SHOKDECOK

How the future will be? That precisely might have thought the Smithson couple. The reality have taught us that the curves musn’t represent always the future, despite this, it is a nice way to predict how houses would be.

Why we tend to think that architecture is made by dead materials, that we cannot build a dome with leaves, or transform the trunks of palm trees into the pillars of a dome of air. Breaking the rules of aour common sense.

One of those perfect rare axonometrics that from time to time we find. These one caught by the foundation, give us in a schematic way the main spaces of an unbuilt project for a museum. Classicism and modernity in each corner.

Fruit of the modern expressionism and always in the shadow of another finnish architect, Alvar Aalto, a couple of architects delighted us with this design originated by their free minds and hands, liberated from every shape and constriction.

Just imagination. Use it and you could build castles in the air or just dimension a croissant. Example of simplicity and complexity in the same exercise. Congratulations!

The power of drawings and sketches is the ability to represent new worlds, awesome ideas that are just in our heads and are left with lame words. 

Can you see the teapots? If I tell you the truth what I saw at first were pears and oranges, but if after that you see the drawings of the Kanazawa Museum you will understand were it comes from...and perhaps you will see the tea set. Rooms close to each other, touching them, no corridors, a compression of elements in a tray. Soft and warm like the tea.

A little bit of colour please! Some would recognise clearly this plaza, or should I say “Piazza”. The stroke perhaps is not espectacular, but try to see the shadows and the paviments...also the light green-blue of the sky. The details are in the light, the volumes and the floor, maybe because he was an architect.

Do you need more words, or the name of this famous project comes directly to your mind? 

Sketch of the Sidney Opera House by Jorn Utzon. 

This axo plays with the transparency of the elements drawn in it. The depth of the building is told in just one plane, where you know exactly what is ahead and behind, but mixing everything.

Chairs. A mess of chairs, and nothing else. Sometimes chaos produces nice and aesthetical drawings like this one. Perhaps because the simplicity of this chaos.

Water between walls, enclosed in the mass, trying to escape. Light filtering through the cracks.

Indoor patios. With a really quick sketch the Folkwang Museum in Essen is resumed. The reality give us a low and modern building made in steel and glass; six structures envolving four inner courtyards, keeping behind its walls the first museum of contemporary art in Europe (1902).

Rehabilitations are awesome. Sketches too. And when one of these permit you to imagine how an old power station is gonna be reused into an art gallery, to see the old chimneys, the industrial spaces and elements, then its function is done.

Old and new should not fight for having more presence and space. That’s what the architects of this building in the drawing thought when they had to resolve the project. A protected palace from the 19th and buildings close to the plot. The axonometric talks by itself.

Drawings are much clearer than words many times. It is when the hands of Marjane draw the stories of her country. In black and white, no textures, thick strokes, with a very well prepared and thought script.