Plain Jane

Not-so-sketchy in Philly. It’s nice to work out a storefront design on a background that looks closer to the site’s next permutation than the derelict facade that’s really here. The plain jane storefront is cleaned up and wearing colors amenable to the next occupant. (I should not have included the blade sign; it’s bound to change.) Next up: back and forthing about window heights, visibility, building codes, etc. That's where having a sketch of the bigger context and a site plan helps.

Bring in the fog

Aerial perspectives are a challenge. This detail is from full sheet size, 22" x 30", for a project that's likely to raise a lot of hackles. For conceptual illustrations where there is no architectural info available, the context-obliterating clouds of of Chinese and Japanese landscape style, sansui-ga, from the 15th c. is appealing. Only salient scenes would have to be drawn, with mist intervening where no design info is available. In the 21st c, I have to invent built forms, continuous to the property line, where none may ever be built. The result of can be beautiful and give its viewer a sense of soaring. That's great for fund-raising and approving boards of directors who may operate from a detached position. When no end-user will ever soar, is it disingenuous to sell an idea this way? Does it bridge or exacerbate the gap between end-user and promoter?

2 Barn or not 2 Barn

In a semi-rural setting 65 miles from San Francisco, who needs two barns? How will the new digs look from the driveway with the old barn gone? I gave the sketch app on my iPad another try. Colleague Doug Wittnebel is in love with it; for me it still feels inauthentic, and about as sensuous as scratching my ear with an oven mitt.

cool fire

MLH hanging the drawings on 3 Feb

Once a week I lead a class at UC Berkeley Extension, offering students tools to visually explore concepts for the use of space, and to efficiently communicate their ideas with drawings. Something that makes UC Extension different: instructors have day jobs in related fields and do the instructing on the side. We bring biased, contemporary, practical experience to students. 

In Fall 2014 some of the classes will move to 160 Spear, and for Spring 2015 all Extension action moves to the new digs on Spear Street. I look forward to meeting new students there every semester.

Framing techniques

 I'm outta here!

This scratchboard made for Marley Lynch's 3rd birthday is my first Sendak-inspired image that came to mind after hearing today's sad news. Goodbye to Maurice Sendak, who passed yesterday morning at 83. His phrases run through my mind every week: "Milk! Milk! Milk for the morning cake!"

In a clutch of radio interviews compiled by WHYY's Fresh Air to commemorate his passing, Sendak recalls being a sickly child in the years before vaccines and antibiotics. He spent much time in bed. To pass time during visits, his grandmother would close, then open the window shade for him, to great theatric effect. Mundane scenes of Brooklyn were enhanced by that prelude of anticipation. "The window became my movie camera, my television set." Can you imagine a better way to imprint a framing technique for illustration on a young fellow?

When Sendak chooses to employ depth cues, his volumetric worlds are rendered to the flat page so believably, giving great depth to landscape as in his "decorations" for Randall Jarrell's The Animal Family. Other views, like the party scene in Where the Wild Things Are, compress depth to a claustrophobic sliver. A master of narrative, whether a band header or full-page embellishments in dense pen and ink, Sendak enchants readers to lose themselves in each frame.  Children do this very easily, but Sendak's spell works on grownups, too. I suspect all the childhood window-watching gave him a lifelong ability to climb into the frame and report back to us.

blowing Brunelleschi's cover

A student made an excellent observation Wednesday night. After trying to correct a freehand sketch of a scene using new-found perspective tools, she remarked that her initial sketch felt more like the space as she experienced it. The line quality in the first sketch was personal and idiosyncratic, recalling the sensitive lines she generated during blind contour exercises. The "cleaned up" drawing was more like an Etch-a-sketch image.

Anyone who has lost happiness based on a misunderstood email knows that a low-res, virtual, electronic form of communication is full of pitfalls. So much more is happening than what those few text characters convey. The same is true when describing on flat paper a design idea that's to be experienced in the 3D environment.

Linear perspective is only one means of translation, one that has been dominant for centuries. If you've done a perspective construction, you know it's nothing like sketching with a pad of paper on your lap. Much that we have assumed to be highly skilled perspective constructions may in fact have used another translation mode, one that may have seemed more technically accurate at the time. Here is David Hockney refuting the accuracy of single-camera perspective!  Here, a Japanese image provides a comprehensive spatial narrative by other means. If you want to look further, here is Hockney as Toto, pulling away the curtain that (he alleges) hid perspective's Wizard of Oz for 600 years. Consider the "rules" of perspective more as tools, or guidelines, for translating an optical experience that occurs in 3D, over time, onto a flat surface.

The means we use to come up with what "feels" faithful to a visual experience today may also carry a message about our relationship to technology at the time of translation.

observing one's dominion

Many designers like to feel on top of their projects, virtually and figuratively. Using images like this during design development might work for office politics or designer-builder relations, but what end-user ever encounters a building from this angle? Once it's approved, it's a little late to say "Gee, the parapets seem out of proportion." The project above ended with a comic compensation for such oversight. 

3D modeling is now so well-embedded in building industry software, it's easy to periodically examine a project from the user's eye level. If true perspectives are not possible, track a project via elevation, perhaps with figures for scale. Elevations may miss the dimension of depth, but they approximate the user experience more accurately than the above type of view (isometric paraline.)

