Abstract
The article analyses Frank Gehry’s insistence on the use of self-twisting uninterrupted line in his sketches. Its main objectives are first, to render explicit how this tendency of Gehry is related to how the architect conceives form-making, and second, to explain how Gehry reinvents the tension between graphic composition and the translation of spatial relations into built form. A key reference for the article is Marco Frascari’s ‘Lines as Architectural Thinking’ and, more specifically, his conceptualisation of Leon Battista Alberti’s term lineamenta in order to illuminate in which sense architectural drawings should be understood as essential architectural factures and not merely as visualisations. Frascari, in Eleven Exercises in the Art of Architectural Drawing: Slow Food for the Architects’s Imagination, after having drawn a distinction between what he calls ‘trivial’ and ‘non-trivial’ drawings—that is to say between communication drawings and conceptual drawings, or drawings serving to transmit ideas and drawings serving to their own designer to grasp ideas during the process of their genesis—unfolds his thoughts regarding the latter. The article focuses on how the ‘non-trivial’ drawings of Frank Gehry enhance a kinaesthetic relationship between action and thought. It pays special attention to the ways in which Frank Gehrys’ sketches function as instantaneous concretisations of a continuous process of transformation. Its main argument is that the affective capacity of Gehry’s ‘drawdlings’ lies in their interpretation as successive concretisations of a reiterative process. The affectivity of their abstract and single-gesture pictoriality is closely connected to their interpretation as components of a single dynamic system. As key issues of Frank Gehry’s use of uninterrupted line, the article identifies: the enhancement of a straightforward relationship between the gesture and the decision-making regarding the form of the building; its capacity to render possible the perception of the evolution of the process of form-making; and the way the use of uninterrupted line is related to the function of Gehry’s sketches as indexes referring to Charles Sanders Peirce’s conception of the notion of ‘index’.
Highlights
This article examines Frank Gehry’s drawing practice, paying special attention to how his preliminary sketches contribute to the genesis of ideas
As key issues of Frank Gehry’s use of uninterrupted line, the article identifies the following: first, the enhancement of a straightforward relationship between the gesture and the decision making regarding the form of the building; second, its capacity to render possible the perception of the evolution of the process of form-making; third, the way the use of uninterrupted line is related to the function of Gehry’s sketches as indexes referring to Charles Sanders Peirce’s conception of the notion of ‘index’; and, how Gehry’s sketches enhance a kinaesthetic relationship between action and thought
In contrast with the most dominant interpretations of Frank Gehry’s approach, which shed light on the morphological aspects of Frank Gehry’s buildings, neglecting his concerns about how the building functions, what I argue here is that through his use of the single uninterrupted line and the juxtaposition of the different sketches concerning the same building on a single sheet of paper, Gehry challenges the distinction between the plans, the views, and the sections and the tendency of certain architects of prioritising the one kind of drawing over the other
Summary
Considering the distinction between the drawings whose function is to transmit ideas—‘trivial’—and those aiding their designer to grasp ideas during their generation process—‘non-trivial’, we could claim that Gehry’s line-making refers to the first category. They function as loci for thought, concern the very condition of architectural experimentation, and belong ‘to a specific category of representation that makes architectural thinking possible’ This means that understanding Gehry’s sketches as dispositifs goes hand in hand with aiming to reveal ‘the relationships of all the parameters and the interacting forces characterising each parameter’
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