During a one-week summer workshop at Shatwell Farm, students from the EPFL, alongside young architects from the UK, explored drawing as a key tool of architecture and engineering. Through research into the Drawing Matter collection and the construction of survey drawings, the workshop used drawing as a corporeal form of measurement to observe the environment of the farm. Below are reflections on the experience by two of the workshop groups.
Measuring shatwell’s tempo
Using threads of strings, our own bodies
In this repetitive measured dance, profiles arise
The more practice, the more accurate the hands get
Four of them follow the same choreography
Surveying piano piano the sheet
Some be good, other not, only the paper knows
The harvest of lines only started
The thin shadow cast by the bevelled edge of the clear plastic ruler makes it difficult to locate the exact point where my line must begin. Just as I peer over the sheet, a corner, gently lifted by a sudden gust, folds the sheet in two. I spring up, moving quickly round the table to reposition our improvised paperweights to flatten our sheet once again. As my partner Lea scrambles to catch a sheet of sketch measurements that is playfully drifting across the gravelled yard, I try vainly to recall where my line was meant to go. Sighing, my gaze glides glibly back to the paper. But it’s no use. I can’t remember. I look up, smiling and squinting from our table set up in the yard, draped in drawings, toward the rest of the farm. Up from the weeds and nettles braided around Siza’s mustard columns and out across the full and gentle curves of fields fringed with hawthorn and hornbeam hedgerows. Courage.
Our drawing is becoming alternatingly creased and dappled from the fickle West Country weather. In this way, it is beginning to take shape. We are measuring and drawing all the drainpipes and gutters of the farm. This, I suppose, is our rather generous interpretation of the group’s task to study the immediate landscape. This task, I am told, is not to be understood anecdotally. Our pipes which hover nakedly alone on the page, plucked from their parent structures, certainly don’t seem to narrate much. And yet, as we proceed, pipe by pipe, gutter by gutter, line by line, from one sheet to the next, each softly drawn streak of graphite begins slowly radiating its own matrix of design logics, accumulating contingencies and its own curious character. Though separated by great swathes of empty paper these fragments of the farm are seemingly not autonomous. Rather, like the other inhabitants of the archive and the farm, they are buzzing brimfuls of activity. As we draw, the gutters are pulled from the flattened periphery to a sharp pointed centre. Each piece of the farm is open, one need only look, or perhaps ask Niall, who will happily indulge in any questions on their nature.
My week at Shatwell did not discriminate between mental and manual activity. We, like tired pilgrims, returned everyday back to the drawing board with the bells of yesterday's unanswered questions and fraught debates ringing our head. Each day a favourite pebble, which, picked from the beach, is turned over and over again, yielding and unyielding to the rhythms of eating, talking, drawing, measuring and looking. The strange drawing we left behind tells tales of small blooming fruits of discovery, slow sunny hours spent peering over the ruler’s shadow and perhaps even a little about Shatwell Farm.
Nestled in a terrain more familiar with cows than people sits a farm, an archive, a collection of buildings with ambiguous use. Upon arriving, two capture a fleeting moment of attention, drawing our eyes through their axial alignment. The first, the work of architect Hugh Strange, acts as our ‘entry’, sitting snug within a historic façade. The other, Stephen Taylor’s whimsical ‘hay barn’ sitting above us, holding station, surveying the landscape it commands. Despite their differences, there appeared to be a connection, a feeling that they are somehow akin.
Invited to map the site, to try and understand the relationship between these points in space, this connection was somehow inescapable to us, proving enchanting, yet tricky to unpack. Unknowing what this connection might be, rulers emerged, measures were taken, and pages were marked. A meticulous process, an exercise that initially lacked a conceptual point. However, a deus ex machina presented, uncovering the evasive connection. Suddenly, we could see structures in structures, buildings in buildings, uses in uses. Within both, a doubling emerged, each housing a construction within its external mass. The hidden tie had sprung.
The process of drawing, of mark making, of painstakingly recording the details we encounter became our devices of clarity. In inviting an opportunity to sit back, to map what we measured rather than what we thought we saw, a moment of discovery presented. The exercise, for us, unravelled in an unexpected way. Drawing extended upon representation, encouraging our unexpected encounter.
EPFL students: Christelle Blanco, Johanna Brendow, Jérémie Engler, Léa Guillotin, Emilie Hamel, Edouard Heinkel, Polina Holub, Quentin Mesot, Léo Perrin, Carolina Pichler, Lalie Porteret, Sophie Sills, Kasia Stachnio, Anthony Varaillon
UK Team: Michael Becker, James Haynes