Visualizing a Timebleed

Is it possible to “unfreeze” time, to let its flow manifest in a drawing?

Architects and other designers imagine and work to create preferred futures. Often, either consciously or coincidentally, our representations of designed or built projects capture a perfect, idealized moment, rather than the process of change. If we could make visible the process of change, and design within this constantly transforming context, might our built environments more naturally adapt to new circumstances, including the decay brought about by nature’s forces?

To remind myself of the inevitability of change, the text on my homepage chants “Flow creates form. Form shapes flow. Everything is ephemeral.”

Can architectural analysis and context-setting establish a framework for understanding a world always in transition, and prefigure a preferred future that engages this cosmic play, rather than resisting it?

During the spring of 2014, my last semester as dean, I worked with three talented, smart, funny colleagues, Cammy Brothers, Jeana Ripple, and Ghazal Abbasy-Asbah, along with Cynthia Smith and Anita Vigil, to present a day-long symposium titled “Intention + Improvisation: Four Provocations.” Prior to the symposium, each faculty member, working with a student on a week-long drawing assignment, proposed a question and set parameters to prompt a drawing. These four provocations structured the symposium. I worked with U Va undergraduate Anne Chen, and asked her to imagine a drawing that would unfreeze time. The site of the provocation was the James River, near Lynchburg Virginia.

I challenged Anne to reduce dependance on architectural conventions, while embracing emerging digital technologies. I asked her to imagine the water’s “experience” as a drop might float down the river, bobbing and rolling, to undercut the role of the privileged, static human subject on which most perspective drawings are based. I asked her to enlist GIS mapping to draw the river’s morphology, capturing the passage of geologic time in the river’s characteristic formal signature. I asked her to seek scale similarities between the river and its tributaries, and to plot this signature in the form of the path of a drop of water flowing down stream, fusing geological time and time measured as gallons per minute. In the end, she made one final drawing, incorporating her experiments into a cohesive response.

Over the course of the week’s charette, Anne used a variety of digital tools—GIS, Rhino, and the Adobe suite—along with pencil, pen, charcoal, and paper. I offered new prompts daily, and we discussed which tool might be most useful in addressing each challenge. While her digital skills were strong, it seemed to me that she more organically considered her marks when they were made directly by her hand. While I was specifically interested in suppressing the role of Cartesian space in orienting the viewer, it became obvious that the digital tools she used rely on a coordinate system to locate objects in space. For this reason, her preliminary charcoal speculations were especially helpful. The final drawing, a combination of scanned hand drawings, manipulated photographs, and GIS data, was evocative, and beautifully synthesized her explorations.

The project was, for me, both a primer for the course of study I have since pursued, and a good next step towards a new form of speculative drawing.