9.5
This sequence of sketches
from Kyoto begins with the
Zen garden at the Ryoanji
Temple and ends with the Open
Air Art Museum designed by
Tadao Ando. The route traces a
journey through gravel gardens,
standing stones, minimalist
planes of concrete and art
installations.shopfronts or town churches. Your sequence of sketches
should explore progress along the line, noting where and
how it is broken, deflected or punctuated.
Mention has already been made of the geometry of
urban spaces. Most places of interest contain a mixture of
cubes, rectangles and spheres. Such complex geometries
are the essence of attractive townscape. These spaces
and their interrelationships can only be discovered by
walking about the town and recording one’s impressions
in the sketchbook. The volumetric geometry often
extends to the interiors of buildings where a circular
space inside, say, a church is complemented by a
rectangle of urban space outside. In his design for the
Sheldonian Theatre in Oxford, Sir Christopher Wren
played upon such interrelationships, as did the designers
of many Baroque churches in Rome, and more recently
Frank Gehry at the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao.
You can train your eye to recognise and appreciate this
architectural interplay, and through the sketchbook record
and analyse your experiences. Of course, if you are an
architect, town planner or developer, you may be in a
position to bring this sensibility to bear upon current civic
design. Europe once had a splendid tradition of related
interior and exterior spaces, but the car and the
dominance of street traffic have together eroded our
perception of this rich urban heritage.Sequential sketches 79