The Plan Is the Discriminator: Masculinity and Modernist

The Plan is the Discriminator Masculinity And Modernist Architectural Drawings

A thesis submitted to the Graduate School of the University of Cincinnati in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

MASTER OF SCIENCE IN ARCHITECTURE

In the School of Architecture and Interior Design of the College of Design, Architecture, Art, and Planning June 2011 by

Czaee Malpani

B.Arch, TVB School of Habitat Studies, 2007 M.Arch, School of Architecture and Interior Design, College of DAAP, 2011 Committee Chair: Patrick Snadon, Ph.D Member: Nnamdi Elleh, Ph.D

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t ABSTRACT

This thesis investigates the interrelationships between gender and Modernist Architectural Representation. Contrary to the overwhelming scholarship that has tended to see architectural representation as “mere” (read: neutral) media for the translation and representation of the “intention” of the architect, this thesis argues that inherent to Modernist Architectural Representation is the production of the subjectivity of the architect, as well as the identity of architectural discipline at large, as gendered masculine. Yet, at the same time, this thesis also claims that such productions of gender are not completely bereft of contradictions and always involve (re)negotiations with the normative (masculine) ideal of the architect contained within architectural representation.

This work develops its arguments through an intimate reading of drawings made by two Modernist Architects for projects within the South Asian subcontinent. The first are the collected works of Minnette De Silva, one of the first formally trained women architect in Sri Lanka and a prominent participant as well as ideologue of Modernism in Asia. The second is the set of drawings produced for the Villa Sarabhai, Ahmedabad, India by the Architect Le Corbusier who was a mentor of Minnette and who remains, arguably, the foremost emblem of Architectural Modernism.

Analyzing the line work, the usage of scale, as well as the textual annotations that dot their drawings, this work shows how these (re)presentations i.e. the plan, section, and elevation, due to their projected ideals of veracity, objectivity and universality not only render themselves, but also “their author(s)” masculine. The work also, however, underscores the subtle yet important differences that characterize the drawings of Minnette vis-à-vis Corbusier to unpack the contested nature of the identity of a woman architect from South Asia.

IV acknowledgements

At our graduation ceremony, Director William D. Williams stated that the purpose of education “is not to fill a pail, but to light a fire.” It is with this sentiment that I would like to begin my acknowledgements since that is precisely the gift I have received at the School of Architecture and Interior Design here at the University of Cincinnati.

Words are not quite adequate to express my gratitude to Professor Patrick Snadon. One of the most wonderful people I have met, Patrick has encouraged in both times of self-doubt and conviction. He has always shown me new ways to think about the project I have taken on, and enthusiastically supported me when I have attempted to take the path less travelled. This thesis could not have shaped-up in the manner it did without Patrick’s energy, pain-staking editing and tireless commitment. It has been such a pleasure and honor working with him. Thank you so very much, Patrick.

Professor Elleh Nnamdi is another reason this thesis was finished and that I stayed at school. He has time and again bestowed upon me, his wisdom and kindness both of which have been integral to my development as a student and a person. Through our conversations, formal and informal, I have learned to see the world in different ways.

Thanks to Professors Aarati Kanekar and Vincent Sansalone, who have helped me develop my ideas in the M.arch program, ideas which have been brought to bear on the Ms.Arch. Also, for keeping me in good cheer.

A vote of thanks to Professors Adrian Parr, David Saile, John Hancock and Michaele Pride, all of whom have helped me expand my thinking on architecture and gender.

Much love to all my friends who have made this journey interesting and gotten me into much- needed trouble and diversions. Thanks Gȍzde, Dan, Richard, Yang, Mae, Ashley, Helen, Charles, V Shuai, and Maryam. You’ve made me question, learn, laugh, screech, and act silly – worth every moment of it.

I have found much nurturing at DAAP for my ideas and questions. These, though, would not have been borne had it not been for Jaideep’s constant pushing to re-examine my own ideas and notions. So much of what I am has been the product of many, many, many conversations with you. But more so than for the ability to think critically, I thank you for all the love and patience you have given me over the last few years.

Thank you to Suparna Chatterjee and Amit Sen for allowing me to ‘maro vel’ and giving me company on it. They have been a home away from home.

Last, but not the least, thanks to my parents and my sister, who have encouraged me to pursue my education, think for myself, and supported me in what might seem like slightly bizarre pursuits.

VI TABLE OF CONTENTS

Abstract | III

Acknowledgements | V

List of Figures | VIII

Chapters

1: Introduction | 1

2: Representation | 16

3: Lines | 45

3.1 A tale of two drawings and two architects 3.2 The Nature/ Culture Dichotomy 3.3 Lines that convey tensions 3.4 The Sheet as a the World 3.5 The Space between Bed and Room 3.6 Conclusion

4: Scale | 68

4.1 Defining Scale 4.2 The Politics of Scale 4.3 Scale as a Taxonomic Device 4.4 Scale as a Device for Fixity 4.5 The Politics of Scale is the Politics of Identity

5: Text | 86

5.1 Contextualizing the Question 5.2 The Act of Writing 5.3 Pictorial/Literal Representation 5.4 The ‘other’ Information 5.5 Conclusion

6: Conclusion | 113

Bibliography | 121

VII LIST OF FIGURES

1.1 Minnette de Silva and Le Corbusier at CIAM, Bridgewater, 1947. Image Source: De Silva, Minnette. The Life and Work of an Asian Woman Architect. Colombo: GEDSands, 1998.

1.2 Le Corbusier’s notes on the plan-drawing. Image Source: Le, Corbusier, and Frederick Etchells. Towards a New Architecture. translated from the 13th French ed. New York,: Brewer and Warren inc., 1927.

