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Architectural Theory Review

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Lines as Architectural Thinking

Marco Frascari Available online: 04 Dec 2009

To cite this article: Marco Frascari (2009): Lines as Architectural Thinking, Architectural Theory Review, 14:3, 200-212 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13264820903341605

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MARCO FRASCARI
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LINES AS ARCHITECTURAL THINKING

Architecture stems from a sapient working together of writing, drawing, and construction lines. The critical study of genetic architectural representations by examination of the sedimentation of architectural materiality inscribed in weathered boards, papers and models develops the ability of architects to become architecturally conscious. Architectural lines are material, spatial, cultural and temporal occurrences of rened multi-sensorial and emotional understandings of architecture. Architectural lines create a graphesis, a course of actions based on factures by which architects actualize future and past architecture into representations. Architectural drawings must not be understood as visualizations of building, but as essential architectural factures. Leon Battista Albertis term lineamenta carries embedded in itself the idea of facture since Albertis understanding of lineamenta derives from the use of tracing lines, ropes, ribbons, strings or threads mostly made with ax bres and used by the builder on construction sites during the facture of buildings. Tota res aedicatoria lineamentis et structura constituta est. Leon Battista Alberti, De re aedicatoria
ISSN 1326-4826 print/ISSN 1755-0475 online 2009 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/13264820903341605

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Architecture is a constructed virtueor better, she is the Queen of Virtues, as Andrea Palladio, a Renaissance architect, labelled her on the frontispiece of his treatiseby which humans interact spatially, tectonically and culturally with a region that they modify with thoughtful tracing of lines on the paper and on the ground to their advantage as a proper expression of their humanity. Not too long ago, architectural drawings were made in limited quantity. It used to be that only a few lines were necessary to accomplish the task of representing future or past buildings. Nowadays, we need an inconceivable number of lines even to describe the tiniest building. Consequently, the favourite aphorism used by Carlo Scarpa, an extraordinary Venetian architect of the late twentieth century gifted with an absolute ability of conceiving building by drawing, should be updated sourly to reect this overwhelming condition. Scarpas . . . nullo dies sine linea [do not let a day pass by without line], should be altered into . . . nullo dies sine mille lineae [do not let a day pass by without a thousand lines]. The overpowering expectation to produce lines for erecting an edice or a small house does not allow drawing hesitation anymore. A hesitated set of architectural lines is a sensible and sensitive form of drawing, dwelling on pensive borders ceaselessly, where the drafting and writing of lines is an alluring discourse, buzzing backward through history and igniting genetic analogies as a way to see the real nature of the undisciplined discipline of architecture beyond the functional quotidian. Hesitate comes from Latin, meaning to stick, to stammer. It is a holding back in doubt, having difculty in doing or making something. In our condent age of aggressively digital imaging and atrociously hasty processes of construction, linear hesitations must be brought back into architects drawings to make

them truly heuristic devices again. It is a slow process of architectural sapience based on the ideas of lingering, savouring and touching; it is based on the adagio time and common places, proverbs or rule of thumbs. Labour intensive, slow architectural lines belong to the aging cellar of a rened multisensorial and emotional understanding of architecture. Without a lingering drafting sapience, there is not architecture and the drafting sapience originates within architects compelling material imagination. Sapience stems from thoughtfully sensible considerations on how material transforms into matter and this is the foundation of thinking in architecture. Sapience comes from saperea slow tactile savoir which is at the same moment slow time and savouringthat operates in the same manner by which the sense of taste discerns different essences or avours.1 During the drafting of a building and its constructive details, a ne architect discerns and savours architectural objects and their causes. The protracted translation of lines of drawings into building lines and vice versa is the most essential phase of the architectural process of imagination by which buildings are conceived and erected, since the ontogenesis of architectural lines assimilates itself the primary processes of designation that take place on construction sites. Lines are tense enigmas slowly translated on paper and their solution determines architects ability to consider and savour the facture of the building. Architecture is built to transcend its epoch; so also are architectural drawings. Buildings outlive their builders, so also do drawings outlive their drafters. The implication of this parallelism is that both buildings and drawings carry in their facture the constructed virtue of architecture.