A designer should know how to request a specific view from software. It's important for design students to understand the basic geometry of linear perspective, since any 3D modeling software is built on classic geometry. At least for now. 

the squeeze

Maybe it's a sex thing or a childbirth thing, but early on in my schematic design experience,  I got the idea that the entry experience should be a kind of squeeze, a tightness before you get to where you're going in a space. Not just a visual portal, but a time-sensitive transitional experience long enough to give "entry" its own experience, perhaps to lend relief to its end. Not every project can spatially afford this (think Ben & Jerry shop), but it has been fun to try and interject and illustrate this element in projects. I was reminded of the squeeze during a recent trip through airport security and started to wonder: just how long has probing, wanding, multiple ID verification and the possibility of a pat-down or body-cavity search been a prelude to travel?  What a squeeze on the front end of a trip! It makes the anonymity and indifferent solitude of exiting the plane and the airport liberating. When I get home my dog will kiss me. It was kind of depressing to learn that dogs, a little like an insecure spouse, only do that to check what the missus was eating while away.

master draftsman

I ran in to Ken Sekiguchi, architect, photographer and master draftsman, on Fourth Street the other day. I had the good fortune to be on collaborative teams with Ken at Hanns Kainz' office for about 10 years, on the pencil (vs. mouse) side of the digital divide. Ken's drawings are exquisite examples of hand-drafted orthographic drawings. A medium both aesthetic and practical, his drawings translated gesture, bullshit, and schematic design into something that can be priced, measured and built. Contractors who bid projects based on his drawing sets should have bid low just for the privilege of working from those documents! Instead, because the drawings communicated design so thoroughly, they bid higher since they anticipated their work would be subject to the same scrutiny. What a bind. This image will hold a place until I get my original Ken Sek scanned.

level playing fields

Another group of us is made newly-liminal, and another opportunity to observe boundary behaviors arises. I had the opportunity to portray interim shelter designs and configurations for displaced Haitians. The drawings had to put the product in context, which meant looking at photos of Port-au-Prince with curiosity instead of shock and sadness. Although most everything to be delivered is modular and already expressed in 3D model format, the software-composed configurations were so -- out of left field: brutal, machined, inappropriate. I wondered how things were playing out with "the competition", how living space among our displaced brothers and sisters in Haiti is being defined now: chalk lines on a soccer field, tarp-defined boundaries, rubble repurposed as property lines. Click the photo to get closer. Google Earth assists.

reversal

As counterpoint to describing buildings with black dusty marks or vector-based lines on white paper, I started painting from a live human with wet media -- white paint on black paper. What a reversal! Volume informed by light alone. Good brain exercise.

view selection

Information one gets about the context of an image's presentation will inform view selection. Choosing good views is half the job. Which view best invokes what my clients wish to project? From what eye level is the project experienced by its user? What season or time of day will create a positive attachment to the audience? In what light does the design look best? Is a 3D model available for seeing the overall project, or is an aerial necessary? I try not to lie about the volumes. It's not necessary to make a ceiling taller, a room wider, omit columns or add landscaping that is too many years forward. The way linear perspective works, a given view implicates the viewer in a scenario and positions him or her exactly where the client wants. If one has to make multiple views to see the "whole" space, all the better. In that case, the viewer gets the brain-candy task of knitting sequential views with his or her own imagination. Choosing views is very powerful.

black holes

I had been working with a retail client on look-and-feel, sketching different phases of the retail experience with scenes unique to the new flagship store in Manhattan. The store design crew sent numerous product pics and architectural files to a 3d modeler, who created an animated fly-through for concept presentation to the company's CEO. Except for the fixture design, the layout and most of the interior details were complete. Their boss found the video stiff and unfriendly. Photos of product had been stretched like silly putty around shapes that didn't match the products' proportions. Product was sparsely distributed and -- nightmare to any retailer -- nobody was in the store! Perhaps most painful for the design crew (apart from the uncannily familiar soundtrack) was how details that had not been fully worked out appeared: black polygons! These virtual voids, stole a show that could have been about how well the space was working. The concept was presented again, using quick sketches, and it moved along, approved. Later, a technique was developed to embed the brand's proprietary video ads and music into online sketch presentations.

implicating the observer

If 7 people were to rely solely on your verbal description of a scene you experienced, each person might have quite a different picture in their mind's eye! Give each of those seven a map of the scene. Their internal pictures may shift, but still differ. If each were also given an elevation of the space, the individual perceptions might begin to align. How much would providing a perspective drawing ensure that those seven people are now "on the same page" in their understanding of the scene?

Constructing a linear perspective might be called a public relations task, a translation, or propaganda, where the perspectivist mediates between a purported reality and an audience.

Beginning with selection of the view itself, the perspectivist has a great deal of control over how a space is perceived. Traditional linear perspective fixes a relationship between the virtual 3d environment to be portrayed on a 2d surface and an observer. The distance between the observer and the environment, the height of the observer's eye level and the direction of the gaze can all be inferred from a perspective drawing. Put another way, the creator of a linear perspective establishes a relationship between a virtual volumetric space and its audience-observer. The observer can see no more of the space than what has been revealed in the linear perspective.