CAVE DRAWINGS
When we were traveling in the Cappadocia region of Turkey, we of course visited many caves which were carved out of the rock. Cappadocia is famous for cave dwellings and cave churches. Cappadocia is...
TRANSPARENT DRAWING
MIND MAPPING
A huge thank you to Denys Levassort over at Mind-Mapping-Decision.com. The link to Denys’ site is here http://www.mind-mapping-decision.com Although I do not speak French, Denys offers services in which mind mapping is applied to...
INNOCENCE LOST
The more that I work on this project, the more I think back to my educational experience in Architecture School. And I continue to ponder on how we generate the forms that we create. ...
LOGIC OF IMAGES
“I am inclined to believe that the logic of images is the prime mover of constructive imagination.” This quote is taken from Arnheim, who is quoting Ribot. When we have a concept or thought...
SURREALIST VISUAL FACTS
The Surrealists formed between the wars in Paris. They found suspect our cultural over reliance on words. Some previous thoughts on the literary dichotomy here. The Surrealist and subsequent Dada movements were founded to...
WEISENHOF HOUSING ESTATE
During the birth of modernism, the Weisenhof Housing exhibition has loomed large as a historical marker. In 1927, between the wars, the German government mounted the Deutcher Werkbund exhibition. This exhibition was established so...
EARLY EXPLORERS
As I read the far more scholarly and researched texts of others, it is always exciting to realize that early explorers have tread this pathway before us. Although they have not given us the...
GREEK DICHOTOMY
Our culture puts logical discourse ahead of visual discourse. This predilection started with the Greeks: the early Greek thinkers essentially disparaged sensory experience. Instead they encouraged the rigorous application of words and numbers. In...
LINEAR PERSPECTIVE – THE CRITICS
The development of the perspective should be seen as a natural component of the rational development of the human mind. Certainly the development of the perspective can be understood given our propensity for mathmatization...
BRAINLESS MASS ANTS
The Mould Manifesto by the painter Hunderwasser is hugely entertaining and inspirational. In his manifesto, he decries the use of straight lines in architecture. And what painter uses straight lines? Think of almost any...
PLAY THE FANTASY GAME
The building is built. The design was done the best that you could have done. Yet I find it interesting to pursue the what if scenarios. What if, for example, there would not have...
FULL CIRCLE TRANSPARENCY
Thomas French, one of our far flung correspondents, sent an interesting and related note. This regards the PBS series Time Scanners. So that engineers may understand in greater depth the structural integrity of the...
TRANSPARENT BLOCKS – PRODUCT REVIEW
“The maple-wood blocks…are in my fingers to this day.” This is the famous quote by Frank Lloyd Wright touting his kindergarten experiences with the maple block sets that were ubiquitous then. And we have...
VISUAL FACTS
A critical component of the creative conceptual process is when and how we retrieve our associations. As has been discussed earlier, our drawing makes direct deposits in our association database. When we draw, the...
TONE AND LINE
Transparent Drawing requires that you draw lines and then put tones between the lines. At least that is what I do. We should give some of our attention to the matter of tones and...
RIETVELD SCHRODER HOUSE
Our correspondent Mike reminds us of Gerald Rietveld’s Schroder Residence in Utrecht. Indeed, this building was one that I continued to gaze at thru the iconic book images as a student. I won’t bore...
THINKING THRU THE BLOCKS
I was amazed to learn that there are transparent building block sets. There seem to be two basic types. The first type is made of solid acrylic. These blocks have more of a translucency...
THANK GOD ALMIGHTY, WE’RE FREE AT LAST
To date, we have discussed various drawing projection systems for your Transparent Drawings. We have discussed the axonometric with it’s supreme objectivity. We have discussed the one and two point perspectives with their supreme...
ONE POINT VS TWO POINT PERSPECTIVE
Is there a big difference between a one point and two point perspective? Before answering that, it is important to understand that at the beginning of the Renaissance, the only perspective that they were...
FORM GENERATION
As designers, one of the basic points is to derive a form that is unique to your problem and somewhat different that what has come before. The derivation of a new form is in...
DRAWING FROM PHOTOS
Most architectural educators continue to tell students that you should not draw from photographs. The general line of thinking is that since a photo is a 2D image, it is too far removed from...
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