Pages from the Sketchbook – Roger Connah

Architects used to rely on drawings as transfers, steps from the idle towards the occupied, from the intuitive towards the framed. Today, perhaps due to time, anxiety, software and social media, the way architects think and draw may be changing. Some go as far as claiming not many are doing it these days - thinking and drawing, that is.

These calligraphisms - 5 Easy Pieces - started in a 10”x10” Golden Sketchbook (Ordningoch Reda, Sweden) and then began life in real time. By real time I mean there is no advanced planning of the sheet-as-canvas, or where the information and knowledge will be layered. Crucial to the effectiveness, or not, of mapping is the unknown material - the narrative and links that emerge from an event - a lecture, an outline, or a program. Without agenda or destination. Incomprehensibility is not determined by the layering as how the brain erases and edits as it goes along, but merely demonstrates the workings of the architectural brain in action. The drawings and maps that emerge erase knowledge and learning as fast as they locate new thinking. The drawing of text is forever thinking through architecture, without harbouring the intention to build anything; thus a drawing of text, and an architecture of words. These drawings rely on a model of knowledge and language that fluctuates continually between fluency, redundancy, absence and infancy. Always, but always, they begin in the middle of something else. Memory, direction, required skill and narrative are all contained in the instant unthinking precision of this downhill drawing.

(This article was first published in Issue#19 of mondo*arc india journal - an initiative by STIR.)