1.3 Examples of some of the seminal texts on Gender and Architecture.

1.4 Examples of Minnette de Silva’s work while at JJ School of Art and the Architectural Association (below). Image Source: De Silva, Minnette. The Life and Work of an Asian Woman Architect. Colombo: GEDSands, 1998.

2.1 ‘God as Geometer’ from The Frontispiece of Bible Moralisee (mid 13th century). Image Courtesy:Wikipedia.

2.2 Plate by Jacopo Barozzi da Vignola demonstrating problems created for perspective by binocular vision, 1583. From Perez- Gomez, Alberto, and Louise Pelletier. Architectural Representation and the Perspective Hinge. Cambridge, Mass.: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1997.

2.3 Plate from Barbaro’s Practica della Perspetiva demonstrating how the plan, section and elevation belong together (1569). From Perez-Gomez, Alberto, and Louise Pelletier. Architectural Representation and the Perspective Hinge. Cambridge, Mass.: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1997.

2.4 Durer, Albrecht (1471-1528), Draftsman Drawing a Lute (1525). Image courtesy: ArtStor

2.5 Durer, Albrecht (1471-1528), Draftsman Drawing a Recumbent Woman (1525). Image courtesy:ArtStor

2.6 Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720-1778), Carceri, plate IX (1769). Image courtesy: ArtStor

2.7 Architect at his drawing board. This wood engraving was published on May 25, 1893, in TekniskUkeblad, Norways leading engineering journal

2.8 Allan, David. The Origin of Painting, 1773. Image Courtesy: www.nuno-matos-duarte-textos.blogspot.com

2.9 Schinkel, Karl. The Origin of Painting, 1830. Image Courtesy: www.emeraldinsight.com VIII 3.1 Collection of architectural drawings for Minnette De Silva’s first project: The Karunaratne House, Kandy, 1948. Image Source: De Silva, Minnette. The Life and Work of an Asian Woman Architect. Colombo: GEDSands, 1998.

3.2 Perspective Drawing of the Karunaratne House, 1948. Image Source: De Silva, Minnette. The Life and Work of an Asian Woman Architect. Colombo: GEDSands, 1998.

3.3 (Recomposed) Plan Drawings of the Karunaratne House, 1948. Image Source: De Silva, Minnette. The Life and Work of an Asian Woman Architect. Colombo: GEDSands, 1998.

3.4 Proposal Drawings for Villa Sarabhai, Ahmedabad, 1955 by Le Corbusier. Image Source: Le Corbusier. Ahmedabad, 1953-1960 Le Corbusier. Paris: Fondation Le Corbusier, 1983

3.5 Comparison of the rendering of natural elements in Minnette De Silva’s and Le Corbusier’s drawings. Image Source: Le Corbusier. Ahmedabad, 1953-1960 Le Corbusier. Paris: Fondation Le Corbusier, 1983 and De Silva, Minnette. The Life and Work of an Asian Woman Architect. Colombo: GEDSands, 1998.

3.6 Comparison of the transgressed margins in Minnette De Silva’s and Le Corbusier’s drawings. Image Source: Le Corbusier. Ahmedabad, 1953-1960 Le Corbusier. Paris: Fondation Le Corbusier, 1983 and De Silva, Minnette. The Life and Work of an Asian Woman Architect. Colombo: GEDSands, 1998.

4.1 Drawings for House for Mr. Pieris, Colombo, 1952-1956 by Minnette de Silva. Image Source: De Silva, Minnette. The Life and Work of an Asian Woman Architect. Colombo: GEDSands, 1998.

4.2 Comparison of the annotation of scale in Minnette De Silva’s and Le Corbusier’s drawings. Image Source: Le Corbusier. Ahmedabad, 1953-1960 Le Corbusier. Paris: Fondation Le Corbusier, 1983 and De Silva, Minnette. The Life and Work of an Asian Woman Architect. Colombo: GEDSands, 1998.

4.3 Comparison of the scale-based detail and composition in Minnette De Silva’s and Le Corbusier’s drawings. Image Source: Le Corbusier. Ahmedabad, 1953-1960 Le Corbusier. Paris: Fondation Le Corbusier, 1983 and : De Silva, Minnette. The Life and Work of an Asian Woman Architect. Colombo: GEDSands, 1998.

4.4 Comparison of the scale-based detail and composition in Minnette De Silva’s and Le Corbusier’s drawings. Image Source: Le Corbusier. Ahmedabad, 1953-1960 Le Corbusier. Paris: Fondation Le Corbusier, 1983 and : De Silva, Minnette. The Life and Work of an Asian Woman Architect. Colombo: GEDSands, 1998.

5.1 A page in Minnette de Silva’s autobiography illustrating the importance of visuality to her. Image Source: De Silva, Minnette. The Life and Work of an Asian Woman Architect. Colombo: IX GEDSands, 1998.

5.2 An initial page in Minnette de Silva’s autobiography showing the Sinhala script. Image Source: De Silva, Minnette. The Life and Work of an Asian Woman Architect. Colombo: GEDSands, 1998.

5.3 The use of graphic metaphoric information to denote/connote space in the drawings for Villa Sarabhai, Ahmedabad, 1955 by Le Corbusier. Image Source: Le Corbusier. Ahmedabad, 1953-1960 Le Corbusier. Paris: Fondation Le Corbusier, 1983

5.4 Plan drawing for Mrs. D. Wickremasinghe Flats, Colombo, 1954 by Minnette de Silva. Image Source: De Silva, Minnette. The Life and Work of an Asian Woman Architect. Colombo: GEDSands, 1998.

5.5 Drawings for Mrs. N De Saram House, Colombo, 1956-57 by Minnette de Silva. Image Source: De Silva, Minnette. The Life and Work of an Asian Woman Architect. Colombo: GEDSands, 1998.

