Drawings of Tea-Leaves and Split Entrails: The Uncertain Social Function of Architectural Plans
- Publisher:
- Design History Foundation
- Publication Type:
- Journal Article
- Citation:
- Places: a forum of environmental design, 2021, 2021
- Issue Date:
- 2021-12-22
Open Access
Copyright Clearance Process
- Recently Added
- In Progress
- Open Access
This item is open access.
I stumbled on the architectural plans for my high-school assembly hall in the New South Wales government archives. Like an old photo, the drawings brought back vivid memories: the hall obscured by fog on daybreak winter mornings, the dusty smell hiding in the backstage curtains, the scrape of metal chair legs on sunlit floorboards.
The plans, of course, reflected none of these qualities. They had been prepared by the office of the Australian modernist architect Arthur Baldwinson in 1960. The hall’s modular, straightforward design embodied the principles of functional planning for which Baldwinson is now well-known. Simply drawn, they were visually unremarkable. The richness of the space in my memories was not conveyed, yet the disjuncture was surprising all the same.
In architectural planning, the unreconcilable difference between a building’s graphic representation and its inhabitants’ lived experience is under-considered and often ignored. The theorist Robin Evans once described architectural drawings as “like the tea-leaves in the cup, [or] the split entrails of the eviscerated dove.”1 His point was that, far from simply translating definitive qualities and pre-programmed facts, architectural drawings comprise uncertainty — though this is rarely acknowledged in the profession.
Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: