THE FREE HAND
DORE ASHTON
The nature of the act of drawing has been discussed for centuries—an indication of how fundamental it is to human endeavor. During the Renaissance, a period of great architectural invention, it was often architects who fervently addressed the issue of drawing. And no wonder, since among the great architects—I think of Michelangelo—drawing and painting were the natural accompaniments to the creation of articulated spaces. Speculative geniuses such as Leonardo never ceased pondering the nature of drawing, often making casual remarks in his journals of striking import, as when he characterized the contour line as possessing uno spessore invisible, “an invisible thickness.”
Old rumors have it that Nicolas Poussin said there were two ways of regarding: the first is merely to look and the second is to look with attention. Poussin was seconded by Goethe, whose remarks on drawing occur from his earliest success in the novels, The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774), to his enigmatic Elective Affinities (1809); in the latter he particularly reveals his proclivity for landscape architecture. That text is peppered with remarks about the importance of art and drawing in the architect’s life. Drawings give, in their purity, the mental attention of the artist, and they bring immediately before us the mood of his mind at the moment of creation.1 In speaking of the mood of the mind, Goethe reminds us of the mysterious fusion of eye, hand, and mind that we call drawing and assumes that drawing springs from the imagination, the only site for a mood of mind. It is a faculty indispensable for an architect.
A draftsman is not a mere technician if he avails himself of what has long been called freehand drawing—a term by which we condense ideas about the reciprocity of eye, hand, and mind. The very act of drawing, if freely engaged, is speculative to the highest degree. Just as there are no two hands alike, there are literally boundless possibilities in the hand of each when touching the vast blankness of a page. There are countless testimonies to the value of such explorations. I have always liked especially the words of the poet Paul Valéry, who, while still a schoolboy, had the good fortune to watch Edgar Degas drawing, and was a decent draftsman himself. Valéry observed:
There is an immense difference between seeing a thing without a pencil in the hand and seeing it while drawing it. Even the object most familiar to our eyes becomes totally different if one applies oneself to drawing it: one perceives that one didn’t really know it, one had never really seen it.2
Valéry added a dictum from Ingres that he had heard from Degas: “The pencil must have on the page the same delicacy as the fly who wanders on a pane of glass.”3 Needless to say, such delicacy, with all its fortuities, is essential to an architect. The principal value to him in freehand drawing lies in the act of disciplining the whole organism—his own, that is—in order to understand with every fiber in his body the true nature of space. What architect can forgo speculating on the nature of space? The revelations, while drawing freely, are legion. Visual artists, amongst whom I include architects and poets alike, live in an inescapable quest of some defining vision of space. I have found it pervasive in the oeuvre of the Mexican poet Octavio Paz, who, in writing of the sculptor Chillida (who spent four years in architecture school), mused about space. He said it is “anterior to the I”: “The apprehension of space is instinctive, a corporeal experience: before thinking it or defining it, we feel it. Space is not outside of us or a mere extension: it is that in which we are. Space is a where.”4
Above all other artists, architects require a firm sense of where. They must first locate themselves and then their composed objects in an ideal space before they can even begin the sequence of acts that constitute a construction.
Poets, artists, and architects inevitably seek the metaphorical dimension of space. It was one of the primary means of instruction in the years that John Hejduk developed the curriculum at The Cooper Union. Metaphor, as Aristotle thought, is “a kind of enigma” and, for a verbal artist, “the greatest thing by far is to have a command of metaphor because this alone cannot be imparted by another; it is the mark of genius, for to make a good metaphor implies an eye for ‘resemblances.’”5 The eye, Hejduk thought, must be cultivated for myriad resemblances in the Aristotelian sense—that is, through a poetic exploration of both inner and outer spaces. Probably The Cooper Union was the only school in the world that had thesis projects with such titles as “A Blue House for Mallarmé” or “The City of Fools.”
Hejduk was not alone among modern architects honoring the imaginative extensions of metaphor. One has only to read Louis Kahn’s paeans to drawing scattered poetically throughout his writings to know how important his metaphorical sketches were to his architectural practice. There is a great difference, he knew, between drawing and rendering, and that difference made all the difference.
If we look at the sketchbooks of the renowned architects of the twentieth century—Le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright, Kahn, and a host of others—we see immediately why the eighteenth-century French critics called the sketch a premiere pensée, “the initial thought.” It would be the indispensable germ of the product we call architecture.
Hejduk’s ideas about the training of the architect found a perfect executrix in Sue Gussow. Her knowledge as a practicing artist extended far back in history. She taught her students the freedom to range everywhere in time and space—that is, in the history of artists from cavemen on—in order to understand the vast range of modes of expression. Architects were trained to attend to the myriad methods artists have found to express what Goethe called the mood of their minds, without inhibitions. She accustomed these future professionals to the quest for the unaccountable, the mystery in establishing a metaphor for lived experience. She gave them, in short, a free hand.