Drawing & Speculation
Drawing Task - 9 credit card size and 1 postcard size
Drawing the city—(First week workshop)
First, I observed the surroundings of UTS, which led me to discover the structure of the city near UTS. The inspiration from the neighborhood is that many buildings are based on squares and lines, and the first point that people can see can be clearly noticed. When the nine images turn to a picture, you will need fine painting, which will make me think about the aspects that need to continue to study.
Inspired by these photos
Research on the chosen Architects and A study from "Learning from Las Vegas"
“Learning from Las Vegas” was a book written by Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour in 1972. Robert Venturi is an award-winning architect and an influential writer, teacher, artist and designer. Denise Scott Brown is an architect, writer and curator. And Robert Venturi is one of the founders of influential construction companies. Steven Izenour is an American architect, urbanist and theorist. This book provides a good support for the development of the postmodern art movement. Their work is mainly to record the things that pull Las Vegas by taking pictures and drawing. At the beginning of the day, Las Vegas was a model of a desert town with billboards, parking lots and vast roads. They use different symbols and related patterns to show their observations. A "Nolli" map of the Las Vegas Strip reveals and clarifies what is public and what is private, but here the scale is enlarged by the inclusion of the parking lot, and the solid-to-void ratio is reversed by the open spaces of the desert. Maping the Nolli components from an aerial photograph provides an intriguing crosscut of Strip systems. These components, separated and redefined, could be undeveloped land, astos, buildings, and ceremonial space. Reassembled, they describe the Las Vegas equivalent of the pilgrims Way, although the description, like Nolli's map, misses the iconological dimensions of experience. (Learning from Las Vegas 1977) At the same time, they used different tools to analyze their observations and research on Las Vegas. They took pictures to make observations of Las Vegas buildings, billboards and roads. Through the analysis of Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour, there are few buildings and dedicated parking lots on both sides of the Las Vegas Strip. Through this layout study, Robert Venturi accepted the Las Vegas landscape, which was originally known as the desert town. They show their recorded Las Vegas cities economically and ethically, looking at the culture of the city and the city in different ways. Venturi and Scott Brown argue that modernist rejection of history, decoration, and extensional symbolism is irresponsible, empty, boring, and inappropriate. The use of space and light expressionism demanded by modernism is not commensurate with the size of American society and has been reformatted into cars and highways in recent years. Now, the most interesting thing about the United States is the famous Disneyland. However, we have neglected the things in the city next to us.
Figure 1: The ways of map
I used the architect's mapping method to draw my work. The first image uses lines and squares. All the lines are also pure black. My idea is simply the city's top view.
Figure 2: "The Long Island Ducking"
Figure 3: Tanya billboard on the Strip
Figure 4: Map of Las Vegas Strip (detail) showing every written word seen from road
Visual Analysis of Learnings from Las Vegas
By observing the photo (Figure 1), you can see that most of the elements in the graph are squares and lines. The colors are mainly gray and white. In each square, the color is not filled, but the shadow is used to fill it. Through such a layout, it is easy to observe where each square represents, and the part with the shadow color is more attractive. Figure 3 is easy to see is a propaganda advertisement, this graphic logo has become a way of communication between the city and people. Going back to the previous picture, different symbols can be seen from the Figure 2. The symbol of this building is a duck shop shaped like a duck, a symbol of sculpture and a sanctuary for architecture. Prior to the modern architectural movement, the contradictions between the interior and exterior of the building were common, especially in urban architectural and literary buildings. Baroque domes were symbols as well as spatial constructions, and they are bigger in scale and higher outside than inside in order to dominate their urban setting and communicate their symbolic message.
Digital Drawing and Development
The first-hand drawing
First I chose to draw this image in landscape format because it makes it easy to use the architect's mapping method and show an open map view and draw with black lines.
The second-hand drawing edited with colour
The second modification I added some colors to add a strong visual effect. And the color can easily distinguish what I want to express.
The draft of digital drawing
I decided to use the Photoshop to make my digital map because I needed to draw various shapes and lines on the map. For this draft, I roughly selected a few colors to correspond to housing, schools and restaurants. After that I will express the visual effects more clearly.
a final drawing in 80 × 80 cm
In the end, my work shows a very regular visual effect, all with square as the main layout, using different colors to tell the viewers to represent different things, each color represents a different thing.
Reference list:
Lazer, B. 2011, Comment: Learning from Las Vegas, viewed in 29 August 2019<https://ifacontemporary.org/learning-from-las-vegas-and-the-antinomy-of-the-postmodern-manifesto/>
Venturi, R. 1972, Learning from Las Vegas, IBM Composer Univers printed, America.
Venturi, R. 1977, Learning from Las Vegas: the forgotten symbolism of architectural form, MIT Press, Cambridge.
