“In Ersilia, to establish the relationships that sustain the city’s life, the inhabitants stretch strings from the corners of the houses, white or black or gray or black-and-white according to whether they mark a relationship of blood, of trade, authority, agency.”
Italo Calvino22
Lines are material, spatial, cultural and temporal. From a superficial reading of architectural drawings, the lines seem to describe buildings; they present to the reader a gestalt of the forces that determine constructions and uses. However, these forces are at work on drafting supports, these forces also exist outside of them and are free from time and matter. The lines describing a plan on a con- struction site or on a drawing are architecture’s most fascinating puzzles since they make visible and tangible what is invisible and intangible to construct and to construe buildings. Lines present an entire building by simplifying its reality, but at the same time, they manifest an uncut view of the building’s interacting parts by showing more of what is visible in the built reality. These lines present the invisible aspects of architecture, representing what cannot be seen once the walls are erected.
In architectural drawings, the drafted lines in the material working between supports and their facture reveal cosmosgonic events that are present in the visible building, but are in themselves invisible. In their materiality these lines should reveal a spatial and temporal sequence of constructive events, not some non-spatial and non-temporal phantasm. In the lines, the dynamic of a building is manifested in a demonstrative interpretation of the tectonic of the building; its three-dimensional extensions are represented in the material and form of a line, which we do not interpret in order to understand, but we use indexically as a guide.
The drawing and pulling of lines represents the coalescence of archi- tectural imagining. If we assume that this architectural imagining results from an intangible super faculty that arises from the possession of a metaphysical eye capable of envisioning a future building, the enigma of the architectural drawing is a false problem. However, if we consider the extraordinary capac- ity of architects to conceive a building by tracing lines, the enigma becomes real. Architects can draw the lines of a building in direct sight, reconstruct the lines of a demolished structure, or devise the lines for a future building. The common denominator in all these procedures is the making perceptible what is imperceptible.
Through a peculiar procedure of de-composition, selection and re-com- position, through a polysemic use of lines, architects can trace rooms, structures and building details whose functions become self-evident in the composition of the lines that will never be seen in the constructed building. However, it is essen- tial to present the inner and outer spaces simultaneously and to reveal the tem- poral sequences of architectural perception. The building is represented in its entirety but there is no necessary likeness between the lines and the original.
The lines of building are neither facsimiles nor symbols; they are archi- tectural facture. It is in this cosmopoiesis that the enigmatic beauty of the
104 Cosmopoiesis and Elegant Drawings
lines lays. Lines guide the oblique demonstrations of architecture, both on site and on paper. To understand the importance of their role in architectural imagining, it is necessary to remove any preconceived idea about the lines of an architectural drawing as merely an instrumental result of geometry, or as an illustration that leads to verbal and graphic prescription of usage and construction. To achieve a better understanding of the play of lines as dem- onstrations of architecture, it is perhaps necessary to reflect on the obsolete Vitruvian term, ichnography (ichnographia), used to indicate the drawing of a plan. Ichnography, a compound Greek word (ichnos = foot-sole, graphos = writing/drawing) is a procedure by which a representation that opposes per- ceptions and experiences depicts something that does not exist in the visible realm. The graphic procedure involved in translating the invisible into the vis- ible requires a reflexive dislocation. Ichnography contains the solution to the problem. Architects can project the characteristics of a construction from the footprint of a building, as hunters, using conjectural knowledge, can identify their prey from its tracks.
Human beings have been hunters for thousands of years. Over the cen- turies they have learned to reconstruct the shapes and movements of invisible animals from hunting clues. Human beings learned to sense, classify, interpret such minimal traces, they reproduced them in drawings and they executed complex rational maneuvers during the hunt. Hunters have passed down their rich storehouse of knowledge through storytelling. Hunters would have been the first “to tell a story” because they were able to read the tracks left by their prey. This expertise is characterized by the ability to construct from apparently insignificant experimental data a complex reality that could not be experienced directly. In addition, the data is always arranged by the observer in such a way as to produce a narrative sequence. The reading of animal tracks is the mirror of divination: divination looked to the future by using similar interpretative procedures that had directed the interpretation of hunting clues looking into the past.23 There were great correspondences between the hunting and divina-
tion; the intellectual operations involved—analyses, comparisons, and classi- fications—were identical and storytelling was the process of communication in both based on processes that designate of one thing through another. The lines of an architectural drawing, understood as a coherent sequence of events, are clearly a case of designation of one thing through another in their past, the present and the future of buildings.
By using a sequence of lines, architects generate architecture. This prac- tice is based on processes of demonstration. Demonstrations occur both in the constructing of theoretical drawings and in the constructing of building drawings; since both are forms of realization, every architectural demonstra- tion becomes ontological. Architects demonstrate meaningful and non-trivial architecture. This demonstration encapsulates the enigma of the labor involved in architecture. The pulling of lines on site, a projection using the compass of the human body, reveals a continuous search for human measures to bridge the past and the future of our world-making. An architectural play of lines on a support is not limited to a specific building, but becomes a projection of a cosmopoiesis based on the transformation caused by a specific drawing, the ichnography.