Two lectures at Drawing Research Platform, Somerset, 2024, ENAC Summer Workshop
The following text is a brief reflection on two lectures delivered at Shatwell Farm in August 2024 as part of the ENAC EPFL Drawing Research Platform. To read the students’ reflections and view their drawings, click here. To read an account of the week, click here.
The two lectures at Drawing Matter emerged out of the briefing of Prof. Patricia Guaita, who felt there should be moments for the students to be in contact with the drawings of the collection, structuring a reflexive counterpoint to the practical work happening in the open air around Shatwell Farm. After researching the open digital catalogue of the Drawing Matter collections I was then compelled to explore two different themes, not spatially related, but always connected to my Brazilian background, which I thought would be interesting to share.
The first one, ‘Drawing and the “design of production” within architecture’, meant to explore big format drawings across the collection—many at 1:1 scale—dealing with the boundaries between drawing, the building site and the production of architecture. The talk reflected on work I recently conducted as an affiliated researcher at the project ‘Translating Ferro / Transforming Knowledges of Architecture, Design and Labour for the New Field of Production Studies (TF/TK)’—a four-year collaborative project between researchers in Brazil and the UK funded by Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo (FAPESP) and the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). In this project I reflect on the work of Brazilian architect João Filgueiras Lima (Lelé) and some of his own shop casting moulds ‘production’ drawings, within the framework of Sergio Ferro’s theoretical thought—also a Brazilian architect whose texts the TF/TK research project brought into English for the first time[1]. Large scale detail, and construction-oriented drawings from the Drawing Matter collections formed a great pair to Lelé’s drawings and their analysis, along with Ferro’s reflection on the differences between the ‘drawing for production’ and the ‘drawing of production’.
Click here to view the group of drawings ‘Drawing of Production’.
The second lecture, named ‘Connections between the Drawing Matter collections and Brazilian architecture/drawings’ stands for comparisons and relations between the Drawing Matter collections and Brazilian architectural drawings—it was also an opportunity to add some ‘new names’ to the students’ architectural background and to find interesting links and parallels between the archive drawings and work realised in Brazil. The lecture was meant to spark reflection on why we draw, as architects and engineers, structured through themes such as ‘landscape’, ‘sketch’, ‘observation’, ‘survey’, ‘travel’ and ‘intervention’. This structure allowed for a great session that acknowledged the broadness of the Drawing Matter collections.
Click here to view the group of drawings ‘Connections’.
Notes
- Sergio K. Ekerman, Lelé: Dissonant Paths to Prefabrication and Building Sites, Production Studies Series – TF/TK (Newcastle-upon-Tyne: 2024). Available at <https://static1.squarespace.com/static/60ad28dae03bb53761c29c39/t/666c7100c467fd72284cbb57/1718382871710/PSS_BOOKLET-SERGIO_web-R00.pdf> [accessed 16 December 2024].