Christos Hadjichristos University of Cyprus, School of Architecture, Nicosia, Cyprus 435
dio. The students sat around it in a circle and were asked to produce a thirty minute
sketch of the object. No other instruction was given and no comments were made
during the exercise. While most of the students managed to produce more or less
respectable drawings, it was observed that the use of the eraser was quite extensive
and that parts of the drawing were worked out in detail without a first general sketch
of the whole composition. Consequently, the final product in most cases had wrong
proportions while the movement expressed in the streamlined shape of the motorcycle
was not captured in the drawing.
After a quick review, the students were asked to sketch the same object for only
thirty seconds while the use of an eraser was prohibited. For the series of exercises
that followed, the time was reduced to ten seconds and then five seconds. The new
sketches were then discussed. The students themselves begun to see the qualities
expressed in the quicker sketches. For the last exercise of the session the motorcycle
was sketched once more for thirty minutes hoping that the students would use this
technique of layering information in order to gradually build up their composition.
It was observed that very few did indeed change the technique they used in the
very first sketch.
With more of these exercises during the semester, the limited time allowed for each
exercise together with the use of markers and pens helped change the tendency of the
students to dwell extensively on a part before configuring the whole. Furthermore,
using charcoal as the medium offered another way of looking at the act of sketching
and erasing while combining media further developed the skill of the students to work
in layers, a skill that can potentially be useful not only in representing, sketching
and recording but in designing as well.
For the first year, first semester design studio the project involved a version of a
rather common exercise in architecture studios: each student was asked to study the
relationships found or expressed in a painting by a local artist and then use them
in order to create a new two-dimensional composition. This in turn served as the
initial material for the design of a three-dimensional object which in turn inspired an
intervention in the urban fabric. The whole process can be seen as a series of layers
which may be linked linearly. It could also be that some layers are actually more linked
between them than with intermediate layers, creating jumps and discontinuities. It
is the juxtaposition of the layers that allows such features to surface. So, while in
the drawing class the exercises encouraged a de-layering of an existing object, in
the design studio the task was first to delayer the work of art and then create new
layers to compose a new entity. Needless to say that the creation of a layer in de-
layering as well as in layering, in the previous class as well as in this one, was not
carried out in a mechanistic fashion. It was rather more of a process that involved
both analytical as well as synthetic activity.
In the second semester design studio of the first year, the students were intro-
duced to a strip of Cyprus. Grouped in teams of four they were required to study a
quarter of the strip allocated to them through maps and aerial photographs and bring
out information regarding the topography, settlements, the transportation system,
vegetation, farming and other activities. The data discovered was used to create dif-
ferent layers which were juxtaposed and relationships, connections or dependencies
were searched for. Creating a layer for each type of information allowed for deduc-