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Buildings should respond to the requests of their own epoch, but at the same time, they should be able to adapt to requests that cannot be anticipated or even imagined. Similarly, architectural drawing done to accomplish the exclusive requests of a specic building construction should be able to be read for searching answers to constructive requirement of past and future buildings.

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Drawings as Architectural Factures Recognizing that even more so in our age of digital imaging the great majority of architects do not build buildings, but merely draw them, as the late Robin Evans had powerfully pointed out a few times.2 The aim is to demonstrate that the tracings of real and proper architectural drawings are not obvious and impartially objective as the marketing for digital architectural instruments try to convince architects, builders and clients in their market campaigns. While recognizing these ambiguous conditions, we do not presume that architectural traces are either worldly or unworldly, existing or non-existing, physical or mental, subjective or objective. Architectural drawing must avoid such labels. In real acts of architectural drawing that which is marked, inked, pencilled, brushed or chalked comes into being through the sapience of a facture and not through any Cartesian rational process of matheme even when Cartesian plans of representation are used to trace the image. Architectural drawing is, in other words, wholly based on a sapience of material manifestations within which tangible lines become carriers of uid and invisible links that guide intangible thoughts. The intention is not to develop a reactionary proposition trying to ght back the professional

exploitations of digital representations and their scientintically presentations, but rather, to pose a question that could lead to a new way of obtaining a better grasp and handle on the fresh graphesis afforded by computers.3 A graphema, an emotional piece of drawing, should not become a mathema, an indifferent digital drawing and an after-the-fact analysis of algorithmically produced representations. An architectural graphema should tackle materiality and sensuality of the built world by generating sapient hybrid representations that can allow architectural students and professionals to fully utilize the potentiality of digital drawings. The epistemology of architectural graphesis must be synthesized in vague representations located at the chaotic and in sapience, the cunning junction of the humanistic and scientic concepts of knowledge.4 Pulling pieces of geometry, geology, alchemy, philosophy, politics, biography, biology, mythology, and philology from alien territories, architects should write and draw with hesitation, discovering the multiple aspects of architectural graphesis, a generative graphic process understood in its slow making. The fruitful vagueness ruling architectural graphesis comes from the ambiguity embodied in the Latin spell: nullo dies sine linea, where linea (line), an heuristic device, must be understood as a line of writing, as a line in a drawing or as the pulling of a line on a construction site, but not as linearity. Architecture results from a sapient interfacing of writing, drawing and constructing lines. These lines are investigational media that serve as a point of departure for arriving at a symbiosis between materials and culture, dening everything from the tectonic character of rooines to the bodily prole of a bathtub. Images are written and words are drafted, and

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crossings of cultural events and material expressions take place within the lines of a drawing. Architectural graphesis is a course of action, a facture by which architects actualize future and past architecture into representations. They are compilations of thoughts that are not self-evident and by being interpreted, they can generate crucial structures within which architecture can be read and understood, as culturally coded expressions of knowledge with her own epistemological assumptions and powerful ancestry. Architectural drawings must not be understood as merely visualizations but as essential architectural factures. The reading of these factures is based on a sapient construing of the marks or touches; the quality and selection of ink luminosity, the graphite fatness, watercolours lightness, temperas density, the exibility or rigidity of supports. These are all things that readers of the drawings indirectly see and savour, even if they are not embedded in the specic visual notions presented by the drawings. Nevertheless, they play an essential role in a formal way of the reading and they foster an extremely productive procedure that David Summers calls inferences from facture.5 Facture is the Latin past participle of facio, facere, meaning both at the same time to make and to do; it thus has the same derivation as fact, which might be dened as something evidently done. Understood in this way, fact and facture are closely related; to consider an artefact in terms of its facture is to consider it as a record of its own having been made. Architectural drawings do not just represent somethingthey are something in their own right. Any given architectural drawing is not just a summa of arbitrary signs that stands for something elsetwo lines makes a wall, a dash line indicates something hidden,

