Towards a cross-cultural sketching school

with David Covo, Henry Tsang and collaborators Sechaba Maape, Chris Cornelius, Joanna Nash, and Chibuzo Ohaneje

This workshop series has been designed to both develop and challenge conventional skills in observation, notebook recording, and sketching in selected media, with a focus on drawing. More importantly, the workshops respond to the voices we’ve heard in the Global Studio dialogues calling for an approach to architectural representation that questions current practices and reflects multiple perspectives on racial identities, cultures, ethnicities, genders and world views.

The act of sketching will be presented as a strategy that frames our encounters with places and peoples, built form and landscape, land and cosmos. But using who’s frame? Together we will experience the malleability of frames[1] when looked through from different world views. The course will start by examining the kinds of sketches that architects, artists, writers, poets, and many others make when they are exploring the world around them. The kinds of sketches that we associate with reflection and introspection we will practice together as a means of capturing a truth of place. Whether produced across the street or on the other side of the world, worked on for hours or just a few minutes, here, the sketch is presented as the product of a process of enquiry and searching. It is not a perfect artwork, but an evidence of our curiosity about the world and our attempt to understand it by observing and drawing what we see and experience. It is an expression of knowledge that reveals how we see and what we learned.

Join us to grapple with an approach to architectural representation that reflects a ‘collective future’[1], one that values multiple perspectives, racial identities, cultures, and world views as both unique and interconnected. Throughout the past year of AU’s Global Studio we have more fully recognized and acknowledge the ongoing sovereignty of colonial and Eurocentric knowledges in our minds, as well as our practice, teaching and learning of architecture. We’ve also heard extraordinary voices leading change and students demanding change. In this sketching school we will ask ourselves and each other how as architects can we learn to be in ‘right relation’[2], to see and draw across differences without reduction. We acknowledge that this is an experiment and the beginning of a journey of healing, and with that in mind we ask you to consider that “The idea of multicultural curricula is not to master every culture addressed…The goal is to operate with the humility of an apprentice”[3].

[1] Fortin, D. T. (2014) Indigenous architectural futures: Potentials for post-apocalyptic spatial speculation. ARCC/EAAE 2014 | Beyond Architecture: New Intersections & Connections Ends: The Dystopia in Utopia and the Final Cause. Forces, Causality, Ideology, Values, Myth. p. 481.

[2] Mills, A. (2017) What is a Treaty? On Contract and Mutual Aid. In Borrows, J. and Coyle, M. (eds) The Right Relationship: Reimagining the Implementation of Historical Treaties. University of Toronto Press. p. 209.

[3] Yusaf, S. (2019) Decolonizing Architectural Pedagogy: Towards Cross-Culturalism. Dialictic VII, Spring p. 10.

The series will be delivered in four separate stand-alone workshops. Each 90-minute workshop will be a collaboratively taught dialogue based on presentations from 2 or more cultural perspectives exploring the diverse nature of drawing and its role in the architectural design process.

The workshops are free and open to everyone. Specific topics that will be introduced in the workshops include:

Workshop 1: Context and narrative, the human figure

Workshop 2: Drawing the unseen, design sketching

Workshop 3: Subject vs Object, Detail vs Information / A Painter’s Perspective

Workshop 4: Visualizing the Unintended / Colour and Light

See the button below to our Miro board, we will be including a bibliography of suggested readings, an ongoing revision of “best practices” for sketching in community, and the beginning of a glossary of terms that we invite you to expand.

Those of you who are students, please inquire at your own schools what credit is available for completion of the series.

resource board

contributors

David Covo.

David Covo is an Associate Professor and past Director (1996-2007) of the School of Architecture at McGill University, where he has taught since 1977. He teaches design, architectural drawing and plein-air sketching, and co-teaches two courses in McGill’s School of Physical and Occupational Therapy.
Henry Tsang.

Henry Tsang is an Assistant Professor in the RAIC Centre for Architecture at Athabasca University in Canada. His design, teaching and research work explores the intersections between sustainability, health, and culture in the built environment.
Sechaba Maape.

Sechaba Maape is an architect and the director of the design practice Afreetekture, as well as a senior lecturer at the Wits School of Architecture and Planning. His research explores people/place relationships, ritual and climate change adaptation among indigenous communities in Kuruman in the Northern Cape Province, South Africa.
Chris Cornelius.

Chris Cornelius is a citizen of the Oneida Nation of Wisconsin and has recently accepted the position as Chair of the Department of Architecture at the University of New Mexico. He is the founding principal of studio:indigenous, a design practice serving Indigenous clients.
Joanna Nash.

Joanna Nash is the child of Slovakian-secular-jewish parents who were WW2 refugees in London, England. Her family emigrated to Canada twelve years later and she grew up in Montreal. Joanna’s philosophy and work matches the ambitions of art by which generations of diverse artists have sought an understanding of themselves, their unique experiences and their environment.
Chibuzo Ohaneje.

Chibuzo Ohaneje’s love for both art and architecture manifested from his earliest days as a young scholar. He is now a Nigerian licensed architect with a penchant for Afrocentrism rooted in African belief systems. Despite attending universities in Nigeria, his training was an all-Western pedagogy, he then connected the dots back to his cultural roots in 2020, during a fully immersive internship with Community Planning and Design Initiative Africa.
kristen kornienko.

kristen kornienko is the coordinator of the Global Studio at the RAIC Centre for Architecture at Athabasca University and the co-founder of 1955 an experimental collaborative in Kliptown, Soweto South Africa. She is a creative practitioner of transformative spatial justice through design and is actively self-reflective on the power dynamics within our social constructs that impact cultural and racial identities and everyday lives as we work to decolonize our minds, institutions, and places.