George Legendre AA School of Architecture, London, United Kingdom 199
what things look like; or what they are supposed to look like; it is enough to focus
on what they actually do.
For the past four years, Diploma Unit 5, my studio here at the AA, explored the
twin paradigms of (1) descriptive notation the points and lines of projective geom-
etry, on the RIGHT and (2) analytic geometry, the surface of modern mathematics
and computation, on the LEFT. The distinction is purely historical and goes back to
the time when algebraic symbolism broke free from the figures of geometry. Though
personally I like to think of it at a more fundamental level, i.e. as the essential dis-
tinction between symbols and figures, between text and the image.
So you see, year in year out, the AA project review pages of Dip 5 are evenly split
between the descriptive, and the analytical. I do not have time to elaborate on this
key distinction, but the essence is that we do never draw or model form; instead we
just write it.
The descriptive surface served Dip 5 well! This being an undergraduate studio,
we approached the problem in narrative and playful terms, taking the human body
as site. For about 3 years, we did short projects that took the body as site but never
took directly from it, looking instead for surfaces modeled on the body’s external
envelope, its measurements and dimensions. In 2003 that material was collected in
Bodyline.
Bodyline opens with the rather figurative meshes of contemporary computer
gaming, and descends very quickly into abstraction. In descriptive terms it moves
on to micro-narratives of pattern and garment in which the body is already all but
unrecognizable. This one is about growth as a form of decay, a metaphoric look at
the uncontrolled multiplication of cancer cells and the lethal distortions it visits on
the sick body.
Bodyline closes with the work of our third and final year, in which the students drew
stereotomic self-portraits using the projective networks of Mongean geometry, a mode
of notation invented more than two hundred years ago. The briefs were very abstract;
this one is about reciprocity, geometric inversion, or the act of collecting.
Technically speaking, this final chapter took us back to the ancient techniques
of the eighteenth century, but, paradoxically, in its merciless abstraction, it also
produces the most contemporary result: the human body disappears, and the subject
itself emerges only through registration and technique, as is the case in the work of,
say Pollock or De Kooning. So you see, our latest virtual visions can be art-historically
backward, since in terms of gestalt, it is actually possible to move in two opposite
directions at once.
Bodyline presents this contradiction in the form of an art-historical spoof, treat-
ing the software Maya and Character Studio as Ancestors, and Mongean geometry as
‘contemporary’.
The question of course is whether this is of any use for architectural design. We
did try to use it, starting from the obvious fact that it is a lot more difficult to draw
a jacket than it is to draw a building. This is because pattern grading uses one plane,
whereas architectural drawing uses at least two, and that extra difficulty is in itself
very inviting. So we tried to extend building with the same techniques that you use
to jump sizes in clothing, but the final result was a bit generic. The descriptive tech-