Thinking Through Drawing

The first thing to be said about the drawings of Carlos Bedoya is that this is not an exercise in nostalgia, or a case for the lost art of drawing by hand. The architects of PRODUCTORA work in the present, with all the tools and techniques available to them. The computer is a fact of life in architectural offices today and PRODUCTORA are no different than any other practice of its generation in this regard. Those debates belong to another time.

Bedoya draws on loose sheets, usually gridded, or in notebooks. Each drawing is scaled to the hand, each line a single gesture. For Bedoya, the drawing is a place where ideas are worked out and tested. Made with all the familiar conventions of an architectural drawing—ruled plans and sections, axonometrics, and a few perspectives—these drawings make use of that shared language, the everyday working language of architects, to communicate ideas clearly and quickly. They function at an intimate scale of thoughts, ideas, and propositions, made tangible and scaled to the page: thinking through drawing. The small scale discourages overelaboration—there is only so much information that can be conveyed in such a small space. Some drawings are spare, some are dense. These drawings do not delineate ideas or concepts worked out in the mind—the ideas emerge on the page, as they are drawn. Bedoya knows this very well: it is through the process of drawing itself that ideas are produced. One thing leads to another, and the ideas flow, sometimes ahead of the hand, other times following.

His preferred drawing instrument is the Bic pen—cheap and readily available in multiple colours. The reds and blues belong to the office or the schoolroom—not to the artist’s studio. Nothing esoteric, simply what is quick and to hand. A means for direct annotation of ideas and architectural possibilities. Colour is not about atmosphere or effect, it is notational—clarifying ideas and marking out differences.

He calls them sketches (croquis), and that seems right—a quick shorthand to get ideas down on paper. The set-square and the triangle could be seen as a crutch, the apparatus of the finished drawing, but I suspect that for Bedoya, the technique has long ago been internalised. It serves as a way of imposing a certain geometric discipline on the sketch, maintaining the rectilinear organisation, and imposing a slight slowing down of the process, a kind of internal check. He can move with confidence from the modular space of the paper to the building, each one operating according to the same geometries. Each drawing a thought, then move on to another, the accumulation of ideas beginning to outline the building proposal.

This discipline is (and not by accident), the counterpart to PRODUCTORA'S preferred formal language of simple forms, immediately apprehended. Clarity, in their case, is not about reduction, or simplification. These primary forms are often unexpected in scale, orientation or juxtaposition; rotated, mirrored, cut, superimposed, and often incomplete. This is not, in other words, a form of architectural minimalism. Minimalism strips away complexity, often by ignoring program or context, and a simplified formal. language can shut down the potential for rich programmatic encounter.

For PRODUCTORA, these legible forms, readily understood, are a scaffold for public space and social interaction. They operate according to what || would describe as default regularities. It's a pragmatic principle, invested neither in reductive simplicity nor in complexity for its own sake. Rather, in the absence of any information that might suggest formal elaboration, the default response is simple and straightforward. On the other hand, if site, program, or the internal logic of the project suggests a more complex solution, that too is embraced. It's not about the form, but about the space between things, a place where all the contingency and the messiness of life can unfold, against a framework that is stable without being absolute.

Note, for example, the central figure in the plan of the Museo Cultura Maya, located in Xpujil, Campeche. Within the field of geometric forms that make up the precinct of the museum, the dominant figure is an extended bar, stepped in section, to which are appended an oblique triangle and a half circle, on opposing sides. There is a delicate interplay between movement and stasis. These forms animate the plan, and create spatial incident as a consequence of the accumulation and juxtaposition of simple forms - not unlike the play of fragments in an archeological site. A distant recall (in a different cultural context), of Piranesi's Campo Marzio or of Louis Kahn. And, curiously, once the eye is trained to the drawings made by hand from Carlos Bedoya, PRODUCTORA's computer drawn working drawings, with their structural axes and notated ground textures, begin to look a lot like his sketches.

This speaks to another characteristic of PRODUCTORA's work – which is that within the simple language of forms, there is a countervailing tendency for serial repetition and aggregation - intricate, perforated screens, material textures or columnar arrays that enrich the experience of the architecture. Simple at the large scale, intricate at the local, human scale, not unlike the effects of Bedoya's drawings, where the texture of the individual drawn line or the shaded areas occurs within a larger geometric scaffold.

