Drawing is my language. It is the way I communicate with people, space, and memory. I believed that my drawing is entirely based on instinct. However, when it comes to architecture drawings, I receive academic education with a lot more constructed and regulated details. Architectural drawings seem mass produced, and so does architecture. In the ocean of digital technology, the design sometimes becomes disconnected from the environment and the designer. It is because the process of constructing digital to physical or even just reproduction may involve second and third-hand makers. It is also because designers follow the “rightful” trend without a second thought. Sometimes the author of the original design cannot control the end product, and may not determine all the design results of it.[1] In my vision, if the designer once loses the ownership of the product, the value of identity, variability as well as creativity get stricken.
From my standpoint, architecture should include unique and responsive characteristics, related to its site, culture, environment, users, function, and vitally, designer’s spirit. I believe that this can be accomplished through multidisciplinary research methods that consider the human experience in transforming critical and psychological issues into architectural thinking and design solutions.
Drawing constructs spacial and emotional experience into a representation with a viewable material. Therefore, I believe drawing with the method of intrapersonal communication from the discipline of communication can build up ownership and desired human experience for architecture. Intrapersonal communication will help designers to access their responses, values, and desires for spaces from subconsciousness. The instinct, existence, interaction, and even destruction of a drawing form the entire design value through time, just as architecture does.
Drawing transforms human value and thought into visual, physical or readable products. Architecture provides a spatial and emotional experience of human value, and from the medium of drawing. If we lost the building, the value gets imperceptible; if we lost the drawing, the value gets incomprehensible. With active intrapersonal listening, people will successfully shape their design(imagination) from intrapersonal values to real word participation. However if both the author and the audience concern drawings as just representation products, the process of constructing the drawing, the thinking will get lost. Then the products get detached from their values.
Gardens are defined not by formal appearance but by the activities of gardening.[2]
Drawings are defined not by esthetic appearance but the dialogues of drawing.
Drawing, if related to space, needs intrapersonal methods to reconstruct human experience and constantly evoke feelings, then to maintain the value and related narratives.
The drawing Summer Shade, as one experiment of architectural drawing with a high level of intrapersonal listening, is a reconstructed space of the field land. The scale, material, spatial quality, or experience are competing to a typical space. The value is presented as audience standing in front of the drawing, emerged in all the detailed projection. The drawing started from a series of sketches and notes. Initial ideas for the drawing are “the original texture of dead grass,” “black soil,” “cold.” With the question of what I remember and how I feel, I had an obscure vision of thick and dark. Then the first layer of the drawing was constructed right after the thought. My mind does not need to process a vision of dark and cold of the space when facing the translated brown and black surface. On the other day of the trip to Blacks, I asked myself about the nature of the field. Then I think about the continually changing experience based on weather and time. That is to say; the scenery and appearance are never the all.
The idea of changing seasons is inside the vegetation and the land. What I want to remember, what I want to create, is this value of constantly changing and erasure. Some vegetation dead. To add and to remove is two side of the same character of the land.[3] In the similar vision, I gradually constructed the space with different levels of exposure and shadow quality with multi-material and multi-methods. All detail moves are collected by the drawing. As time moves from mid-April to late April, the solar radiation gets stronger. At one side of the building, the land is filled with sunshine, while, beneath the building, the land will never reach the sun.
These stories got transformed into a new place, the drawing board. Medium and materials include acrylic paint, copper powder, gold leaf, tempera paint, paper strips, and but ashes. The selection of mediums, selection of drawing techniques are all based on personal concerns with emotion. For example, the light pink dots has a quality of warm, randomness and pleasure. In this case, the drawing is not a document or visual art but considered as landscape architecture itself.
The dream is one of the vaguest and also private dialogue people generated with themselves. Lucid dream is an intrapersonal communication involving subconsciousness. The drawing “ Cyan Dream” is a daily record of lucid dreams, which did not depict any form of scenery but just the intuition feelings and insights. As Perry Kulper stated, leaving behind conventional graphs such as plans or sections opens up possibilities of fusing thinking. Multi-methodology of visualization can make what is known and what might be known coexist.[4] In my case, I believe that once the information, experience, and analysis of dream get depicted, transferred and translated into a drawing format. It can help me to do design coordinating consciousness and subconsciousness. It is what conventional architecture drawing cannot do. In this case, the drawing is concerned as mapping.
The process of this research can be divided into three stages.
The first stage is the drawing documentation of dreams. The drawing paper will be taped to the window next to my bed. I will intentionally memorize and transform the emotion and vision onto the physical paper. It is the first layer of my intrapersonal communication: listening to subconsciousness.
The second stage is recreated specific emotional and visual experience I documented and recognized sufficient, in the method of a lucid dream. A lucid dream is a dream during which the dreamer is aware of dreaming. Lucid dreaming constitutes a hybrid and balanced state of consciousness with measurable differences from waking and REM [5] sleep. In the lucid dream space, people can intentionally construct a vision, raise dialogue with themselves, and do testimonies without physical world’s constraints. When they wake up, they can still remember the experience.
The third stage is continuously conducting drawing or model for specific purposes.
For design and intrapersonal communication purpose, I will try depicting my desire experiences, stories and related spaces based on elements of old dreams. For example, commonly, when speaking about a design character full of isolation and stress, people think about a closed, narrow volume, or dark space. However, I had a dream on February 26th that gave me the feeling of stress and isolation in a different format. In the dream, I was in a huge club. At first, I was talking with friends and drinking in a corner. Later my friend told me to go to the center dance pool. They made such big sound that people around started to look at me. I was so embarrassed because the center pool was so big and so bright while no one was in. I documented this dream on my drawing with many sharp lines as if there were shooting lights. Then I could indicate that a change from observing to being observed is stressful for me. Based on these experiments, I know that my interpretation of stress and isolation can translate into a large bright open space, with sharp infrastructure and the jump from noise to silence. The mapping documents of lucid dream successfully reconstructed identical emotional experience.
[1] Troshani, Flutur. 2013. “The Alphabet And The Algorithm By Mario Carpo. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, U.S.A., 2011. 184 Pp., Illus. Paper. ISBN: 978-0-2625-1580-1”. Leonardo 46 (3): 300-300. doi:10.1162/leon_r_00587,5.
[2] Corner, James. Forging New Landscapes, “Operations Eidetics”, Harvard Design Magazine, 24.
[3] Stoppani, Teresa. 2013. Material and critical: Piranesi’s erasures In: Wingham, Ivana, ed. Mobility of the Line. Birkhäuser, Basel. ISBN 3034608241, 245.
[4] Kulper, Perry. 2013. “A World Below”. Architectural Design 83 (5): 56-63. doi:10.1002/ad,1663, 59-62.
[5] Voss, Ursula, Romain Holzmann, Inka Tuin, and Allan J. Hobson. 2009. “Lucid Dreaming: A State Of Consciousness With Features Of Both Waking And Non-Lucid Dreaming”. Sleep 32 (9): 1191-1200. doi:10.1093/sleep/32.9.1191.
