READING: 'Translations from Drawing to Building' BY ROBIN EVANS

'...My own suspicion of the enormous generative part played by architectural drawing stems from a brief period of teaching in an art college. Bringing with me the conviction that architecture and the visual arts were closely allied, I was soon struck by what seemed at the time the peculiar disadvantage under which architects labour, never working directly with the object of their thought, always working at it through some intervening medium, almost always the drawing, while painters and sculptors, who might spend some time on preliminary sketches and maquettes, all ended up working on the thing itself, which, naturally, absorbed most of their attention and effort. I still cannot understand, in retrospect, why the implications of this simple observation had never been brought home to me before. The sketch and maquette are much closer to painting and sculpture than a drawing is to a building, and the process of development - the formulation - is rarely brought to a conclusion within this preliminary studies. Nearly always the most intense activity is the construction and manipulation of the final artifact, the purpose of preliminary studies being to give sufficient definition for final work to begin, not to provide a complete determination in advance, as in architectural drawing. The resulting displacement of effort and indirectness still seem to be distinguishing features of conventional architecture considered as a visual art, but whether always an necessarily disadvantageous is another question.'