On June 21st 2012, an exhibition of Kevin Sloan’s Notational Drawings will open at the AIA Fort Worth Center for Architecture.
Following a reception, a lecture about the drawings is scheduled for 7:00PM.
“Sloan’s pencil probes beneath the surface to reveal the essence, the deep order, the hidden anatomy, of works of architecture, landscape and urbanism. His sketches are loose and free, open and exploratory, but always based on measure and analysis. They’re a model of how a designer learns through investigative drawing.”
Robert Campbell, FAIA
1996 Pulitzer Prize for Criticism
“Drawing: to Pull”
Drawing can represent an experienced or imagined world. It is also an analytical tool of great power.
Notational drawings are an analytical tool and a precursor to design. Unlike expressive drawings that push interpretations, these are made to “pull” – like water from a well – architectural ideas observed during an encounter with a seminal place.
Architecture and by extension landscape architecture, is a knowledge-based activity and notational drawings contribute to the repository of knowledge needed for an informed contemporary practice. For this activity, drawing is unique and indispensable as it can fix understanding in the mind for recall in ways that photography or reading cannot duplicate.
The art of notation is largely preoccupied with making shorthand-like diagrams in plan, section and isometric that abbreviate the observation of an architectural idea. Constructing these diagrams so the information can be retrieved is essential, as ideas and lessons recorded long ago, sometimes in encounters separated by decades, are recovered to aid and accelerate design production.
This exhibition is an offering and an encouragement to draw. Good design is good analysis.
Kevin Sloan, ASLA
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