DRAWING TOGETHER
SEPTEMBER 2021
“Boccaccio’s fourteenth century classic the Decameron takes the form of 100 tales told by a group of young people who have retreated to a villa while waiting for their native Florence to escape the grip of the Black Death”.
The 100 Day Studio is an initiative started by The Architecture Foundation that adapts Boccaccio’s 14th century classic the Decameron into a series of Zoom lectures. Our studio was invited to host a lecture on Day 26.
Our office has a long-standing tradition of drawing together. From the plaster floor drawing we made of the Bishop Edward King Chapel, to the collective drawings for the “Losing Myself” installation at the Venice Biennale, the studio’s practice of collaborative draughtsmanship has always been a sociable activity, materialising our thoughts in a way that would not be possible individually. Starting from a roll of tracing paper, drawing together becomes the medium through which we relate and converse. During a recent online studio discussion on the relationship between memory and space, we started sketching our office as we remembered it. We drew it together with Niall using the Zoom Whiteboard whilst recounting memories of the space we once shared. The drawing started to become collaborative, as each colour represented a different person’s drawing. We realised that through using this technology, there was the opportunity to share our collective drawing tradition with a wider audience. We decided to host an interactive drawing session for our 100 Day Studio lecture, hoping to illustrate the sense of community through audience participation during this period of isolation.
The move to working through remote digital media has been an experiment for us on its own: how could we choreograph this drawing exercise with hundreds of participants communicating with each other in real time? After hosting a few digital drawing sessions in our studio, the importance of designing a framework that would produce a cohesive collective drawing while still allowing for individual creative expression became apparent. Since the lecture would be taking place on a Thursday and finishing in time for the weekly 8pm Clap for Carers event in the UK, our narrative recognised our shared lockdown experience and appreciation for our health workers.
There were around 300 people taking part in the collective drawing session, which was co-hosted by everyone from our studio. The participants were asked to draw their own house with themselves at a window. Then, they were asked to imagine putting on their shoes, go outside, and join one another in front of the house to clap for NHS and carers. They were invited to draw themselves hosting a street party in their neighbourhood when the lockdown is over. Very quickly, we saw each one of the whiteboards being filled with trees, flowers, picnic blankets and delicious pastries. The hosts then invited the audience to take a virtual walk down the street and design a public space together. It could be anything from a communal garden to a public swimming pool; from allotments to an athletics track; from a market to a pub, etc. It was great to talk about the variety of activities people looked forward to doing again.
It was a one hour event. The collective drawing took 25 minutes in 20 breakout whiteboard rooms. The final composition was assembled from 20 fragments in 25 minutes while Niall gave a talk. It was completed just in time for the weekly 8pm Clap for Carers event in the UK. The collective drawing was revealed alongside a soundtrack by the composer Kevin Polland, mixing our own clapping with live sounds coming in from the street. We recognise this particular beautiful assembly of sketches is just one of many possible outcomes, reflecting the unpredictability produced by the structure of this exercise. This drawing is not a finished artefact, but rather a never-ending work-in-progress. We look forward to weaving the next tapestry!
THERE IS MUSIC IN EVERY BUILDING
SEPTEMBER 2019
Back in March, I was lucky enough to take part in the annual TEDxCambridgeUniversity conference as one of the 14 speakers. Whilst daunting, this presented a wonderful opportunity to explore and develop my personal interest in architecture and music and how they might interrelate.
I am passionate about both subjects and have long since had a hunch that they are linked. This notion centred around the idea that both architecture and music are composed of layers. On further investigation, numerous parallels became apparent despite the fundamental difference that architecture is visual, physical, and music is aural, intangible.
They share common language – structure, rhythm, harmony, texture, form and so on.
They are both compositions. Architectural composition is the arrangement of building components in space, sensed with our eyes. Musical composition is the arrangement of sounds in time, sensed with our ears.
Architecture is given its distinctive quality or character through choice of materials – stone, brick, timber, glass and so on. The musical equivalent is the range of instruments and sounds available to a composer – piano, strings, brass, percussion for example.
Architectural drawings are like sheet music, one instructing builders on how to construct a building and the other instructing musicians on how to perform a piece of music. In this way, a busy building site resembles an orchestra.
In considering the relationship, one can’t go too far without referencing Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s famous 18th century quote that “Architecture is frozen music”. This suggests solidifying, giving physical presence to sounds and led me to another line of questioning – can we translate the visual, physical, spatial components of architecture into the aural, intangible, time-based components of music? Can we look at a building and hear its music?
To help find answers, I contacted my brother – an electronic music producer – and we agreed to work together on a musical representation of a façade designed by this office – West Court for Jesus College Cambridge. It lends itself well to the test as there is a clear rhythm and well-defined order to the visual composition.
We considered each bay of the façade as a bar in the music with each layer of the façade translated into a different musical component. Repetitive structural brick piers were translated to a beat. The stone fins added to the rhythm as another layer of percussion. The first floor windows were represented as piano chords, setting the groove and reinforcing the meter of the composition. The two floors above were translated into layers of melody, and the hidden foundations dictated the bassline.
The exercise was intended to be diagrammatic. My brother had many ideas about how to make a better piece of music but for me, the legibility of the translation was key. We could have pushed it further, giving more thought to which sounds or instruments might be best suited to different materials for example.
A lot has been written about the links between Classical architecture and music but I am more interested in the here and now. We are in a technological revolution. With the introduction of computers as a compositional tool over the last few decades, I think it is more apparent than ever that both contemporary architecture and music involve the organised, now computer-aided repetition of a series of components.
Today the primary instrumental music is Electronic. It is generally composed on a computer and it is this computer that “performs” the piece, creating the final “recording”. It is still the case that most buildings today are built, or at least put together, by hand, but change is afoot. The use of 3D printing, drones and even robots on building sites hints at a future in which computers replace humans as the “performers” in construction.
If we think about the classical music of the past in terms of the classical buildings of the past, we can align its melodies and orchestration with ornament, craft, organic sculptural form. Contemporary architecture is closer to electronic music. For some this will have negative connotations but it is important to recognize the full spectrum, from the mundanity of elevator music (or Muzak), to the ubiquity of pop music, and on to the progressive sounds of electro, house, techno and so on. As computers continue to have more impact on the way we practice, architects must embrace their potential in the same way music producers have, striving to be more Techno than Muzak.
To view the talk please click here.