830 / end of the twelfth century c. 112 x 77. 5 cm The plan of the Abbey of Saint Gall is the oldest surviving major architectural drawing from the Early Middle Ages. The plan shows the schema of an abbey with the floor plans of some 50 buildings, the names and functions of which are indicated by 333 labels. In the centre of the complex is a three-aisled church with a double apse to the east and the west. The altars in the choirs and the side aisles are also shown. Arranged around the church are the cloister, the dining hall (with wine barrels), latrines, the laundry, kitchen, bakery and brewery. Also depicted in detail are the guesthouse, the abbot’s residence, the hospital, a novitiate, numerous commercial buildings and workshops, as well as garden areas, fences, walls and paths. The building floor plans in the lower left corner were erased at the end of the twelfth century to provide space for text.

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2 PLAN, SECTION, ELEVATION

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2.1

2.1 JEAN-NICOLAS-LOUIS DURAND (1760–1834) Elevation, floor plan, section

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1 2 3

Szambien (1984) Lippert (2014), p. 72 Durand (1802–05), vol. 1, pp. 32–33

Plan, section, elevation: this chapter deals with the three fundamental representational modes in architecture. Each of the three modes is given its own specific sub-chapter, for these categories are not as straightforward as they first appear. Architects have repeatedly made efforts not to complicate the representational modes. However, it may be observed that a plan can be represented in very different ways and, in the history of architectural drawing, plans have repeatedly been captured graphically in a variety of ways. By way of introduction it seems appropriate to look at the most succinct form of presentation of the three modes. It comes from Jean-Nicolas-Louis Durand, who, from 1795 to 1830, taught at the École Polytechnique in Paris, which had been founded in 1794. Durand is famous for his rational design doctrine, which he presented in 1802–5 in his textbook Précis des leçons d’architecture données à École polytechnique, which went through several editions and was read throughout Europe.1 Durand’s design doctrine is based on a simple modular element with which a solution could be found for any building task. With this method Durand released ‘building from place and time and suggested the freedom of infinite variability with a minimum of economic and aesthetic risk’.2 For him, systematization and economization were the highest goal of architecture, as is evident in his short statements on the three representational modes: ‘The drawing is the natural language of the architect; in order to fulfil its purpose, every language must be completely in accordance with the concepts of which it is an expression; architecture is essentially simple, an enemy of everything useless, everything searched for; therefore the form of drawing it employs must be free of every type of difficulty, free of pretension and luxury; when this is the case it will especially contribute to rapidity, to ease of study and to the development of the concepts; when this is not the case it will only make the hand impractical, the imagination idle and often even judgement false. To provide a complete concept of a building, three drawings are required, which are called plan, section and elevation. The first shows the horizontal direction of the building, the second the vertical arrangement or its construction, and the third finally, which is merely the result of the other two, presents the exterior. One could make all these drawings on separate sheets of paper, but much time will be saved if they are made on a single sheet, because most of the lines making up these three drawings correspond to one another and can, accordingly, be drawn at the same time. The order in which one draws these lines fundamentally lessens this work.’3 Durand goes on to elucidate this method with reference to a simple square building, which he illustrates on one of the first panels of the Précis. fig. 2.1 Plan, section, and elevation are interlocked with one another. Once this method had been grasped, Durand’s pupils – students at a military academy – were expected to be able to graphically represent far more complex buildings. Durand’s adherence to the primacy of rationality makes it hardly surprising that he rejected other modes of representation such as the perspective, and even limited shading with ink to the depiction of walls. However, it is somewhat disconcerting to find that one of Durand’s colleagues at the École polytechnique was the mathematician Gaspard Monge, who had founded the school in 1794 and instructed the pupils in géométrie descriptive. In other words, Durand’s highly rational approach was taught in parallel to a complex geometrical-structural method for creating projections of three-dimensional objects on a two-dimensional presentational plane. The contrast could not be greater. fig. 2.2 The juxtaposition of such starkly contrasting representational methods points once again to the conflict discussed in the introduction between the mathematical science of the projection and the minimal requirements of an architectural drawing that can also be used on a building site. Plan, section, and elevation can be kept very simple but can also be invested with a very high level of complexity. The question that always hovers in the background is that of practical use: what is supposed to be communicated by the drawing, and to what end? The ways architects and architectural draughtsmen have found over the centuries to formulate the representational modes in keeping with their respective aims is shown in the following by drawings and prints that bring together two fundamental attitudes: a great confidence in the possibilities of two-dimensional representation and an equally great enjoyment of ever-developing ideas for representing architecture analytically.