and so onbut they are an assembly of signs that derive their meanings from actually embodying in their tracing the events that they represent. Facture in Italian is fattura and has roughly the same meanings as in English, there is, however, an additional meaning worthy of note: fattura is a highly developed form of the evil eye; it is physical making of singular objects based on the power of the invidious gaze. A fattura captivates the targeted individual and progresses from more or less involuntary inuences on human behaviour to reach intentional making of its singular objects deliberately prepared with a distinct ceremonial, and their power is meaningfully incredible to achieve results . . . and in a particularly frightening case, the fattura done to kill.6 Architectural drawings are non-evil-fatture that enchant their makers and readers. As already mentioned, they do not just represent something, but they are something in their own right since the signifying power is in the liturgy of its making. This procedure is liturgical. It generates an aura that can be inferred from a simple casting glance both by the maker and the reader. Consequently, architectural drawings have the same signifying power for architects, clients and builders. The aura that belongs to the drawings will inspire a sense of awe and reverence that will guide to a better facture of edices and buildings.

Genetic Drawings If sets of architectural markings and inscriptions are something that stand for architects, builders or clients in some respect or capacity for an architectural element or event, then every pen trait, brush stroke, pencil line,

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charcoal mark, wash run, smudge, erasure, pentimento and blur must have a signalling function and a meaning. Again, labour intensive and slow architectural drawings belong to the aging cellar of a rened multi-sensorial and emotional understanding of architecture. Our contemporary world is based on unnecessary hastiness: temporal speed and material rushing growth are the prevailing attitudes of our age and unhurried attitudes seem to imply stagnation and inertia. We live in a constant rush and building and designing no longer proceed in proper pace; everything has become increasingly fast. The design and construction of a building exist within the overlapping of three spheres of time constrains: the urge of nance, the push of technology and the pull of fashion. Consequently, building and drawing are prejudiced by hasty occasions and respond to interest rates and rises in site prices ascribing a value to each moment. Architectural drawings are also pulled towards speediness because it is digitally possible. Computer technology speeds up tasks and, in theory at least, increases precision and photographic reality, but the drawings produce buildings that lack grip, lack traction in time. For the most part, architectural criticism and history have concentrated on the large-scale question instead of focusing on the genetic processes in architecturethe process of assembly and interaction between different kinds of signs productions, and the interfacing between media and supports. There is no meaningless mark in a genetic architectural representationeven accidental marks play a major role in the coming about of a construction. The study of genetic architectural representations is focused on the cognitive factures. These cognitive congurations map out expressions and patterns recording the physical or mental actions corresponding to the multi-

ple and interfacing stages of architectural projects. The critical study of genetic architectural representations by examining the sedimentation of architectural materiality inscribed in weathered boards, papers and models develops the ability of architects to become architecturally conscious. Although the object is the study of tangible documents such as architects sketches, notes, drafts, models and blueprints, the real scope is something much more intangible. It is the detection of the movements of generating architectural conceiving. Most of these movements are not optically real, but imaginatively real. A critically constructed genetic analysis of architects drawings is the most effective and efcient way to learn architecture. The study of genetic representations is generally concrete, for it never posits an ideal architecture beyond those documents but rather strives to reconstruct, from all available evidence, the chain of events present in processes. A critically constructed genetic analysis is a continuation of the architectural imaginative act itself. The study of beginnings, of alternative and concurrent architectural representation, makes it possible to rethink and rene complex theoretical questions of the efcacy of indirect perception in producing architecture. What kind of union of maternal and material mimesis is required for returning to architectural representations within the sensually captivating play of lines that presently is mostly lacking from the contemporary architectural imagining? Maternal edication and material construction no longer coincide naturally in architecture. An edifying conjunction that was once commonedication comes from edicenow requires careful calibration in the conception, construction and inhabitation of buildings. An understanding of the crisis taking

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place within the play of lines necessary for achieving enchantment in architectural drawings cannot be pursued without tacking a close look at the geometry used on the construction site. Geometry used on site occupies a central position in the development of architecture, both in the way geometry tends to be related to the expression of ideasits inextricability from languageand in the way we understand these ideas, somehow, in geometrical terms. The architectural profession has embraced the use of digital information without a proper critical reection on the conversion of the tradition of architectural drawings into the digital. Many hand-drafted drawings are persuasive choreographic notations of architectural thinking, since they articulate the tangible and intangible relationships existing between the parts composing a construction. Nowadays, hand-generated drawings are typically regarded as a distressing unprofessional occurrence by many professionals and their quintessential edifying capability of portraying architectural thinking has become merely a selling graphic strategy for giving a pseudo-aura to mechanical renderings. The insipid aftermath imitations of handmade artistic drawings generated with the help of fancy graphic lters after digital designing has taken place cannot substitute the freehand sketches and drawings. By recognizing possible functions and meanings in drawings, by nding and adapting new forms into the evolution of the architecture under examination, these hand-generated graphema play a crucial heuristic role in the conception of buildings, when architects draw to explore architectural projects by recording ideas, notions and concepts. For architects, drawing has not only an informative substance, but also formative