There is another tendency within the sketches that also provides insight into PRODUCTORA's work: the making of one thing out of two. Not melding disparate things, but taking two closely related forms and combining them in such a way that each retains a separate identity while contributing to the whole - a synthetic form-making strategy. In an obvious way it is encoded in the colors of the ink - two primary colors. It is visible in one of the earliest sketches in the series, for the Two Towers, later shown at the 2017 Chicago Architecture Biennial. The drawing is a simple axonometric outlining two rectilinear forms, both gridded boxes slightly taller than wide, separated by a notch, but linked by the geometry of the surface lines, and differentiated by slight variations in pattern and the characteristic red and blue ink color. It appears again in a detailed study of adjoining façade patterns (this one for the Providencia Tower) and, in a drawing that does not delineate specific forms, but displays an extraordinary economy of means, traces out the profile of the tower in axonometric by means of a truncated field of vertical lines, resting on a ground line, red on one face, blue on the other, with a syncopated rhythm introduced onto the blue façade.

But this synthetic impulse is most evident in in a series of early drawings for the Houston Endowment - finally built in very different form, which tells you something also about the nature of the sketch. Sometimes it's a record of a road not taken, perhaps to return later. Once again, two primary figures: a half-circle and a triangle (or, if you like, a half-square, rotated 45 degrees). Each one implying a complete figure; if you wanted, you could draw it like this (figure by Stan Allen).

The geometry locks the two figures together: not only is the rotated square inscribed within the circle, the center point of the circle is at the half-way point of the long side of the triangle (or the center of the implied square). In the axonometric, the construction line of the completed square is lightly notated. There are two sheets where plan and section are shown, each with slight variations, one with a spiral ramp system.

This is another example of the synthetic capacity of the hand drawing- to work simultaneously in plan and section, internalizing the idea that in the building they are one thing, and only drawn separately by convention. Plan and projection combine in axonometric, and here the dialectic between the two parts (which make one thing) is more visible, particularly in the roof geometry of the triangle, which suggests deep beams aligned with one face, a geometry foreign to the radial organization of the half-circle. Furthermore, the axonometric has something of the character of a wire-frame, suggesting a cross-pollination between computer aided and hand drawing.

In these drawings (as in PRODUCTORA's work) the movement from plan to three-dimensions is by simple extrusion - not unlike Kahn, although Kahn rarely drew axonometrics. But it's also hard not to see this particular project in the context of John Hejduk's One-Half House, a project that is embedded deeply in the formal consequences of the axonometric. But if the genealogy of the idea can be traced back to these two precedents, the way the forms are fused together points to the differences. In both Kahn and Hejduk, there is an insistence on the fragment, and the separate legibility of each geometric figure, traceable in Kahn's case, back to Piranesi. Something of the existential autonomy of the solitary individual, the collective itself broken and fragmented. In PRODUCTORA's case, the whole predominates, and the individual is linked to larger sense of the whole - a metaphor, perhaps for the dissolving boundary today between public and private, individual and collective.

There is another useful distinction, which turns on a subtle shade of meaning between the terms elemental and elementary. This may sound like semantic hair splitting, but the difference matters. Elemental implies a turn to the essential and the archetypal: air, water, fire, and earth. Elementary is more about common sense: clarity, simplicity and immediacy. The elementary is self-evident, readily understood without complicated explanation. Euclid's Elements, for example, are primary geometric figures, and these are the basic figures that make up Bedoya's drawings, and PRODUCTORA's architecture. Elemental implies an assertive material presence - as in the work of Kahn. The elementary, in contrast, is more about form. Hejduk was attentive to material, but form, particularly in this early work, was his primary concern. PRODUCTORA synthesize both. As far back as the Pavilion on the Zócalo (2014) they employed a plan language of primary geometric forms (circle, triangle), linked in this case by an assertive path of movement, but expressed as assembly of parts whose raw materiality was immediately evident - including a roof structure that, while recalling Kahn's Yale Art Gallery, is the logical outcome of the triangular plan geometry.

The drawings of Carlos Bedoya speak, then, to a certain continuity in the history of the partnership, and an ongoing dialogue with the history of the discipline. They make evident the shared precepts of the partners and offer insight into their work process. They are a window opening into the day-to-day labor of the architect, and the slow emergence of ideas that always occurs in an unspoken dialogue between individual expression and the shared logic of the discipline, between the private space of the drawing and the larger conversation of the office, and between the architect and the public.