5.6 Drawings for ‘House for a Businessman’, Nawala, Colombo, 1954 by Minnette de Silva. Image Source: De Silva, Minnette. The Life and Work of an Asian Woman Architect. Colombo: GEDSands, 1998.

5.7 Drawings for House for Mr. Pieris, Colombo, 1952-1956 by Minnette de Silva. Image Source: De Silva, Minnette. The Life and Work of an Asian Woman Architect. Colombo: GEDSands, 1998.

5.8 Drawings for Villa Sarabhai, Ahmedabad, 1955 by Le Corbusier. Image Source: Le Corbusier. Ahmedabad, 1953-1960 Le Corbusier. Paris: Fondation Le Corbusier, 1983

5.9 Minnette de Silva’s signature on a drawing for Ivor Fernando Flats, Colombo, 1956 by Minnette de Silva. Image Source: De Silva, Minnette. The Life and Work of an Asian Woman Architect. Colombo: GEDSands, 1998.

X introduction* 1

Architects share an intimate relationship with architectural drawings. Drawings such as plans, sections, elevations (two-dimensional representations on a flat plane) or axonometric, isometric, and perspectives (three-dimensional representations on a flat plane) are, arguably, the primary mode of communication for architects. In the words of Jan De Vylder, “[T]he drawing is the

companion of the architect.” 1 In the present work, I do not dispute the fact that the drawing has, in fact, been a staunch consort of the architect. That is a given. Instead, I turn my focus on the nature of this relationship, in so far, as it affects not just the drawing, but the identity of the discipline.

I argue that the drawing through its ideals of universality and objectivity is actually rendered hegemonic and consequently, masculine. Thus, the gendering of architecture is first achieved through the drawing, before it is brought to bear upon space. Architecture’s putative ‘liberation’ from medieval on-site craft practices, through the act of drawing, is simultaneously an entrapment as architecture (in the truest sense) remains more a discipline engaged in representation than in actual building. Needless to say, the act and the object (produced) through representation, then, remains one of the most important and yet, elusive facets of architecture. It is elusive, since, there is a marked paucity of work that critically looks at architectural representations beyond a documentative lens.

I acknowledge the irony implicit here. For the paucity of work on them, there are possibly millions of architectural drawings and styles that could bear examination to forward this thesis. Keeping this in mind, over the course of my work, I shall be examining the works of two architects: Minnette de Silva (1915-1998) from Sri Lanka and Le Corbusier (1887-1965), both of whom embody a strong sense of the Modernist fervor prevalent during their time, and are connected not just by the ethos of

* Owing to the nature of my dual degree, certain portions of my argument in the introduction, especially to do with gender, have also been used in my M.arch Thesis. See: Malpani, Czaee. Drawing Between the Lines: Intersections of Gender, Narratives and Representation. Masters of Architecture Thesis, University of Cincinnati, 2011. 1 De Vylder, Jan. “The Drawing is Everywhere” in Architecture as Craft: Architecture, Drawing, Model and Position. Edited by Michael Riedijk. Amsterdam: SUN architecture Publishers, 2010. 83-93 1 Figure 1.1: Minnette de Silva and Le Corbusier at CIAM, Bridgewater, 1947. Image Source: De Silva, Minnette. The Life and Work of an Asian Woman Architect. Colombo: GEDSands, 1998.

2 the period, but their own personal relationship. While there is a vast amount of material available on Le Corbusier, very little survives of her. Thus, a larger range of her drawings from the 1950s-1960s will be studied in comparison to Le Corbusier’s drawings for the Villa Sarabhai, Ahmedabad, so as to keep the exploration within a similar contextual and temporal setting. Breaking down an architectural representation into certain structural components such as lines, scale and text, which constitute an architectural drawing, I examine drawings in the light of its gendered underpinning. In essence, this thesis looks at the politics of the intersection of identity, gender and representation that are implicit in the production of architectural drawings.

In order to undertake this endeavor, it is important, at the outset, to (re)establish the central role of architectural drawings in the Modernist era, the inherent problem with representation as a general idea, and the surprising lacuna in architectural feminism which skips over architectural drawings.

Recall Le Corbusier’s statement “The plan is the generator” 2 which has since, gone on to become something of an anthem in architecture. An expression such as this is testimony to the centrality of two-dimensional architectural drawings, not just in the Modern era, but in the time immediately both preceding and succeeding it. The architectural-plan (henceforth, plan) is embedded in the architectural psyche. For Corbusier, the plan was the epicenter of all built work. It imparted the requisite richness to all of human experience. It was, most significantly, the moment where both creativity and discipline merged, to give rise to “one of the highest activities of human spirit.”3

Why would a plan be so important to Le Corbusier? What about the plan, beyond its ability to ‘generate’ makes it still relevant to our discussion today? Could it be possible that the plan is

the generator of design, ethos, narratives and identities? 4 What is the nature of this identity so generated?

Perhaps, it is best to begin with the first question I have raised: the importance of the plan. For some time now, we as architects have taken the plan for granted. It is an (if not the) integral 2 Le, Corbusier, and Frederick Etchells. Towards a New Architecture. translated from the 13th French ed. New York,: Brewer and Warren inc., 1927, 26. 3 Ibid., 49. 4 The same could be asked of other architectural representation types such as sections and elevations. 3 part of our mode of translation and communication. No design is granted completion without the production of plans. Yet, plans (as well as sections and elevations) have not existed for time immemorial as the discipline would have us believe. The dependence on drawings is the result of a carefully crafted moment in history which continues to exert its influence. In effect, architectural representations have a relatively short history dating back approximately to half a millennium. In this, they parallel the age of the discipline itself. This is not a matter of coincidence, but rather a concerted effort on the part of the discipline to establish its own identity and narratives (as will be discussed in greater detail later). The most important narrative (or myth even) to merge out of this strategy is that of translation (including exploration and communication). Architectural drawings, in all forms ranging from impromptu napkin sketches to very intricate presentation drawings, claim that they are (visual) methods of translating and communicating an Idea (or concept) into an architectural design, which is often perceived as interchangeable with the built environment. This notion is prevalent amongst both practitioners and historians of architecture, and can be discerned, for example, in the writings of architectural historian Iain Fraser,