consequences, since they weave beautiful constructional thoughts into images. Although many architects have been trained or are trained in drawing within the tradition of the ne arts, hardly are they taught the ingenious art of architectural drawings in an explicit manner. They learn to draw as painters or sculptures, but then it is up to them to discover how to draw architecture. Architecture is never completely integrated with the other arts that use drawings. In the initial phases of humanitys drawing development, architectural drawings had many more points in common with the preparatory procedures present in the other arts, but as artists developed and rened the art of drawing as a ne art in itself; architects grew their own understandings of drawing as an independent facture with its own graphesis. As alive oral, written and drawn interactions, architectural factures and their graphesis serve not only as practicum for recycling existing architectural thoughts and dreams, but to become continuously fertile settings for producing new thoughts and novel dreams that bear great consequences for the future of the humans that will inhabit them. Architects with their drawings participate in the praxis of an architectural cosmopoiesis, a world-making that gives rise to the synaesthetic landscapes of intimacy and participation, an interplay of signs that transfers worlds that often might have remained unknown into a world of architectural materials and substances.7 Architectural nubs and their translations into visual media proceed via deeply-felt interplays of cultural, demographic, socioeconomic, temporal and spatial variables, ultimately assessing architectural conceptions into a trans-historical measure of tradition and novelty. As graphic translators, architects perform the all-important function of bringing into the

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cosmopoietic spheres of architectural facturesdrawings or buildingsaspects that belong to other cosmopoietic spheres that often remained unknown. Cosmopoiesis as an act of world-making always starts from worlds already in existence where every making is a remaking.8 Therefore, architecture becomes an elegantly conceived conjectural manifestation of elegant translations and collations constructing places or structures ordered by specic cultural tracing of lines. The mystery of architecture is all in the divinatory nature of the mirroring nature of the world of drawing and the world of building. The conjuring up of buildings is governed by a double mode of translation: back-telling translations that are transformations of the lines of building in the lines of drawing, and foretelling translations that are translations of the lines of drawings in the lines of buildings. These exercises of back-telling and foretelling form a speculative chiasm, a hypogeal structure, on which every project of architecture must be erected. Posing architecture as a graphic trade with an intellectual tradition that transforms buildings in drawings and drawings in buildings, and recognizing that adequate or inadequate architectural outcomes result from faithful or unfaithful and traitorous or traditional translations, is to recognize that architecture is a conversion that makes visible the invisiblea rendition of the imaginable into the real. Architecture is then a cosmospoietic representation that trades between the idios kosmos (the combination of individual reality and private dreams) and the koinos kosmos (a shared reality coalescing in dreams that all of us share). This joining of individual and shared realities restricts and modies assessments, and results in a denial of the line separating past, present and future, since architectural translation is an elegant event, taking place

within the multiple interacting spheres of cosmopoiesis.

temporal

To draw before building is to recognize architects as agents of change because the lines of their drawings make them aware of aspects of time, life and above all the unknown others since buildings are conceived not only for the direct immediate users, but also for users that cannot even be predicted or estimated. The immediate approach to construction misses altogether or makes it impossible to achieve unspecied aspects of human change. Architecture expressed by drafted lines liberates the human beings from the total conditioning produced by codied cultural, structural and functional resolutions. Architectural translation operates according to tradition and usage rather than rules and analysis. Drawings are based on different modes of thinking converted in lines and the primordial element discoverable at the source of the elegant conversions of architecture is a relationship of causality. The drawings developed for the construction of a building are translations by which a drafting facture becomes a building facture. In essence, a different use of material reality, an elegant architectural translation, denes and demonstrates the marginal by bringing in focus the tensions between orthodoxy and heterodoxy, centrality and diversity; as such, it represent otherness in society. Lineamenta People built rst and drew afterward. Joe l Sakarovitch, Epures darchitecture: De la coupe des pierres a la ge ome trie descriptive XVIXIX sie ` cles, Basel: Birkha user, 1998. In Ersilia, to establish the relationships that sustain the citys life, the inhabitants stretch strings from the corners of the houses, white or black or gray or black-and-white

