MULTI-AUTHORSHIP
Why is it that while architecture has always been a collaborative, interdisciplinary, and team-based endeavor yet its education has mostly focused on the individual? This is especially insistent for those courses in drawing, visual studies, and design communications. The course objectives tend to premise on acquiring skills to enhance the mastery and deftness of the individual students, focusing on cultivating students’ “individual talent and creativity” and not their capacity to work with others1. What might be the alternative methods in which these subjects could be taught more collaboratively by enhancing the potentiality of ‘creative’ co-synthesis? Drawing Together is a project exploring these questions through the ‘collaborative turn’ by drawing toward multiple rather than singular authorship.
Documenting a period of three years with participants of different sizes, from small groups of two to large collectives of twenty-plus. Students from different programs and levels engaged in days-long drawing sessions. The workshops are organized through a structured and rigorous progression of research to synthesis, simple to complex, and quickness to slowness, it nurtures a collaborative-friendly drawing approach involving shared contributions. As the drawing project coincided with the beginning and the peak of Covid 19 pandemic, we took the opportunity to embrace the zeitgeist by Drawing Together (in person) and Drawing Together, Not Together (online).
The workshops begin with speedy studies and exercises that are traversed through contour, gesture, and tonal drawings. Techniques commonly used in foundation fine arts classrooms. The burst modules —between 10 seconds to 5 minutes— seek to stimulate the learner’s intuition, and immediacy and to enhance their hand-eye coordination. The process enables a form of tacit knowledge one cannot acquire passively but can only achieve through doing. It also encourages the students to forgo their burden and desire to achieve likeness in portraying the observed subject matter, a tendency often found in less confident students.
FROM QUESTIONING TO DRAWING
Questioning is an important building block of the project, and it is often instigated at the outset and throughout the course of the workshop. Questions that explore both the cerebral and the practical aspects of drawing, such as: What is a drawing? Is it an instrument of communication, a tool for thinking, or could it be viewed as a process or platform for social interaction? Should we compel to view drawing aesthetically or could it be a proxy for self-expression? Instead of treating drawing as a skillset related to talent, can we accept it as basic literacy on par with writing, math, and science? Could drawing be game-like (such as Exquisite Corpse2) which is serendipitous, creative, fun, and even therapeutic? On the pragmatic side, questions and discussions involve the modus operandi of drawing, i.e. the determination of methods and processes; drawing instruments and duration etc.
Drawing by Hiu Sun LEUNG and Lincoln CHAN
The first example I wish to discuss is Drawing Life, see Figure 1. It involves two people drawing the nude in the studio together. The drawings consist of two 5-minutes sketches drawn by two different students. The first student makes the initial mark capturing the gesture of the life model. As their first 5-minutes come to an end, the students are prompted to pass on their drawings to a colleague sitting beside them. Surprised by the prompt, the second group of students is genuinely intrigued with the prospect of drawing upon someone else’s drawing. This disruption to the expected single-authorship stirred up a unique sense of improvisation that was refreshing to them. Since the workshop is attended primarily by architectural students, they were invited to view these passed-on drawings not only by their aesthetic qualities but also as potential ‘contexts’ for receiving new interventions and co-authorships. Using architectural analogies the drawing exercises encourage students to react to ‘existing context’, composition, drawing style, and technique of the circumstantial conditions.
Sandy CHEUNG, Lai Sum FONG and Sen Yi CHENG
As the expectation for single authorship fades the drawing became a place for relational authorship, where one builds upon and reacts to the creation of others. In the second example Life of Three Kitchens, see Figure 2. It was conceived by three contributors using a triptych as a format to depict their respective home kitchens. The drawings took place in two locations. First, at the studio where an initial discussion took place, followed by drawings created individually at home in different spaces and times. This asynchronous method differs from the first example in that it offers an additional surprise when the triptych is recomposed together in the studio for the first time.