The phenomenon of drawing lies prominently between the imagination of the architect and the design of the building. It is an activity at once highly conventionalized and very personal, shared but private, involving the discovery of forms, their communication both internally and externally, and their resolution of three-dimensional complexities, through a two-dimensional format.5

Though separated by more than half a century, the sentiment offered by Fraser echoes a similar one by Le Corbusier. This line of thinking conjures up an image of an architect, the possessor of an/ the Idea, immersed in a maelstrom of thought-process which will at the right time be converted or translated into a graphic format of lines, or an image that will embody this idea. The image I have painted is less to suggest the intensity of the activity of translation, but rather to indicate the putative linearity of the process. Fraser’s argument seems to suggest that there is a direct path from the idea to the product, wherein the idea is borne out of the creative genius of the architect. The idea culminates in a built-form, and the drawing is but a mere vehicle for this process.

5 Fraser, Iain, and Rod Henmi. Envisioning Architecture: An Analysis of Drawing. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1994. Pg. VII. 4 Figure 1.2 :Le Corbusier’s notes on the plan-drawing. Image Source: Le, Corbusier, and Frederick Etchells. Towards a New Architec- ture. translated from the 13th French ed. New York,: Brewer and Warren inc., 1927. 5 Fraser, however, is not the only individual to offer this view. It is perhaps the most prevalent and unquestioned facets of architecture. In a vein of skepticism then, I question this ‘truism’. Could the ‘idea (of design)’ be generated if is not already contained within the ‘idea of drawing’? In other words, how is an architect able to “represent” (that which a drawing purportedly “represents”) if it does not exist as an entity that is always and already represented. Let us consider an example of an architectural drawing such as Étienne-Louis Boullée’s Cenotaph for Newton (1784). Many analyses of the plan or section drawing would propose that Boullee’s usage of an architectural (representational) language of pure geometries suggests homage to Newton and Science. Additional analyses would infer connections between his drawings, the objects drawn, metaphysics and the cosmos. Often such inferences are drawn from architectural drawings to establish the content behind and beyond what is rendered on paper. Historian Robin Evans would argue that such meanings are projected onto a drawing which is, in itself, nothing more than a mere façade. 6 I extend the argument to ask whether it would at all be possible to make these projections, if we did not already, through our socialization as architects and otherwise, agree that it is possible to draw a circle, and through various effects, liken it to the world (as in the case of Boullee’s drawings.

Moreover, another issue with Fraser’s line of thought (he is not alone, as this is a common conception about architectural drawings) is that by claiming linearity, the drawing is fixed at one point mid-way in the process of architecture. It is imagined as a passive, immutable ‘object’ with a singular purpose and meaning- that of translation. Yet, drawings have shown that they have a far greater reach and impact than this purported definition. Drawings are not only the mirror of their times, but equally of the architects themselves. This claim is best delineated by recognizing the fact that today, modern architectural drawings have not only become celebrated in their own right, but are often as representative of the architect as the work. In fact, at times they even come to stand in for the architects, thus enjoying a degree of autonomy. The best example of this would be the architecture-section at the Museum of Modern Art, where drawings hang as representatives of both built works and architects. This brings a critical point to the fore: drawings may be imagined as

6 Evans, Robin. “In front of Lines that Leave Nothing Behind.” in Architectural Theory since 1968. Edited by Michael Hays, 480-489. Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2000. Pgs 480-489. 6 extensions of the architectural identity. The thesis that architectural identity is inextricably entwined with architectural representations has been discussed by theorists such as Edwards Robbins, Robin Evans amongst others.

My thesis then identifies a space within this conversation to explore and argue that drawings are not mere tools of translation, but an identity-imparting mechanism. This identity, through techniques inherent in architectural representation, as well as its own imagination and position as the universal norm, becomes a gendered identity. The moment of patriarchy and masculinity is, therefore, issued through the act and the object of drawing, prior to its realization through built space. Due to the

paucity of work on the relationship between gender and architectural representations, I lean upon an eclectic range of ideas from feminist theory, to geography and structuralism.

A further body of literatures animating this work is the recent interest of gender and women’s studies into the question of architecture in general. Stemming from the work of second-wave feminists such as Simone de Beauvoir and Betty Friedan, during the middle-part of the twentieth century, who shifted the focus from suffrage and campaigns for equal rights, to a critical examining of the very term ‘women’, and then following later feminists such as Virginia Woolf, Michele Barrett, Nancy Chodorow, Luce Irigaray. Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Judith Butler this body of work has analyzed architecture in novel ways.

An early and perhaps definitive, example is the edited volume, Sexuality and Space that emerged

out of symposium organized by Beatriz Colomina at Princeton University.7 Architecture historically had been a small and largely male-centric profession. Gradually, more feminist architectural historians emerged from all parts of the world, though American feminists formed the majority. This group remained small and their impact, though immense, was contained.

Comprising a small but potent group of scholars the nature of the work that they undertook is more pertinent to the discussion at hand. These architectural historians had an incredibly fecund ground from which to pick and direct their critique. 7 This can be regarded as a touchstone event in the discipline. A publication titled ‘Sexuality and Space’ emerged from this symposium and went on to become one of the seminal feminist works in architecture.

