drawing as language

last Wednesday my studio in Michigan received the visit of 6 students from Chung-Ang University in Korea. Later in December I will show the result of the studio, the very first undergrad, that this year as final project (6 weeks) are designing the headquarters for a urban water conservation NGO

any similarity with studio toró is not mere coincidence

but the subject of today’s post is the concept of drawing as language. It fascinates me to think that between 2 to 3 million individuals spread around the planet have the share a certain language: architectural drawings.

developed over the last 400 years in Europe and systematized by Durand and others at the Ecole Polytechnique about 200 years ago, the conventions of space representation that we usually call architectural drawing have spread all over the world, unifying graphic representation of spaces to be built and bringing with it a spatial system very akin to modernity.

so when we research the homogenization of architectural typologies(see Global Apartments Research Group) it becomes fundamental to understand the drawings as vectors of such contamination.
but what if anything this has to do with the visit of the Korean students?

faced with language barriers, drawings become immediately more central. When we lack words, the traces on the paper speak much louder and take over the conversation. Required to come up with ideas for the building envelope that should engage precipitation, students relied much more on their drawings in order to make their concepts understood by the others.

it is the drawing language bringing together architects from opposing corners of the world.