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according to whether they mark a relationship of blood, of trade, authority, agency. Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities, New York: Houghton Mifin Harcourt, 1978. To solve the genetic vagueness embedded in the concepts of architectural lines, an opportunity lies in a review of the Latin word lineamenta as used by Leon Battista Alberti in his De re aedicatoria (c.1450). He also uses it to title the rst book of the treatise. Performing a back-telling on this Albertian lineamenta can be a way of untangling the skein of lines played on the drafting tables by architects and giving back to those drafted lines of thought a sapid nature again. Several authors have insisted that Albertis meaning for such a distinctive term as lineamenta corresponds to something less broad and, at the same time, more specic than the Italian disegno. Nevertheless, in the traditional Cosimo Bartolis Italian translation, printed in Florence in 1550, lineamenta was translated disegno.9 In the rst English edition of De re aedicatoria, published in 1726, the translation prepared by the Venetian architect James (Giacomo) Leoni was not from Albertis original Latin, but from Bartolis Italian version. Consequently, in English lineamenta became design although John Dee in his The Mathematicall Praeface to the Elements of Geometrie of Euclid of Megara (1570) referring to Albertis theoretical duality had translated lineamenta as lineamentes. The whole Feate of Architecture in buildyng, consisteth in Lineamentes, and in Framyng. And the whole power and skill of Lineamentes, tendeth to this: that the right and absolute way may be had, of Coaptyng and ioyning Lines and angles: by which, the face of the buildyng or frame, may be comprehended and concluded. And it is the property of

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Lineamentes, to prescribe vnto buildynges, and euery part of them, an apt place, & certaine nu ber: a worthy maner, and a semely order: that, so, ye whole forme and gure of the buildyng, may rest in the very Lineamentes. &c. And we may prescribe in mynde and imagination the whole formes, all material stuffe beyng secluded. Which point we shall atteyne, by Notyng and forepointyng the angles, and lines, by a sure and certaine direction and connexion. Seyng then, these thinges, are thus: Lineamente, shalbe the certaine and constant prescribyng, conceiued in mynde: made in lines and angles: and nished with a learned minde and wyt.10 Published in 1553, the rst French translation by Jan Martin used lineamens (lineaments).11 In a modern Italian translation, in a translators footnote, Giovanni Orlandi says that in the beginning of his translation, he wanted to use the word progetto12 and not the word disegno. However, having noticed that in later chapters Alberti himself makes a restrictive use of the term lineamenta, Orlandi decided to keep the traditional translation in disegno.13 In a recent English translation, the glossary indicates that there have been too many interpretations and the translators explanation for using lineaments is based on the physiognomic nature of Albertis understanding of architectural bodies.14 None of the above explanations is satisfactory. The use of the word lineaments is proper by similarity, but does reveal the genetic sapience embodied in it by Alberti. My suggestion is to use the locution denoting lines to translate lineamenta since Albertis attention to lineamenta (denoting lines) is the recognition of a building practice leaning more towards

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a facture of designation of the buildings congurations and elements made by pulling lines and strings taking place on the construction site. For Alberti, the art of tracing a building on sitethe genesis of every construction necessarily had preceded drawings and lineamenta becomes the analogical procedure that allows architects to think building on paper. The understanding of lineamenta (denoting lines) and structura (structure) are related but independent. In the prologue of his treatise on architecture, Alberti had already argued that architecture consists of two parts, denoting lines (lineamenta) and construction materials (materia), by connecting denoting lines with structure, he raises the genetic procedure one step up. A product of human ingenuity (ingegno) and natural processes (nature), denoting lines characterize the assembly of construction materials. Alberti had veried in his practice that the use of the denoting lines needs a rational mind, whereas the handling of construction materials requires groundwork to have the capability of selection. However, if the denoting lines and the materiality of construction are alienated, there is no architecture. What is necessary to achieve a mutual symbiosis between materials and denoting lines is the work of an accomplished architectural maker (artifex). All the intent and purpose of the denoting lines (lineamentorum) lies in nding the correct, infallible way of joining and tting together those lines and angles which dene and enclose the surfaces of the building. . . . It is quite possible to set whole forms in the mind disregarding by no means the material, by designating and determining a xed orientation and conjunction for the various lines and angles. Since that is the

