“Draw the path you took to get here.”
This is what the course assistants told us, naive first-year freshmen; and we, totally disoriented, realized then that we had sleepwalked through various environments to get into the faculty and reach that crowded lecture hall where our flock and its shepherds were now. And so on we went, all of us thinking about those rooms, how many there were, how big they were, what shape they were in and where they were; but, judging by what we saw on the sheets, with very little result.
This test served to accustom us immediately to looking at the spaces where we moved and lived with new eyes, eyes that measured depths, heights and distances, and that transmitted messages of times and positions to the brain. Eyes of a future architect.
Mindful of that experience, I thought about something like that in my course, in which I treated buildings for entertainment and leisure. At the oral exam I posed a question about one of the theaters previously listed, and for it I asked not a reply in words but a graphic one. For example, “draw from memory the plan of Coliseum”, or La Scala, or Farnese Theater and so on; and if, as was normal, the student couldn’t remember all the rooms, it was enough to draw the shapes of the main areas and place them in the right place.
I knew I couldn’t expect great results from the test, but my purpose was to observe how the students were able to express graphically what they had memorized, and to give them the opportunity to become aware of the capacity they had achieved on this fundamental point of an architect’s training.
The result of all this was to make evident a very large and general problem, because no one student, and I mean no one, began his drawing by preliminarily tracing any construction of the figure, that is to say to pose some references for proportions, axes of symmetry and so on, on which he could model the shape to draw: for example, two cross-shaped axes on which create the oval of the Coliseum. Everyone drew as an amateur painter would have done sitting in the country with his easel painting cows grazing. No one – and they were third year students – had been taught to see the space of architecture as a structure of geometries.
In my judgment I was always wide, very wide, also because eventually I should not fail them, but the faculty: the faculty of today, of course, because the faculty of my time immediately laid certain foundations, and without them none could go forward.
