Averted Vision

– Andrew Clancy

This is the third in a series of texts edited by Fabrizio Gallanti on the challenges in the new world of online architectural teaching and, particularly, on the changing role of drawings in presentations and reviews.

In this episode Andrew Clancy of Clancy Moore Architects and Professor of Architecture at Kingston School of Art reflects on his experience of teaching mediated by technology.

As the Pan, Scroll, Zoom project evolves and gains momentum, it might become the basis of a small publication. We welcome comments and ideas at editors@drawingmatter.org.

So, the future came – as it often does – not as a revelation but as an inescapable adjustment. The tools we needed had been around us for some time in the periphery of things. The designers of these systems had not set out to build a life raft, but this is what happened. When the need pressed so acutely, we were relieved – glad, even, we had the option.
It was hard work and tiring too, but we were ready for this, were we not? We already knew our students well through months of physical teaching. Conversations migrated online, projects were completed, assessments delivered, and degrees awarded. Each day we sat, solitary and immobile, and opened applications with names that implied collectivity and speed. ‘Can you hear me?’, we asked, as the grid of faces filled up on the screen. It worked a lot better than it could have. That should be said.

The part of the eye that handles detail is a small depression in the retina, covering a tiny fraction of its surface area. Beyond this small area of central sharpness our immersive visual sense of the world is provided by the amalgamation of light, shade and conjecture we call our peripheral vision.

More than the loss of rooms and facilities, it is this aspect of sight that our new tools have set aside. On our screens our eyes flit from face to face and occasionally snag on our own: a mirror in every room. The screen display slideshows, models and drawings – chronologies of work on virtual walls. This situation is a peculiar inversion of the experience of being together in a physical room, in which we each have a point of view based on our body in space, but share a peripherality and a context that bind the conversation together. On the screen our eyes are all trained on the sequence of images dictated by the person presenting. In our individual and separate peripheries, out of sight of the camera, is the matter of our private, separate lives: the mess of our table, the sound of our household and neighbourhood. The process of looking down at our screens, propped on our desk or lap, gently inverts the hierarchy of things like lectures. I remember Niall McLaughlin’s Register lecture via Zoom that I hosted from my car, parked outside a shuttered pub in the west of Ireland, using its Wi-Fi. There was something more intimate, almost better, about following the presentation on a small screen. The drawings, in particular, held in my hand, felt more immediate, more capable of extended study. The Architecture Foundation’s 100 Day Studio also pushed this, proving that there was something about the traditional lecture-theatre format that prevented certain conversations from happening. Questions seemed more explorative; the weaving of answers more open-ended. Perhaps this arises from our domestic surroundings, a feeling of being at home, even if in conversation with several hundred others.

The camera matters too: a digital device built to focus on analogue things. In the Kingston review spaces we had already been using our phones to navigate the interiors of models as a way to generate an empathetic engagement with discrete works. This process was replicated as students showed us work-in-progress for feedback. I loved when they occasionally reversed their camera to focus on a desk while rooting through papers, or to sketch out what they meant. This sometimes got close to the feeling of being there with them, helping to see where they might go next. Videos of notebooks were helpful too, as was being able to roam freely across any of the hundreds of portfolios without lugging cases around.

Then there are words, the microphone and the speakers. I noticed how often people apologised for talking too long, even though they had barely started – perhaps there is something about hearing our own voice echoing back in our room that disarms us. This aside, there were other little revelations. Many students chose to sit-in during entire days of tutorials, even if these were individual desk crits, leaving their colleagues visible and audible in the background as they worked. This acted as a personal World Service carrying stories from afar – a reminder that there was more binding us together than the specific requirements for instruction. Despite the turmoil and worry, some reported enjoying this new format. There was no need to commute and they knew when to check in, and this allowed them to focus on the next steps to be taken. Those caring for others, or with pressing economic contingencies, also found space to engage more fully. And we are grateful to have found new ways to make ourselves accessible, aspects we will not relinquish in a hurry (but as an augmentation rather than a supplanting). Bandwidth and laptops are not equally available, and we saw written even more clearly the disparities of opportunity built into our societies.

But the greatest moments in reviews were when the conversation strained to communicate a point; times when there was nothing to do but to draw with the primitive annotation tools of the software. In the pixelated fat lines, there was no room for finesse, only an urgent desire to be understood. This is nascent and seems clumsy but again is new, a way of drawing together in the making of a conversation. It was an aspect of the software that was perhaps the most valuable, and most in need of further development.

Recent disruptive technologies, whose legacies we live with, have focused on stripping out things to concentrate on essentials. Nuance, empathy and encounter have been traded for discourse, broadcasting and commerce. With our move to remote teaching we are asked to trade our physical collectivity for a narrower visual focus.

I am reminded that so much of what I love about architecture lies in the hazy peripheralities of sight and touch, a difficult thing to describe. I have long enjoyed how it doesn’t seem possible to read using peripheral sight, as much as we supposedly can’t in dreams. Astronomers talk about the value of the averted gaze –how peripheral vision is best to see things that are dimly lit – and look slightly past the object being examined so they can see it better. In weighing what we found we must weigh what is left behind.

So, can we talk about figures gathered around a table, about turning your head to address someone; about noticing something in a way someone carries themselves that makes you catch them later in the day for a chat. Can we talk about models and drawings speaking for themselves when their maker is gone? Can we talk about sitting together in silence, when there is nothing to say? Can we talk of the chats between classmates and the dissections of tutors? Can we talk of drawings done at a desk or in a review for no other reason than to find out what we want to say? Can we speak for the workshop, the library, and the canteen, all learning spaces, along with the train, and the walk to the studio? Can we talk of the value of watching someone figure something out? Can we talk about learning from each other, socially as much as discipline-specific? And, can we talk about the end-of-year exhibition, a moment of communal pride that lingers in an afternoon and don’t end in a frantic wave and a blank screen?

Instead, remote processes in their narrow bandwidth of encounter tend to the transactional. We don’t gather in our schools as vessels in need of filling, but as vessels in need of floating – with the equipment to navigate. As we chart the year ahead at Kingston, we are confident we can deliver the primary aspects of the courses that we need to keep in focus. Now, we are working to look past this to make space for the peripheral – for things dimly lit. We wait impatiently and with a sense of novelty for the immersive joy of being in a room together, of simply catching someone’s eye and smiling because they have brought something beautiful to the table.