Clancy Moore Architects: Conversation Pieces

Colm Moore

Clancy Moore Architects, Conversation Pieces, 2017. Pencil and colour fineliner pen on paper. Courtesy of Clancy Moore Architects.

I have seen the photographs. Architect couples sketching side by side, a shared arm at work. We do not work like this. We sit on opposite sides of a table. This is not to set up some easy argument of oppositions. Instead it is intended to enable a conversation. Generally an existing drawing is offered as a shared territory to begin from. Sitting and talking into the drawing, a space is opened up. The borders of the drawing provide a place for each of us to work out or, in this case, into the project before us. As with marginalia, we draw from the edge towards the centre in order to critique and illuminate what is before us. This arrangement lends a necessary distance that allows the conversation to exist. We rotate the page only when necessary. In this manner, like the oblique projection, the drawing remains live and at times elusive. This way of working is flexible as it allows us to hold the project in two minds at once. Doubt is present always. We can keep adding things. Building into the drawing without losing what has come before, these drawings remain both reflective and projective, introverted and gregarious. Unlike drawings constructed by overlay it is a process that allows multiple and contradictory versions to exist simultaneously. It is a drawing that seeks out ‘an architecture of “both and”, not “either or”’. Whilst for us projected drawings contain and describe relationships, we make these conversation pieces to enable them.