As the workshop progresses, we experimented with other methods of drawing together. Working with the framework of supervised (involving the instructor) versus unsupervised (without instructor); Synchronous (drawing in the same space/ time) versus asynchronous (drawing in different spaces/ times). The scale of collaboration also increased progressively transforming from two, four to eight collaborators. It culminated in the last piece consisting of 20 contributors. Several students were so immersed in the process that they invited their friends and families to join in. Therefore the question of who is allowed to draw became a discussion point as well. The Massive Individual is a 1.5 meters by 10 meters long scroll drawn in graphite during a four days period in June 2021. The drawing captured the mixed fiction-reality whereby the Mass Transit Railway (MTR) stations are contiguous not by their literal connections but through similarities of their atmospheres, paying homage to Guy Debord’s Psychogeographic Map of Paris (1957). MTR as an important economic, social, and spatial construct for Hong Kong became the common ground for those 20-plus contributors. It is also a means to explore questions about the individual and the city.
RELATIONAL COLLABORATION
In lieu of a few prototypes, such as the design-build studio, architectural pedagogy is premised mostly on single authorship. Some of the most commonly applied group work is often task-oriented such as undertaking initial site analysis; Developing a construction report; Interface with the community; Building a 1:1 installation structure; or proposing a large-scale urban project. These forms of collaboration assume that the task is simply to get participants to contribute existing knowledge rather than nurturing the possibility for ‘relational collaboration’3.
The term relational collaboration is described by John Hagel et al, as the challenge of creating new capabilities and knowledge so that the participants, as individuals, can get better as a result of the collaboration. Its goal is an exchange of tacit knowledge and to offer creative autonomy while learning from others. Relational collaboration under the premise of Drawing Together is cultivated through a carefully designed learning environment and framework, including the rules of engagement, atmosphere, time, and space. In this way, it is a scalable collaboration contingent upon the creation of the participants involved. Relational collaboration is unlike 'transactional collaboration' that works in a linear progression, vis-à-vis the Fordist division of labor. Although necessary in the production of architecture, transactional collaboration offers little contribution to creative synthesis.
FORDIST DIVISION-OF-LABOR OR CREATIVE COLLABORATION?
There are those who argue for the benefit of group work by referring to practice as its motivation. Claiming the work of a complex project is never the effort of one but instead a team with each playing a particular role in the delivery process. However, such claims offer false equivalence that does not capture the dynamic relationships involved in the academic setting. In business practices, a chain of command is defined according to various explicit or implicit hierarchies, rules, and practices. While at a place of learning, such a chain of command does not exist among peers4. Even when it does it takes place in a different form.
Division of labor has always existed in architectural drawings, particularly the kind that involves construction documents. A single drawing often involves a handful of people drawing and redrawing on digital files over the life of the drawing5. And collaborations are enabled through toolsets, such as Xreference in Autocad and Link in Revit etc. However, such collaboration rarely results in creative contribution. Drawing Together offers a counterpoint to these practices by exploring the paradox and challenge of achieving synthetic teamwork unique to architectural education, that is the challenge of educating a designer’s traditional role as the creative individual yet at the same time allowing them to be contributing team players as well.
Endnotes:
1. See Andrzej Bialkiewicz. “Propaedeutics of teaching drawing to architects”, Global Journal of Engineering Education Vol. 21 (2). Australia: WIETE 2019.
2, See Hagel III, John & Brown, John Seely & Davison, Lang. “Defining Common Collaboration Tensions”. Harvard Business Review. May 7, 2009. https://hbr.org/2009/05/defining-common-collaboration
3. See Mark Morris discusses the practice of exquisite corpse in “All Night Long: The Architectural Jazz of the Texas Rangers.” Architectural design 83, no. 5 (2013): 20–27.
4. Heather M. Caruso and Anita Williams Woolley wrote extensively on the actions of 'collaboration' by construction documents, in “Harnessing the Power of Emergent Interdependence to Promote Diverse Team Collaboration.” In Diversity and Groups, 11:245–266. Emerald Group Publishing Limited, 2008.
5. Peter Mackeith. “On Teamwork: Standards and Practices”, SOM Journal 2013. Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz.