ARCH 409

Directed Drawing
Winter 2022
Instructors: Melissa Harris
Term: Winter 2022
Class Number: 409
Credits: 3
Required: No
Elective: Yes
Meets: Thu 2:30-5:30pm  2210 A&AB
Course Brief:

Directed Drawing – sketchbook as interactive tool

Premier Coup, a painting pedagogy championed by Charles Hawthorne in the early 20th century argues for the value of “first strike,” working directly from life, in situ. Our Michigan course will slice and dice the containers of our daily lives to illuminate relationships among form, behavior, meaning, and procedures of analysis that relate technique and vision. Design is a complex endeavor and central to that process, drawing plays many critical roles. From giving birth to mental images, to communicating instructions regarding assembly and construction, drawing is our primary language. In Direct Drawing we aim to get better prepared to use and understand these roles. Architecture is a combustion of opposites: concrete and physical, it is also emotional, experiential. How we may reveal this complexity through linear means is at the heart of our task. In simple terms, can measured factual drawings observed from life convey the essence of a structure or the experience of it? Often within a design endeavor parameters shift requiring on the spot revision, improvisation. To this end Direct Drawing will also aim to make quick drawers of each of you. This is no easy task, as quickness is achieved only with deep knowledge, of perspective rules, of proportioning and dividing, of framing and ordering. These come with practice.