The Tell-Tale Drawing

An Interview with Marco Frascari

By Martin Moeller

Blueprints Summer 2007
Volume XXV, No.3

Marco Frascari is a practicing architect and the director of the School of Architecture at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. A native of Mantua, Italy, he studied in Venice under the famed modernist Carlo Scarpa (1906-78) before coming to the United States, where he received a master’s degree from the University of Cincinnati and a doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania. He subsequently taught at several universities in the U.S. and Europe. Frascari’s scholarly interests include the history and theory of architectural drawing and the potential of good design to enhance human happiness.

Martin Moeller:  How did you become interested in the theoretical implications of architectural drawing?

Marco Frascari:  It started when I was working with Carlo Scarpa and seeing how he used drawing as a form of communication with both students and outsiders. His drawings were performances. 

Scarpa probably had synesthesia [an unusual condition in which normally distinct senses or perceptions overlap—e.g., the association of a particular flavor with a specific color, or of a certain sound with an abstract shape].  For him, the purpose of a drawing was not just to depict what any human could see, but somehow to convey the totality of what we feel.  Students in his class would make drawings in which, of course, the trees were green and the bricks were red, and so on.  But Scarpa did not like this.  He was not interested in a drawing as a representation of a real building; for him, the drawing should express some essence—some perceptual presence of an architectural idea—rather than just pretending to be a photographic substitute.

I did not understand all this at the time.  Later, when I discovered synesthesia and its implications for design, I learned that all children are synesthetic, but we lose it just by growing up.  Consequently, architects have to rediscover these child-like qualities and, by using drawing, have to perceive all dimensions, because we design buildings for totality—acoustics, smells, and so on are all part of the architectural design.  What a drawing can do, by color or by manipulation of ink, is to achieve for the architect not only a visual rendering, but also an understanding of other perceptions that you don’t visualize. 

Moeller:  Did such complex drawing techniques carry through to Scarpa’s actual construction documents?

Frascari:  You had to produce some credible drawings in order to bill the client.  Scarpa would sometimes start a project by saying, “I have to have a door like this,” even before deciding on the basic design of the building.  Well, if you have a client who is expecting a house, you can’t just show a sketch of a beautiful door and expect to get paid.  Scarpa often did not bill until the end of the project, because it was not until then that he actually had something real to show. 

Moeller:  How did your study of architectural drawing proceed beyond Scarpa?

Frascari:  I became interested in understanding the full potential of drawing.  There was one amazing set of drawings that captured my eye early.  It was done in 1590, in Venice, by Giovanni Antonio Rusconi.  He created unique drawings showing the process of construction of a particular building in different phases and at different moments.  The idea was borrowed from Vessalius’s famous anatomical drawings of that period.  Rusconi gives the viewer a very peculiar understanding of the structure because he can show what is not visible in the finished building. 

There was also Mario Ridolfi, who was a very good friend of Scarpa.  He did many drawings on tracing paper, but he used both sides of the paper.  Unlike Scarpa, Ridolfi was an ink pen guy—his fingers were always covered with ink.  He had an ability of sketching that was very close to the process of making a building.

Moeller:  You talk about Scarpa, Rusconi, Ridolfi.  As an Italian you may be biased, but do you think the concept of drawing as an analytical tool is a peculiarly Italian phenomenon?

Frascari:  There is a particular tradition of analytical drawing in Italy.  Contrary to what you might expect, this was even evident well before the Renaissance.  Of course, the major achievements in drawing in the Gothic period were all French and German, and there were relatively few from Italy, but the Italian ones, rather than showing the finished building, tended to show the construction process.  The scaffolding used to build the structures, for instance, often would appear on the drawings.  The character of the drawings themselves actually suggested a building under construction.

As for why this tradition might be so closely associated with Italy, I think there may be a linguistic explanation.  The word “design” comes from the Italian word disegno, and you might assume that that word derived from Latin, but in Latin there was no such word.  Rather, the Italian word slowly arose within the field of architecture—not the other fine arts—and it was related to what was called “designation” (disegnare equals designare).  If you think about it, the designer is the one who “designates” where things go.  In the pre-Renaissance era, one might draw a “plan” of a building by putting poles in spots “designating” the corners of the actual structure to be built.  “Design” was much more broadly understood to be a craft—an ongoing and circular process—than it is now, when it is generally associated with a finished object that may be regarded as a work of art.  Gradually, the modern sense of the word emerged, and became understood as l’arte del disegno—the art of design.