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2.2

2.3 JEAN-PIERRE-LOUIS-LAURENT HOUËL (1735–1813) Scene in front of the Temple of Asclepius in Agrigento

2.2 FRIEDRICH GILLY (1772–1800) Perspective Study with Landscape, 1798 Pen and ink with watercolours, two differently coloured sheets of paper 23 x 30.5 cm, composite At the age of twenty-seven Friedrich Gilly was appointed Professor of Optics and Perspective at the newly founded Bauakademie (Building Academy) in Berlin. He planned to publish a textbook on perspective, for which this drawing was probably intended. Although this is a scientific rendering dealing with perspective and the effect of shadows, it also has a pronounced aesthetic quality. This is achieved, on the one hand, through the use of differently coloured paper and, on the other, through the integration of the shadow structures into a landscape. In this way Gilly gives the abstract volumes a concrete reference to reality. As an architect Gilly believed that science and art were inseparable from architecture.

The Temple of Asclepius in Agrigento in southern Sicily is located outside the walls of the ancient city. Only fragments of its rear wall have been preserved. The former temple was only 22 metres long and 11 metres wide, and over the centuries a farmhouse had been established in it. It was one of the stations included in the Grand Tour itinerary. During his travels in Sicily from 1776 to 1779, Jean Houël, one of the eighteenth century’s most important travel writers, visited Agrigento and the Temple of Asclepius. The romantic scenery, which Goethe encountered on his own travels in Italy in 1787 and described as offering a ‘friendly image’, obviously pleased Houël and made him want to draw it, as it did Goethe’s travelling companion Christoph Heinrich Kniep (1755–1825) ten years later. Houël’s depiction presents the landscape setting and structural character in a sober, objective fashion while also inserting a somewhat disconcerting scene in the foreground, where travellers, perhaps Houël himself and his travelling party, are spreading out a large cloth, the dimensions of which could correspond to the actual size of the temple, and weighing it down with stones. On the cloth a precise floor plan has been drawn of the temple as an Antae temple with two pillars at the front and two half columns at the back. In his four-volume work Voyage pittoresque des isles de Sicile (Paris 1782–87), Houël, who was an illustrator, a painter, and an architect, repeatedly explored new ways of representing architecture analytically. He was particularly interested in floor plans and sections of complex arrangements such as subterranean burial complexes and theatres embedded in the topography. It is not clear what he wanted to express with the spreading of a cloth showing the floor plan in its original size. Perhaps it was the idea of fixing a plan on the ground in order to check the position of the building. The individual to the right with the staff in his hand who seems to be directing things could be an architect directing craftsmen to position the plan at right angles. Whatever the case, the image clearly expresses the significance of the floor plan for the planning and depiction of a building.

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See Philipp (2017); Kemp (2009), pp. 167–218 5 Bührig (2014), p. 338 6 Penther (1744), pp. 17–21, here p. 18 7 See Osthues (2014), pp. 179, 286–87 8 See Vitruv. (1987), p. 37 and Rode (1796), p. 25 9 DIN 1356-1: 1995-02, 4.3.1. Floor plan type A 10 Ibid. 4

PLAN Drawing the ground plan of a building or a topographical situation is one of the oldest cultural techniques known to humanity.4 As early as four thousand years ago floor plans of residential buildings were produced in Mesopotamia that are barely distinguishable from contemporary plans and that we can understand without being able to comprehend the written language of the time. fig. 2.4 The clay tablets featuring the floor plan of a house in Umma (Djokha) in southern Iraq depict the walls of a square house with double lines that indicate their thickness.5 It is immediately evident that the gap in the lower double line represents an entrance into the building just as the gaps in the interior lines represent doors between the different-sized rooms. The fact that the external walls do not feature any other gaps suggests that the inner rectangular area represents a courtyard via which the other spaces were illuminated and ventilated. Since no stairs are indicated, the house would seem to be single-storey. In spite of the abstract, two-dimensional line drawing, the idea of a house emerges in our minds. The floor plan thus provides fundamental elements required for the understanding of a building and essential information about its design. The first definition of what constitutes a floor plan is provided by Vitruvius, who draws on a no longer accessible terminology and denotes floor plan with the term ichnographia. The term is made up of the Greek words ίχνός (ichnos = the sole of the foot) and γράφω (grapho = I write or draw) and means the drawing of a footprint, i.e., the place where a foot has stood and left an impression on the ground.6 Here, we do not need to go into why Vitruvius does not use the more common Latin term forma,7 although it is worth noting that his choice of terminology led to wide-ranging misunderstandings. However, Vitruvius’s definition of ichnographia is straightforward and easily understandable: a floor plan is executed using circles and lines on a small scale and shows the layout of the ground area of a building.8 This definition still applies today. In the German-speaking world, for example, it is codified in the DIN 1356-1, which states: ‘The floor plan is a top view of the bottom part of a horizontally sectioned building’.9 The horizontal section plane is positioned in the building or building section such that ‘the basic details, e.g., walls or other bearing elements, stairs, openings for windows and doors, are sectioned’.10 One could almost think that the unknown architect and draughtsman of the Mesopotamian clay tablet employed this norm, because this is exactly what we see in his floor plan. Of course, this floor plan is not the footprint of the building in the sense of Vitruvius’s ichnographia but actually a horizontal section through the building. Clearly, this is a sensible way of informing

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