case, let lines be the precise and correct delineation, conceived in the mind, made up of lines and angles, and perfected in the culture and imagination.15 Albertis understanding of denoting lines (lineamenta) derives from the use of tracing lines, ropes, ribbons, strings or threads mostly made with ax bres and used by the builder on construction sites during the facture of buildings. These tracing lines range from the lines pulled among pickets and the battered boards to map out the footprint of the building on the ground, to the taut strings that, stretched at the end with weights, guide the masons in their erecting of stone and brick walls, from the plumb lines directing the builders in the making of vertical walls or vertical placing of building elements, to the coloured snap lines (chalked strings used to make long, straight lines on horizontal or vertical surfaces) used to guide the layout of nishes and from measuring ropes and tapes to assess modularity, to the folding of knotted ropes to generate angles and basic proportional ratios. Furthermore, Albertian eminent scholar of the Latin languageknew that there was a connection between ax and line as established by the Latin origin of word linea (line) that derives from linum (linum usitatissimum ax). A substantiation that measuring strings were made of ax bres, a preferred material for its stability and sacral nature is given by the following passage in the Book of Ezekiel: He took me there, and behold, there was a man whose appearance was like the appearance of bronze. He had a line of ax and a measuring rod in his hand, and he stood in the gateway. 16 In the nal chapter of her book on Roman and Etruscan inaugural places, Palmira Cipriano, a Latin philologist, rmly rejects the traditional

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etymologies for templum.17 For Cipriano, templum derives from root temp- that expresses not only the notion of tension but also that of crossing that is tensioning an element transversely to another.18 The templum has three parts: one in the sky, one on the ground and one underground. Tensioning lines for determining angles and transversal crossings of ax lines delineated the temple on the ground pulled by the augurs. The ceremony and function of the augur was central to any major undertaking in Roman societypublic or privateincluding matters of war, commerce, and religion and buildingfrom this comes the tradition of inaugurating buildings and edices. The procedure of line tracing for augurs invisible temple is at the base of the inauguration of the construction site and as well as of the inauguration of architectural drafting surfaces. An aftermath illustration of Albertis treatise (he did not want any image associated with his text) shows a direct connection to templum layout. The image refers to the passage where Alberti discusses the laying out of the area of foundations (Book 32), which is done by lines that Alberti calls originating lines (radices). From midpoint of the front of the structure pull a line to the back of it, half way along it we drive a picket into the ground and through it, following a geometric construction we draw a transversal line. We then related everything to be measured to these to lines. The two taut crossing lines for working on the area of a future building corresponds to the two crossing lines traced by the augurs where the positive and negative connotations of the omens and consequent auspices were measured in relation to these lines. The geometric

construction suggested by Alberti corresponds also to the traditional cunning preparation of a sheet of paper for drawing on it, since edges were not necessarily perfectly parallel or orthogonal in handmade paper, the drafting area was ruled by two orthogonal lines crossing in the centre of the paper. The proposed phenomenological origin of the denoting lines can also help to explain a remark by Alberti that has puzzled many critics. They are of such a nature that we might recognize the same lineament in several different buildings that share one and the same form 19 If lineamenta is translated as design, the interpretation is that different buildings share the same design, but if the translation is denoting lines, the meaning is that different buildings share the similar layout procedures. The transformation of the use of taut lines on site to the use of denoting lines traced on paper, and vice versa, reveals the wit or cunning intelligence of architects in their divination of future buildings. In the rst paragraph of the rst chapter of the rst book of his architectural primer, Vitruvius suggests that construction is a meditated process of building by advancing the idea that theory is a graphic illustration devised to explain cunningly constructed objects. Sollertia, the act of cunning judgment, is an essential intellectual procedure to build thoughts and any construction. Sollertia is the fundamental virtue with which architects infuse their factures. They are prudent and ingenious architects who know how to meditate architecture critically by constructing plots and weaving plans. Sollertia/ metis has its origin in the art or technology of weaving since all the lines used in other crafts requiring metis derive from the lines used in