Moeller:  You have written about the idea of “the well-tempered drawing,” alluding to Johann Sebastian Bach’s collection of musical compositions titled The Well-Tempered Clavier.  What do you mean by that term with respect to drawings?

Frascari: The phrase “well-tempered” has to do with word “temperature.”  In Italian, the word tempo means both “weather” and “time.”  The drawing process takes time, and once it is completed, the drawing itself must also weather.  A good building should grow more beautiful as it weathers.  In the same way, a well-tempered drawing is one that has weathered well.  It is not just the gradual change in color of the paper and ink, but even the change in humidity in the room where you are working will have an influence.  For me, there is the setting of a powerful synesthetic condition between the weathering of a drawing and the weathering of a building. 

Real architectural drawings are very dirty.  Scarpa’s drawings were on the table for a long time, and they show a building up of layers.  This is true even in ink drawings, but the ink drawing in the end looks very clean like a building does at end of construction, but even on the ink drawings you can often see traces of the “construction” of the drawing, which can be very revealing.

Moeller:  You also wrote an essay on the “tell-tale detail,” arguing that study of the smallest elements can inform our broader understanding of buildings.  Some of the most interesting drawings throughout history have been details.

Frascari:  I was reading an article in which [Richard] Rogers was talking about his experience with [former business partner Renzo] Piano, who was the son of a builder.  Piano, he said, would always start the design process with details.  Rogers would always start from totality.  Either method can lead to beautiful architecture, but I think it is extremely important to recognize that both exist.  And each requires its own kind of drawing.  Erich Mendelsohn, for instance, started from totality, but Otto Wagner started from detail, and they produced radically different drawings.  Mendelsohn represented shadow and form, and not the tectonics of construction; Wagner was the opposite.  But eventually the two meet in the middle. 

Moeller:  How would you assess the impact of the digital revolution and changes in architectural practice?

Frascari:  Modern computer drawings are so ascetic.  They look like the “clean environments” where they make chips and computer equipment. 

The authority of hand drawing has been lost a bit.  Now, with computers, someone has to do a translation between the image constructed by the architect and the actual building to be built.  [The engineering firm] ARUP does a very good job of this, transforming the architect’s drawing so it can represent the real act of construction.  They do these amazing drawings—the construction to allow the construction, as it were. 

When architectural drawings became merely legal documents, they lost most of their power.  But, computer or not, one thing is true today that has always been true—the architect rules construction with the use of well-constructed and well-weathered graphic representations.

I once designed a villa close to Verona, Italy, which included a spiral stairway.  One day I got call from the contractor.  “Architetto,” he said, because in Italy we are addressed with our professional title just as a doctor would be in the U.S., “we don’t have wings; we cannot fly.”  At first I did not understand, but then he explained.  You see, when I did the design for the stair, I started from the main floor, and projected everything down and up from there as necessary, and it turns out that the contractor could not physically get to these key points, which were on the second level, to use as baselines in construction.  “Oh, you’re right,” I responded.  Clearly, through the act of construction, he had discovered something that I had not considered while creating my drawing.  That’s fine, as long as we have a system for working through these things when they arise.

Moeller:  As a professor and director of an architecture school, how are you integrating hand drawing into the curriculum?

Frascari:  It is very important that we are teaching drawing.  I want students to discover the possibility of synesthesia, and discover the tactility of the drawing.  The digital world is so far away—you use only two fingers (at least I do).  It is another dimension away from the real act of drawing. 

There is a beautiful description in Cesariano’s 14th-century translation of Vitruvius’s De architectura [now commonly known as The Ten Books of Architecture] that says that, when you are drawing on a piece of paper on your table, the compass walks on the paper just as the architect walks on a field covered with snow.  As you go around, the foot marks this and marks that; you can do that on snow, on plaster, or on paper.  It’s like the joke about letting your fingers do the walking.

Really, we are exposing our students to the role of drawing in architectural thinking, helping them to understand that drawing is the best way to conceive a building.

 

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