Drawing Things Together: Drawings beyond Disegno

This seminar will study the material, cultural, and social parameters that conditioned drawing practices in Europe from the 15th through 19th centuries. We will examine drawings firsthand, and compile critical perspectives to grasp the varied roles drawings performed in artistic and architectural practices as well as the production of knowledge, and the constitution of power structures.

The course aims to sharpen the historical awareness of the media conditions of architectural design. It does so by highlighting the practice of hand drawing in the face of today’s digital imaging devices and through a critical engagement with the material, cultural, and social conditions and implications of the allegedly neutral blank page. This exploration also involves a methodological reflection of historical research. We will delve into in-depth reading of texts from various scientific fields and disciplinary perspectives. This will require the preparation of one text per session, which will be moderated alternately by one or two assigned students. This reading component will be complemented by visits to drawing collections and study rooms, to familiarize ourselves with the historical materials.
Texts and discussions will be held in German and English, requiring a sufficient command of both languages.

„Architects do not make buildings; they make drawings of buildings.” Robin Evans reminds us of a fact so obvious that it is easy to forget. Even easier to forget is that, for centuries and until only recently, this meant drawing by hand. Materially standing in for the Vasarian paradigm of disegno, drawings have been positioned at the processual and conceptual base of the Western definition of art. Art and architectural history have consequently rendered them a privileged medium in the comprehension of artistic production—with the graphic marks left by the artist’s hand regarded as the most immediate access to the mental disposition constituting a work of art. This reflects a discursive prevalence of artistic individuality, authorship, and autonomy in the endeavor to make sense of the history of art and architecture.

This course departs from this influential paradigm and shifts the focus to the material, cultural, and social parameters that conditioned drawing practices in the early modern period. We will consider the act of drawing less an externalization of an individual mind than a cultural technique, just as we will consider drawings less the traces of a creative process than social objects. Drawings can be read as tacit notations of discourses and practices, as tools of collaboration and exchange, as sites of the production of knowledge as much as of institutional centralization and social power.

This entails refraining from any attempt at a systematic or conclusive history or theory of drawings in favor of gathering various theoretical observations and critical perspectives, combining thoughts, approaches, and questions from such diverse fields as art history, history of science, cultural studies, and media theory. The texts we will subject to an in-depth reading in assigned sessions, therefore, range from classical pieces of architectural history to contemporary contributions of critical theory. The reading sessions will be complemented by on-site visits to study rooms and drawing collections to enable firsthand engagement with the historic materials themselves.