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a loom. On a construction site, pulled between battered boards, the tracing lines mark the plan of a future building and show clearly the textile origin of architecture by appearing as a giant horizontal loom. Used to comment on a proper procedure done with order and precision, an Italian saying, to do something for line and mark (fare qualcosa per lo e per segno) is a snappy language codication of sollertia. A physical expression of sollertia is the use of a line, which allows the straight cutting of beams and planks. The strings and plumb lines used by master masons in laying bricks during the building of walls are all expressions of sollertia. The lines and the marks used by architects within the looms of their parallel bars are the cunning processes by which a building comes into being on paper. Architectural lines are material, spatial, cultural and temporal occurrences. To a supercial reading of architectural drawings, it seems that the lines are dealing with future buildings; they lay before the readers eyes, for their examination, a gestalt of the forces in operation that seem to determine future constructions. However, these forces are at work on the supports although they exist, so to speak, outside and freedom of sequential time and encumbering matter. The lines describing a plan on a construction site or on a drawing are one of architectures most fascinating and puzzling ambiguities since they make visible and tangible what is invisible and intangible in the constructed building. Lines present an entire building by simplifying its reality to a vague stage, but at the same time, they manifest a more complete view of the buildings interacting parts by showing more of what is generally visible in the built reality. This play of lines presents the invisible aspects of architecture, representing in a unique way what can never be seen when the walls are erected; this

play reveals a spatial and temporal sequence of constructive events, not some non-spatial and non-temporal phantasm. In the lines, the dynamic of building is manifested in a demonstrative interpretation of the tectonic of the building; its three-dimensional extensions are represented in the material and form of the line, which we do not interpret in order to understand it, but which we indexically guide without interpreting it. The thoughtful Cosmopoiesis of Lines If the existence in all of its moments is all herself, the city of Zoe it is the place of the indivisible existence. But then, why the city? Which line does separate the inside from the outside, the roar of the wheels from the howl of the wolves? Italo Calvino, The city of Zoe, Invisible Cities, New York: Houghton Mifin Harcourt, 1978. In architectural drawings, the drafted lines in their interfacing between support and their material facture reveal cosmopoietic events that are present in the visible building, but are in themselves invisible. Metaphorically speaking, the drawing and pulling of lines represents the coalescence of architectural thoughts. If we assume that this architectural thinking results from an intangible super faculty that arises from the possession of a mind image able to envision a future building, the enigma of the architectural drawing is a false problem. However, if we consider the extraordinary capacity of architects to conceive a building from a body image by tracing lines, the enigma becomes real. Architects can draw the lines of a building in direct sight, reconstruct the lines of a demolished structure, or devise the lines for a future building. The common denominator in all these procedures is the making visible of

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that which is invisible. Through a peculiar and curious procedure of de-composition, selection and re-composition, through a polysemic use of lines, architects can trace rooms, structures and building details whose functions become self-evident in the composition of the lines that will never actually be seen in the constructed building. However, it is essential for presenting the inner and outer spaces simultaneously and revealing the many temporal sequences of architectural perception. The building is represented in its entirety but there is no necessary likeness between the lines and the original. The lines of building are neither facsimiles nor symbols; they make architecture poetical. It is within this cosmopoiesis that the enigmatic beauty of the lines lies. Lines guide the enigmatic conceiving of architecture, both on site and on paper. By using a sequence of lines, architects make present that which is absent. This conceiving practice is based on processes of demonstration. Demonstrations occur both in the constructing of theoretical drawings and in the constructing of building drawings; since both are forms of realization of architectural thinking, every architectural demonstration becomes ontological. Architects demonstrate through tangible signs the intangible that operates in the tangible of a construction. This demonstration is the setting of the problem of the labour involved in architecture. The physical pulling of lines on site, a projection using the compass of the human body, reveals a continuous search for the human measure necessary for bridging the past and future of the constructed world. An architectural play of lines on a mobile support is not the designing of a specic building, but rather a projection of a future constructed world based on the transformation of the past