7 Figure 1.3: Examples of some of the seminal texts on Gender and Architecture. 8 This was a period of post-modernism. The Modernist corpus (and corpse) lay for everyone to dissect. Early feminist architectural historians returned to this scene in order to analyze Modernist spaces for their gendered underpinnings. For example, Colomina provides a pointed analysis of Adolf Loos’s and Le Corbusier’s work in her essay titled ‘The Split Wall: Domestic Voyeurism.’ She discusses the works of the two architects to demonstrate how they objectified women. With respect to the house Loos’s designed for Josephine Baker, she argues that he literally and figuratively placed her as an object on display, by imagining her immersed in a glass swimming

pool that spectators ( most likely himself as the imagined audience) can walk past. 8 While some architectural historians focused on issues of marginalization through spatial practices, others turned a critical lens onto the disciplinary and professional aspects of architecture, wherein women have historically been a minority, and thus were either sidelined in their roles as practitioners or patrons.

Alice T. Friedman in particular highlights this by looking at (working) relationships between the famous modernists and their clients. It is interesting to note how a great number of women patrons were at the forefront of the modernist movement, and patronized iconic architectural works such as the Farnsworth House, La Miniatura and the Schrȍder House amongst others. Though it might seem that the directionality of Feminist analyses is fairly straightforward, yet it is a difficult task to wade into the murky architectural history, so as to throw light upon female designers and clients who had been left in the shadows. This work carried out by them has been path-breaking, and opened up aspects of the discipline hitherto ignored. It has also exposed the glaring disparity in the praxis of architecture, wherein the woman, whether as a passive recipient or an active subject, has eventually been denied agency, and subsequently objectified, not only by the discipline but also by the narrative that has been projected by it. Thus, leaning on lenses from other visual media, such as that of the gaze, voyeurism, appropriation, feminist architectural history sought to expose issues of marginalization and domination. The most important and significant understanding to emerge from the espousal of gender and architecture, is that the discipline of architecture is inherently masculine and patriarchal.

8 Colomina, Beatriz. “The Split Wall: Domestic Voyeurism” in Sexuality & Space, Princeton Papers on Architecture. New York, N.Y.: Princeton Architectural Press, 1992. 9 To recapitulate, feminist analyses of architecture essentially make the following claims:

1.) Spaces are gendered, 2) Spaces were/are gendered by architects who are male, or trained to think like males, and thus, are masculine and 3.) Therefore, the discipline is Masculine or the disciplinary identity of architecture is masculine.

In this sense Feminist analyses has produced an expansive body of work, yet there remains a vital lacuna in their arguments. They examine spatial connotations but gloss over the minute yet important fact that architects do not directly produce ‘space’ (or the built environment). Given this the question/s I would place in conjunction with the above claims are 1) through what mechanism are spaces gendered? 2.) How do these mechanisms operate to reflect the male-ness of the architect and 3?) Where and in what does the disciplinary identity of architecture lie?

The issue with many feminist analyses of architecture coincides with the same one that Linda Nochlin points at with art-based analyses, in that, feminists have often gone looking for women artists in the history of the discipline to employ as props so as to make a case for the (ignored) presence of women artists. While this does provide for different facets of the discipline, it still side sweeps the very being of the discipline and does not look towards an immanent criticism.9 Thus with regard to the questions I raise, the answers, as this work hopes to show, has much to do with architectural representation; the myriad sets of drawings and graphic media which are not only denotative of space, and connotative of a disciplinary identity, but also centrally imbricated in a mechanism which will to a large extent form the focus of this thesis. My argument however, is not that architectural drawings are made masculine, if their author is male. Drawings have a masculine potential in spite of conditions of gender, or similarly the race, socio-cultural or economic background of the author. This arguably may be a facet of modernism, which touched multiple architects across the globe in similar and dissimilar ways. Thus, there were instances in which modernism was appropriated through different routes in post-colonial nations, even if their

9 Nochlin, Linda “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” in Women, Art, and Power and Other Essays. New York: Harper Row Publishers, 1998. 10 immediate language seemed to be one of all-encompassing universality. The same might be true of architectural representations. The absence of a feminist understanding of architectural drawings as the maker and keeper of architectural identity, in the history of the discipline marks the lacuna, from which I begin my exploration.

In the first chapter, I cover the history of architectural drawings: their inception and their continued production. I attempt to establish why certain forms of representations such as plans, sections and elevations came to occupy a central role in the discipline. Simultaneously, I also try to establish the problem with ‘representation’ as a broader category of understanding, and why the problem of representation is essentially also a problem of gender, as it presupposes objectivity and distance, thus grounding it as a static and hegemonic structure.

As mentioned earlier, an architectural drawing can be imagined to have at least three integral components. These are lines (the graphic information), scale and text (the linguistic information). Each one of these components is employed as a lens to examine the nuances of architectural drawings in greater detail, and thus, each takes on the shape of a chapter. Again, the understanding gleaned from each of these ‘lenses’ could have an implication on a large cross-section of Modernist drawings, as they would hold true for many, if not most, of them. However, in this thesis I examine architectural works of Minnette De Silva (1915-1998), up to the period of the 1960s. Minnette is often considered one of the first South-Asian woman architects, though it might be more apt to say modernist-trained woman architect, without taking any credibility away from her. Born in Sri Lanka to a liberal, politically-significant family, she always harbored an interest in the Arts and Crafts, and specifically in architecture. During the late 1940s, Minnette came to the JJ Schools of Art and Architecture (JJ, henceforth), to pursue her passion for architecture. The JJ is itself significant, as not only was it the only school in the South-Asian subcontinent, at that point of time, offering this particular discipline, it was also being led by Sir Claude Batley, and was educating some students who would go onto define the shape and discipline of Modern Architecture and architectural education in India. Minnette was the only female student here, and the tradition that she and her fellow colleagues were trained in was very ‘Beaux-Arts-ian’. Her renderings and 11 Figure 1.4: Examples of Minnette de Silva’s work while at JJ School of Art and the Architectural Association (below). Image Source: De Silva, Minnette. The Life and Work of an Asian Woman Architect. Colombo: GEDSands, 1998.

