pad
padConventions of Architectural Drawing: Representation and Misrepresentation

Edited by James S. Ackerman and Wolfgang Jung

By a convention of architectural drawing, I mean the sign—made normally on a two-dimensional surface—that translates into graphic form an aspect (e.g., the plan or elevation) of an architectural design or of a building. It is an arbitrary invention, but once established it works only when it means the same thing to an observer as it does to the maker; it is a tool of communication.
This book is based on research done in a seminar on conventions of architectural drawings offered by the editors at Harvard University Graduate School of Design in 1997. The authors, then candidates for advanced degrees who participated in the course, are now practicing architects, with the exception of Dr. Anne Bergen, Professor Classics at the University of California at Los Angeles.

CONTENTS

Forward

Introduction
James S. Ackerman

Diagrams and the Villa Rotonda
Samuel Lasky

The Pressures of Paradox: Michelangelo and the Sforza Chapel
Brian Bell

Tilting Volutes, Bending Cornices and Perplexing Angles and Planes, or How Borromini Might Have Given Architecture Over to the “Anarchy of Imagination”
Wolfgang Jung

Drawings as Social Practice: Ideal Town Plans of Nineteenth Century London
Karin Tehve

Theo van Doesburg and the Undescriptive Qualities of the Axonometric
Alan Christ>

El Lissitzky’s Four Composite Drawings of the Abstract Gallery, Hannover Museum, 1926-1927
Ann Bergen

Representing the Almost Nothing: the Drawing of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe
Sze Tsung Leong

An Interview with Hani Rashid
Walker McKinley

Where Does Architecture Live? Presentation, Representation and the Represented in the Work of Asymptote
Walker McKinley

Notes

Illustration Credits

Appendix: Checklist of Architectural Drawings at Harvard


Copyright 2000 James S. Ackerman 271 pages, black and white


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