world of construction through a specic drawing, the ichnography. These coincidences of events and stories illustrate the corporeal basis of the lines projected on plans and in addition suggest their curricular nature. The experience of lines of life is made tangible by the marks human living leaves. In conceiving architecture through drawing, the human body resonates to the mind by merging ows of inner and outer perspectives. The amalgamation of senses and architecture takes place within body experience, which can then come to life through drawing factures. As a phenomenon, this process can be carefully observed and noted and reinterpreted to provide insight into drawing knowledge and the nature of architectural understanding. All of the senses are implicated in drawing factures. The making and reading of drawings affect us by manipulating the ratio of our senses: hastening slowly, architects see the drawing, smell the drawing, hear the drawing, touch the drawing and taste the drawing. The drawings are biased according to time and space, they come from deep inside, from the common sensorium and materialize on a surface through the interaction of hands, tools and surfaces since architecture is above all the architect, but it is also other than the architect. Marco Polo describes a bridge, stone by stone. But which is the stone that support the bridge? Kublai Khan asks. The bridge is not supported by one stone or another, Marco answers, but by the line of the arch that they form. Kublai Khan remains silent, reecting. Eventually, the Great Khan adds: Why do you speak to me of the stones? It is only the arch that matters to me! To which Polo retorts: Without stones there is no arch. Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities, New York: Houghton Mifin Harcourt, 1978.

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Notes
1. Unfortunately, sapere and sapore are not anymore cognates in imaginative thinking. Virgil of Toulouse, grammarian of the 6th century, has beautifully shown the connection between sapere and sapore. Virgil of Toulouse, Virgilio Marone grammatico: Epitomi ed Epistole, ed. and trans. G. Polara, Naples: Liguori Editore, 1979. Western Modernism, London: Phaidon, 2003. 6. Ernesto De Martino, Sud e magia, Milan: Feltrinelli, 2004. 7. Giuseppe Mazzotta, Cosmopoiesis: The Renaissance Experiment, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001. 8. Nelson Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking, Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1978. 9. Leon Battista Alberti, Larchitettura di Leonbatista Alberti tradotta in lingua orentina da Cosimo Bartoli gentilhuomo & accademico orentino. Con la aggiunta de disegni. In Firenze: appresso Lorenzo Torrentino impressor ducale, 1550. 10. John Dee, The Mathematicall Praeface to the Elements of Geometrie of Euclid of Megara (1570), New York: Science History Publications,1975, p. d.iiij. 11. Leon Battista Alberti, LArchitecture et Art de bien bastir du Seigneur Leon Baptiste Albert, Gentilhomme Florentin, divise e en dix livres, Traduicts de Latin en ois, par deffunct Jan Martin, Franc Parisien, nagueres Secretaire du Reverendissime Cardinal de Lenoncourt, A Paris: [Imprime par R. Massellin, pour] J. Kerver, 1553. 12. In architectural terminology the Italian term progetto cannot be translated as design, since it has broader and idiosyncratic phenomenological connotations. 13. Leon Battista Alberti, Larchitettura, (De re aedicatoria), trans. Giovanni Orlandi, vol. 2, Milan: Edizioni Il Polilo, 1966. 14. Leon Battista Alberti, On the Art of Building in Ten Books, trans. Joseph Rykwert, Neil Leach and Robert Tavernor, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988. 15. Alberti, On the Art of Building, p. 7 16. The Book of Ezekiel (from the Hebrew Bible) 40:3. 17. Palmira Cipriano, Templum, Rome: University La Sapienza, 1983, pp. 121142. 18. Cipriano, Templum, p. 123. 19. Alberti, On the Art of Building, p. 219.

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2. Robin Evans, The Projective Cast: Architecture and Its Three Geometries, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995. 3. Scientintically, adv. A burlesque nonce-word, formed by a blending of scientically and tint. 1761 STERNE Tr. Shandy III. v, He must have reddend, pictorically and scientintically speaking, six whole tints and a half . . . above his natural colour. 4. Johanna Drucker, Digital Ontologies: The Ideality of Form in/and Code StorageorCan Graphesis Challenge Mathesis?, Leonardo, 34, 2 (April 2001): 141145. 5. David Summers, Real Spaces: World Art History and the Rise of

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