12 manner of study stand as testimony to this.

Unfortunately though, she was expelled prior to being able to complete her education, as she aligned herself with the Independence struggle in India, which went against the colonial outlook of the JJ. Faced with a temporary setback, Minnette spent time in India working with Otto Kȍenisberger, an architect who would have a huge impact on passive architecture and the education of architects for decades to follow (In 1953 he moved to London and became head of the Department of Development and Tropical Studies at the Architectural Association). During this time (1945) she applied to the Architectural Association (AA, henceforth), London to continue her studies. Her stint at the AA though short, had a defining influence on her for the rest of her life. Not only did she imbibe the architectural and social ideals of modernism, she became intimately involved with the Congrès internationaux d’architecture modern (CIAM), an involvement she nurtured till the institutions last days, The other significant event in her life during this period was her introduction to Le Corbusier at his atelier. The two formed a mutual lasting relationship, which arguably may have come to have an effect on her work. Minnette returned to newly independent Sri Lanka in 1948, and started her own architectural practice under the name of Studio of Modern Architecture, and worked till her demise in the late Nineteen Nineties.

Minnette’s work provides for a fecund ground from which to begin this exploration, given its explicitly modernist nature. As a foil to her work, I will also examine some of Le Corbusier’s work from the same period, specifically, that he carried out in Ahmedabad, as not only will the drawings of both then be placed in a similar geographical context, but will also have a common base of ‘function’ type to spring-from. As mentioned above, though not primarily, he is an important part of a discussion of her, as he always lingers in shadows, when De Silva discusses her own work in her autobiography. Flora Samuels, in her book on Le Corbusier10 suggests that he might have shared an intimate relationship with De Silva. While De Silva neither confirms nor denies this in her own writing, what is apparent is the profound affect he had on her, as her book is as much a display of his work, sketches and writing (addressed to her), as it is of her own. Thus, it becomes

10 Samuels, Flora. Le Corbusier: Architect and Feminist. Great Britain: John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2004. 13 pertinent for me to examine the architectural representation of both architects, as their narratives intersect at many moments.

The analytical study of architectural representations presents a curious challenge. On one hand, It can employ some of the tools of analysis as provided by Art History and Criticism, such as that of composition, structure and gaze. On the other hand though, architectural representations (though within the gamut of the visual field) are markedly different from art-representations. Firstly, unlike the latter, they attempt to be objective sets of information and thus are marked by an absence of figures or entities through which a narrative can be derived. Secondly, they are assumed to be the vehicles for translation. That is, they set themselves up in a directional-relationship with the built product, which is usually not true of Art. Thirdly, most modernist architectural representations attempt to follow a similar coded visual language, which was the same everywhere. While art’s representations were openly about the individual genius, architectural representation tried to blind themselves to the same phenomenon within their representation, so as to be able to profess that objectivity. Given this, the three lenses of line, scale and text provide for an immanent method of studying architectural drawings.

The third chapter studies the compositional aspects of drawings achieved through the placement of lines on the sheet. It argues that the space of the drawing maybe assumed to be the space for exhibiting the identity of the architect, through an act of appropriation/domination which is, otherwise not possible in the ‘real’ world. How does this simulation allow for identity to be gendered? The architectural drawing likens the (empty) sheet to an imagined map of the world. That is, as if one were to imagine a piece of land mapped onto Cartesian space, flattened and transposed onto a drawing sheet. Ironically, the site does not behave like the sheet as a) the physical qualities of both differ and b) the social, cultural, economic and political facets of the former are completely excluded from the latter, thus allowing for a tabula-rasa situation. Important to this discussion of linework and composition is the (created) duality between nature and culture, and how the works of two different architects respond in varying degrees to this phenomenon.

14 A representation is an encounter, and few encounters can happen without our being able to categorize them. Every act of interpretation is also an act of classification. One method of classifying used by architectural drawings is that of ‘scale’, ubiquitous in every drawing, through which the world can be imagined and grasped mathematically. The fourth chapter looks at ‘scale’ and asks how this tool might allow architects to imbue their work with their own personality and disciplinary identity. Scale is not apolitical, and while there is little discussion of this in architecture, the discipline of geography firmly argues that the production of scale is implicated in the production of space. Accordingly Scale can be seen as mathematical, methodological, ontological, or social and its use then is a very deliberate though unconscious move. Contrasting the works of the two architects, may offer clues to the subjectivities of the drawings. The interesting aspect of scale is that it defines the degree of intimacy or distancing, that a viewer experiences when encountering a drawing, and thus, opens up a discussion on authorship and control.

‘Text’ forms the basis of the fifth chapter. As a layer, text is often the last category of information imprinted on architectural drawings. Yet, drawings have also served as diaries to note down conversations with clients. Text on drawings may be in the form of annotations for space, technical information regarding project title, scale etc and personal information such as signatures. Linguistic information has a significant role to play in architectural representations. It not only allowsa modicum of access/legibility to a non-architect, but also emphasizes the objective and hierarchical nature of the drawing this I show.

Thus, to recapitulate, I begin with arguing that (modern) architectural identity which is inextricably linked to the production of architectural drawings (in the form of orthographic projections) is rendered masculine. The condition of masculinity is founded upon the ideals of objectivity, universality and authorship, all of which are structurally exercised in the drawing through the use of lines, text and scale.

