Drawing Class

So last Friday was our final Analog Drawing class. We were assigned an article on the "Innocent Eye" (the current mode of pedagogy in most architecture schools) and were to create a Pecha-Kucha style presentation in response to the article. Pecha Kucha is a way of quickly presenting an idea, 15-20 slides, 15 seconds each... great for architects because everyone knows how much they can talk.

Anyways, Thursday rolls around and I still had no idea what I was going to do for my presentation. The article was fairly strait forward, tracing the history of the current mode of education back to the 18th century to prove that it is not as natural as its proponents would suggest.

Anyways, Friday morning (Go time) rolls around and I wake up early to put together a presentation. Still confused I take a shower and have a stroke of brilliance. I got out of the shower at 7:15 and had exactly an hour to implement my idea. Here is the results...

So thinking about the article I realized that the best response would be in the form of a narrative. To tell this narrative I used drawing as a medium, figuring it would be approapriate to show how much I learned in my drawing class. Anyways, this is the story about a guy named Johnny Appleseed. (Preface: you might be tempted to think of this as autobiographical but that would be a mistake)


However, Johnny just happened to grow up in San Diego and go to school in Santa Barbara.


What both of these places have in common is that they are in California, the sun shines all of the time, and you never have to wear more than two layers.


One day Johnny had an idea that might give some direction to his life and possibly utilize a disparate set of talents.


Johnny wants to become and architect. (Depicted above is Frank Loyd Wright's "Falling Water")


Anyways, Johnny set about trying to fulfill this dream. The biggest difficulty came when Johnny realized that he knew nothing about architecture school.


Somehow or another Johnny is accepted to a few schools and he chooses to move to Ithaca, NY to attend Cornell University.


Upon the commencement of his stories, Johnny is introduced to a discipline that is not as strait forward as one would think.


He is also introduced to architecture school culture. Which is a bit of a shock.


He is also introduced to his future as a designer. Which is also a shock.


Johnny begins to realize that he knows very little. (Notice in high school you know everything)


However, the positive side is that Johnny's knowledge about architecture school is increasing rapidly. The stepped nature of the plot is due to a spike every Wednesday in theory class. Julia and Maegan did their undergraduate work as architecture students.


So, Johnny had set out to obtain a pair of "innocent eyes."


Fortunately Johnny was educated from an early age in a way that Maholy-Nagy and Gyogry Kepes would approve of.


The conclusion of the story is that Johnny has been exposed to this mode of design education for a while. However, having entered into a semester where it has been much more deliberate and intense, he is not yet able to critique the efficacy and bias of this pedagogical imperative and is far from a place where he might offer an alternative that would embrace the postmodern virtues (no that is not an oxymoron) that characterize our age.

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So that was my presentation. My classmates loved it and my teacher implored that I never show those drawing to any of the other architecture faculty.