Somebody Drew That.

I am super excited to welcome the fabulous and super talented Melbourne based architect Byron George of Russell and George. Hooray! You may recall my previous interview with Byron (click right here), and I also interviewed his parter Ryan Russell (see interview here). I was lucky to meet the pair in person at the IDEA awards last year – I had a distinct feeling we would get on from both their interviews, but I could have never guessed exactly how much. It was love at first site! Well for me anyway. Or maybe that was just because of all the drinks we had. Ah, who knows… Anyway, Byron told me that he recently registered a site called Somebody Drew That (just like the title of this post). Click here to see more. – x dana

When I think of yellowtrace, I think of a number of things. Apart from Dana’s beautiful imagery, for me it usually speaks of the germination of an idea. Putting thoughts on the paper to generate three dimensional form and space. Layer upon layer things are refined and worked out, changed, explored and corrected. yellowtrace allows us to generate and explore ideas, in a forum that is quick and uninhibited. It allows us to filter our ideas until they are just right, before they are filtered by such mundane things as clients, practicalities and budgets.

The filtering process is probably the most important part in the germination of an idea. But what happens when the filtering process fails? When a bad idea on paper becomes a bad building? Or when a good idea becomes muddied? There are a whole number of reasons for it – the desire for “creative expression”, an overly bossy client with questionable taste, budget cuts, or just good old fashioned architectural ego.

Something happens in the translation from two dimensional paper to three dimensional object or space. Sometimes it’s a happy accident, sometimes the drawings and ideas are so strong they can’t be argued with. This post reminds us that most of the things around us started life as a drawing.

It always astounds me when looking at the detail of the Opera House how the tile setout was done without the use of a computer. Every panel in this image is slightly different, fundamentally because of the decision to make each panel radiate from one central point rather than follow the curvature in two directions. As each shell is derived from a single sphere, it would have been possible to repeat a single tiled panel across the building. Thankfully, the decision was made to fit each panel within the structural ribs on the building, giving the surface a unique texture, but generating the need for hundreds of drawings and moulds. There are more than one million tiles on the facade of this building.

Images courtesy of the Royal Society of New South Wales.

I would love to have been a fly on the wall at the planning office when drawings for this building arrived. You can almost see the architect presenting the drawings with an arm draped casually across the top of the page. “It’s just a minor insertion into the street, decorative columns and a plaza”. The scheme seems to have been sold on the fact that it maintains important views under it(!). In a new twist on contextual design, Will Alsop and Robbie/Young + Wright’s Sharp Centre for Design in Toronto appears to be “mating” with the other surrounding buildings on campus.

Speaking of context, we have another version around the corner in Toronto’s Royal Ontario Museum. This time, the new building has literally been dropped onto the existing one. Every Colonial city with a slight inferiority complex must have a Libeskind-esque building to put it on the map (just look at what Federation Square did for Melbourne – it now features in at least half a dozen “ten ugliest buildings in the world” lists). In this case the author of the building was the real thing. Note the standard movie issue North American school buses to add familiarity.

My favourite shot is the close up rendering with scores of dazed people wandering in an electric fog. It’s as if they’ve been transported to Anchorage in 1964 and the city has just crumbled around them. The completed building is shown below.

Images from World Architecture News.

Sometimes an idea has such clarity and strength from the beginning that it seems completely effortless in it’s translation from drawing to reality. Below is a plan and section for the Air Force Adademy Chapel in Colorado Springs, designed by SOM and Walter Netsch (built between 1956 and 1962). The drawings here completely capture what this building is about.

The angular verticality of this structure compliments the surrounding rectilinear buildings and mountains. It’s masculine, uplifting and perfectly captures mid century American confidence.

Images from Great Buildings.

Most architects and designers have their heads in drawings for most of their professional careers. They are crucial in the transformation of an idea into reality, whether to work through an idea, sell it or communicate how to build it. It is after all, the end result, whether it’s an interior or building for which we are judged and not the actual work we do. If the drawings don’t have it, chances are the building won’t either.

– Byron Geroge, Russell and George.