15 representation 2

“[A]rchitecture also came to be understood as a liberal art, and architectural ideas were increasingly conceived as geometric lineamenti, as ubiquitous two-dimensional, orthogonal drawings.” – Alberto Perez-Gomez1

Architectural representations include a gamut of drawing types such as plans, sections, elevations, axonometrics, isometrics, and perspectives. These may be portrayed through napkin sketches, preliminary drawings, presentation drawings, and construction drawings, amongst an ever evolving list. Of the wide range available, I examine plans, sections and elevations as the two-dimensional orthographic drawings that gained ground and became the modus operandi for architects during the Modern period. At times, these drawings are also called ‘technical drawings’ which illustrates the manner in which they were understood as scientific sets of information. Modernist orthographic drawings enjoyed an unquestioned importance as they became representative of not just the buildings that they illustrated, but also came to stand in for the style of the architects. Today, upon looking at architectural plans, we can distinguish between a ‘Miesian’ plan and a ‘Wrightian’ plan. Attributes such as ‘minimalist’ or ‘earthy’ are attached to each respectively. These attributes, though, are connotations projected upon the drawings, which allow us (as architects) to read multiple meanings into and off the drawing.

The architectural drawing has always had a symbolic value, as it is indicative of the social and cultural leanings of its historical milieu. In the creating of an architectural history to root a fledgling profession, drawings have often been produced as testimony to the lineage of architecture. Take for instance, the numerous plans of the Parthenon, the temple at Karnak or temples in India (as an example) that circulate in the architectural discipline as representations of the building. The drawings that we used to study these buildings were not made prior to the inception of the structures, yet they are proffered as evidence to the (putative) fact that drawings are intrinsically 1 Perez-Gomez, Alberto, and Louise Pelletier. Architectural Representation and the Perspective Hinge. Cambridge, Mass.: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1997. Pg 24. 16 linked to architecture. They are posited as emphasizing the reality of the built environment. Much like a caption beneath an image, drawings give meaning to architecture, and by extension to the disciplinary identity. It, thus, becomes one of the central (though tacit) projects of the discipline to furbish drawings of the built environment in the form of orthographic projections so as to give the project itself veracity.

There is a large pool of historians who have worked on this ‘project’. Of these, as an example, let us examine Kendra Schank Smith’s writing on architectural drawings. She discusses the history of drawings and sketches, claiming, “The history of representation is probably as old as

civilization itself.”2 She propagates a narrative of representation (easily mistaken for architectural representation) wherein there has always been a focus on drawings from the paintings at Lascaux, to the Greeks, through the middles ages to contemporary times. While bemoaning the lack of existing drawings from various periods, she rationalizes the absence by claiming that architectural drawings were never considered valuable, thus, precluding their preservation. Smith is not the only historian to support this erroneous line of thought. Her ire, in effect, exposes the loophole in the discipline. The lack of architectural diagrams speaks less about value, and more about the need for such diagrams so as to establish the narrative of the discipline as being one that has existed since the beginning of time. Arguably, architectural diagrams would have been valued as they would have been produced only for ‘important’ buildings. They might even have been seen as imbued with mythic qualities as is seen in Mandala diagrams in Indian architecture. However, architectural diagrams could not and have not existed in the form of plans, sections or elevations, prior to their invention during the Renaissance period. Architecture (as a discipline) is a product of Modernity.3 Its very inception was dependant on the production of architectural drawings, a skill that would separate the newly formed group of ‘architects’ from others, as will be discussed in greater detail later.

2 Smith, Kendra Schank. Architects’ Drawings: A Selection of Sketches by World Famous Architects through History. Amsterdam; Boston: Elsevier/Architectural Press, 2005. Pg. 6. 3 Chatterjee, Jaideep.” The Gift of Design: Architecture-Culture in Postcolonial India.”PhD diss., Cornell University, 2010. 17 A Brief History of Architectural Drawings4

The (modern) development of architectural representation is hinged upon a quest to discover the metaphysical nature of vision and light. Vision and light were issues of exploration since antiquity. According to historian Alberto Perez-Gomez (based on David C. Lindberg’s thesis), with the development of Platonic thought and Euclidian geometry (Optica, 300 B.C), vision came to the forefront for many reasons, which he states as, Theories that elaborated on Euclid’s demonstrations dealt mainly with three aspects of vision: physical or philosophical questions about the propagation of images towards the soul; mathematical questions about the geometric perception of objects in lived space; and particularly during the Middle ages, medical questions about the anatomy of the eye, whose answers would aid in treating disease. 5

The search for understanding the nature of vision gave due impetus to the development of techniques of representations, most notably the perspectiva naturalis. Perspectiva naturalis was borne out of the Euclidian principle that light must follow the geometric law of similar triangles. This allowed philosophers of the time to explain the reception of images by the eye. Largely mathematical, perspectiva naturalis served as a progenitor to perspectiva artificialiswhich would only be developed centuries later. During the Gothic period, the search for accurate methods of representation of light were still in progress. The representation, though, was not architectural in nature and was largely bound up in a metaphysical quest. The use of orthographic or projection drawings, as a method of translation or representation, was still unknown. The process of construction relied largely on the knowledge of the master-mason and on-site geometry to shape form and structure. This knowledge was embodied, experienced and handed-down through the generations. In his essay, investigating the relationship between architects and their representational tools, Edward Robbins explains, The extraordinary proliferation of very precise technical terms for various parts of the building suggests that means other than drawings had to be used by the master mason to communicate the design to others working on the building. Because the technical

4 I have used portions of my argument here in my M.arch Thesis as well. See: Malpani, Czaee. Drawing Between the Lines: Intersections of Gender, Narratives and Representation. Masters of Architecture Thesis, University of Cincinnati, 2011. 5 Perez-Gomez, Alberto, and Louise Pelletier. Architectural Representation and the Perspective Hinge. Cambridge, Mass.: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1997. Pg 13. 18 Figure 2.1: ‘God as Geometer’ from The Frontispiece of Bible Moralisee (mid 13th century). Image Courtesy:Wikipedia.

