When we were in Turkey, we basically went in just about every Mosque we could find. There were always a group of men sitting around the Mosque, and they were always happy to open the doors for us so we could see the interior. Understandably, they were very proud of their Mosques. What was for […]
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29May
2014
DURAND AND REPRESENTATION
2014
I am of course not the first to question the place of representation in the depiction of architecture. Durand, writing in the early 1800s in his Mecanisme de la composition, stated the inextricable link between architecture and engineering. He was a French author, teacher and architect. Given his engineering bent, he naturally questioned the overtly […]
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27May
2014
ORDINARY BUILDING 1
2014
Let’s say you see a building that, for whatever reason, interests you. Get in the habit of taking photos with your phone or camera, with the knowledge that you will draw this building later from these photos. While waking around the village of Guzelyert in Turkey, I was amazed by the fantastic variation in the […]
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23May
2014
LOOS VILLA MUELLER
2014
I have been looking more at the residential work of Adolph Loos. This Transparent Drawing of the Mueller House, or Villa Mueller, is a result. I assembled this drawing from the multiple photographs and plans on Google Images. I don’t think that any of the books that I have include this work. In fact, I […]
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22May
2014
BYZANTINE SPACETIME
2014
I photographed this fresco in the Chora Church in Istanbul. In the reconstructed image, one can see the inconsistent use of perspective geometry. This Byzantine painting was done most likely in the 1300s, well before the discovery of the modern perspective system. Some of the building forms are oriented in one way, and others with […]
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20May
2014
TACTILE TRACES
2014
Nicolaides in The Natural Way to Draw describes the essential drawing phenomenon as tracing with your eye. That is, you move your pencil in the same manner that your eye sees the object that you are drawing. This is of course what we have typically called hand eye coordination; the act of drawing is seeing […]
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19May
2014
HAGIA SOPHIA 2
2014
When traveling, sometimes you become so captivated because of the beauty of what you are looking at that you simply have to stop and sketch. This was one of them. Although I will confess that I did not have to stoop down in some doorway to find an out of the way place to sketch. […]
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16May
2014
SENSORY MEMORY
2014
One of the prime texts which we are typically all given is The Natural Way To Draw by Nicolides. He writes of sensory memory, which is within all of us. We gain sensory memory as a result of living. Sensory memory is the composite memory of all of our senses. We can and do draw […]
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15May
2014
HAGIA SOPHIA
2014
This has to be one of the most compelling buildings in the world. My first impression was that it looked almost like a ruin, given the multitude of elements that have been constructed around the base. The building communicates a long and slow sense of time. And all of the structural buttressing and Islamic additions […]
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14May
2014
PERSPECTIVE POWER
2014
Desargues was a French mathematician, engineer and architect who lived at the beginning of the 17th Century. In the 1640s, he stated that perspective theory was seen as a tool to help moderate between the idea of the building and the building itself. In the Renaissance, the perspective was seen as a new and very […]
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