picture books of buildings

We started school with looking at pictures of buildings. Architecture education that is. Our first day we were taken into this very large room which contained a lot of books neatly organized [Library was just being renovated so books were distributed, stored in several different faculty rooms]. They made us sit around one of the bigger tables and started bringing in the books from the shelves. It was all books with pictures in it. Next to these pictures were drawings and sketches but these particularly didn’t make much sense.

We were asked to imagine.

Imagine how these various types of black and white diagrams became subjects for the images. These imaginations didn’t get all of us very far. Random thoughts in your head don’t count for much. None the less there was these names that came by. Names of those whose drawings were found next to these pictures. These weren’t particularly important either. More distractions. The trick where it was the diagrams which created these pictures was still not revealed. Yes, most of us had seen or come across plans and knew to some extent the basics in construction, the overbearing pictures kinda blew the then available knowledge base. It’s difficult to know at one point that pictures are manipulated. It’s distorted. It’s meant to present things as something else. Some things which are often only representative of the real thing. We then kept the books aside. One of the faculty brought out some large sheets. They were similar to the drawings we saw in the books but more detailed. Markers, dimensions and all. She then started pointing out to the things around us. Doors, windows, shelves, desks, the table on which we were all seated - on the large sheet of paper.

We were asked to imagine.

Building is attributed to construction while architecture is of space. The notion of a set of things molding and presenting a space towards an identified program of habitation isn’t a preview of pictures. This act, entering into an understanding of architecture, is more of a culture of being made to navigate through several space types. And then back to the picture books. And then back again. This became what we did and how we did things. To try and remove distortions which presented them in front of us by focusing on the real.

A way to see rather than to imagine.