FREDERICK UNIVERSITY – DEPARTMENT OF ARCHITECTURE

LECTURE SERIES: 26.11.2014-10.12.2014

POP UP 2014 – THE MAKARIOY CAMPUS

39-41 Afroditis Str. / Pop Up Shop 21/ Opposite City Plaza, Nicosia

© Anna Shapiro (http://annashapiro.co.uk/)

“Why do architects still draw” is the title of a series of lectures, that are taking place at “The Makariou Campus”, based on the importance of drawings for architecture as theory, concept, and practice and indeed for our understanding of our world in general. This conversation is based on a range of questions and issues on the use of drawing over time in architecture, and the complex and rewarding relation of what is the drawing and what might and will be.

No one can argue that drawing express the interaction of our minds, eyes and hands, but how architects use the drawing? Is the drawing the interface between the idea and the work itself?

It is also very interesting to examine if the drawing is an end product, or it is part of the thought process of architectural design. Is there a real purpose in making each drawing, either to remember something or to study something, or is just a tool of communication with the public and constructors? There has always been a connection between architecture and visualization. Not all visualization is about communicating data, sometimes visualizations show concepts. The core of what architects do is creating visuals that communicate complex concepts, processes and spaces. Over hundreds of years, architects have developed and refined different drawing types and techniques that help to communicate these ideas to people. But is the drawing only a communication tool? Or can the value of drawings be simply that of a collector’s artifact or a pretty picture?

Another issue that may need to be reviewed is what architects choose to draw and also what they choose not to draw.

 “An architect needs to know how to draw; unless there is a connection of eye, hand, and mind, the drawing of the building will lose the human soul altogether and become an abstract exercise.” Daniel Libeskind, 2012

Influenced by the words of Daniel Libeskind for the Yale Symposium 2012, a question of the drawing as a human expression element is raised and on the same time the big issue of our times between the past and the future of drawing.

Why would an architect reach for a pencil when drawing softwares are a click away?

The use of pencil and line as a visual representation and the complex and rewarding relation between the past and the future of the drawing, is a big question that need to be studied on this series of lectures.

Does the computer allow us to generate new forms that are not possible to be done by hand? The possibility of inventing new ways of building in order to live a philosophy of newness, can only be done by computers?

But how architecture can divorce itself from drawing, even with the development of the most impressive technology softwares?

All these arguments and a range of others, are expected to be discussed through this series of lectures, and open the conversation between students, architects, teachers and the public over the great subject of the drawing.

Schedule:

26.11.2014  18:00 Anna Shapiro, Architectural Association London

03.12.2014  18:00 Pavlos Philippou, J&A Philippou ,Cyprus

10.12.2014  18:00 Stella Evangelidou, Frederick University, Cyprus

at “The Makariou Campus” 39-41 Afroditis Str./ Pop Up Shop 21/ Opposite City Plaza,Nicosia

στην «Πανεπιστημιούπολη της Μακαρίου» Αφροδίτης 39-41/ Pop Up Κατάστημα 21/ Απέναντι από City Plaza, Λευκωσία

22431355_ extension 45100 /  97693206

https://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Makariou-Campus/638164222969906

https://www.facebook.com/popupfestival2014

Curated by Eleonora Antoniadou, Frederick University