19 supervision had to be constant and was for the most part conveyed verbally, the master mason was tied to the site of the building design throughout its constructions.6

As Robbins demonstrates, the master-mason shared an extremely intimate relationship with the work being carried out on-site. Apart from possessing the most skilled set of instruction and supervision, he was responsible for constructing a “model of the city of God on Earth.”7 An interesting dialectic existed between the master-mason and higher Supernatural powers. The mason was imagined as the conduit through which God’s will (with regard to building) was carried out on Earth. At that point of time, the master-mason was the tool of translation, as opposed to a graphic representation, which would eventually come to replace him, both literally and figuratively. The master-mason’s ability to project geometry was seen as sacred and prophetic. This ‘illusion’ as E.H. Gombrich terms it, is still observed with craftspeople in Sri Lanka, designated with the work of creating statues of Buddha. In this ritualistic process, the painting of the eyes on the statue is of great significance. The craftsperson will turn his back towards the front of the statue to do so. With the use of a mirror to catch the statues’ reflection, the craftsperson will reach over his or her shoulder, and commence the act of painting the eyes. The rationale behind this method is that the painting of eyes brings the statue to life and immediately sanctifies it. The act of bringing a statue of God to life imbues the craftsperson with a measure of sanctity. Similarly, the medieval craftsperson, through the act of building, or even orating the building, was imagined to hold sacred powers.

Theories of vision formed a central preoccupation during the medieval period and later periods. A firm belief that sight/vision was the noblest sense led to ocular-centrism. The understanding of spectatorship and distancing had evolved from antiquity which made reflective thought, authorship and metaphysics possible as per Perez-Gomez. Speaking of the classical period, he states, [T]he inception of alphabetic writing and the “objectification” of space itself to become an object of artistic representation, as in the earliest erotic novels of our traditions , in which the lovers are kept apart until the last page. Named as chora, it is also a “hyphen”: Plato’s space of of ontological continuity, the ground that makes it possible for Being and beings to relate and to share a name, in language and in human action. This distance, therefore,

6 Robbins, Edward, and Edward Cullinan. Why Architects Draw. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1994. Pg. 12. 7 Perez-Gomez, Alberto, and Louise Pelletier. Architectural Representation and the Perspective Hinge. Cambridge, Mass.: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1997. Pg. 8. 20 Figure 2.2: Plate by Jacopo Barozzi da Vignola demonstrating problems created for perspective by binocular vision, 1583. From Perez-Gomez, Alberto, and Louise Pelletier. Architectural Representation and the Perspective Hinge. Cambridge, Mass.: Massachu- setts Institute of Technology, 1997. 21 is what enables participation after the inception of the ‘reflective’ individual. While this distance does not anticipate perspective, its is nevertheless a condition for perspective.8

In other words, not only was viewing facilitated, but it took on a quality of abstraction and objectivity from within its metaphysical boundaries. By allowing for a grounds where Being/ beings could meet, an inherent power struggle was established. Here, ‘mortals’ strove to not only to understand God, as represented through light and vision, but to be able to duplicate that vision. Hence, the medieval period was still not concerned with appearances or how things seem but how things are experienced. Awareness existed of the difference between what is seen and what is experienced.

Grappling with metaphysical questions, the nature of light was collated with the question of God. Philosophers were divided over intromission (the eye projects light making it possible to see) and extromission (the eye receives light) theories of vision. Perez-Gomez writes on Robert Grosseteste (1175-1253 A.D.) for whom light was the basis of God, Grosseteste marveled at light as the supreme manifestation of God and held that its luster, color, and mathematical properties culminated in a divine unity. In his commentary on Pseudo-Dionysius’s Divine Names, Grosseteste defined light as the greatest and best of all proportions as it is proportionate with itself. This identity was the basis for the indivisible beauty of God, “for God is supremely simple, supremely concordant and appropriate to Himself.”9 10

It is not difficult to envisage the Medieval period’s pre-occupation with light. Most Gothic cathedrals stand as testimony to the fact. The concern with the theological nature of optics continued through to the early Renaissance period. Perez-Gomez furnishes the example of Nicholas of Cusa who wrote De Visione Dei (1453), within which he argues that, “only God has access to a ubiquitous center of convergence, and therefore, only He can possess the vision of truth.”11 Nicholas of Cusa described this as the center of a circle. A couple of issues arise out of his (and other contemporary philosophers) ideas. Firstly, this might have been one of the early precedents to imagining the

8 Ibid., 11 9 Ibid., 15 10 Ibid, 15. 11 Ibid, 17 22 viewer at an infinite distance, because, this ‘center of convergence’ could only be very removed from the mortal. To a degree, it implicitly also charts out the path for representations, where the viewer had to be positioned at an infinite distance. Secondly, the center/circle analogy reinforces the possibility of a geometrical (also abstract) description of a metaphysical (or embodied) concept. Thirdly, this was a vital moment, wherein vision was equated to truth, thus, forming the basis for ‘objective’ representation.

Continued explorations gave birth to perspectiva articialis. In 1425, Brunelleschi invented the linear perspective or the construzione legitima, as it was known. Leon Battista Alberti, famously wrote

on this in De Pictura (1435). De Architectura, written by Vitruvius in the first century B.C, became a central tome for artists and architects. A critical moment occurs at this time. Artists become more interested in the empirical rules of perspective, so as to facilitate ‘realistic’ representations. They distanced themselves from and turned towards pragmatic ones. Topographical techniques for surveying amplified this chasm, since it would allow for perspective to be applied in a manner that more closely resembled architectural representation vis-à-vis pictorial naturalism. However, there was a simultaneous split between the artist and architects. According to the latter group, the former group was more concerned with telling stories, which was not the architects’ concern. Their concern lay in objectively representing space. This marks the need of the discipline to use representation to place itself above painting, to promote its own identity as truly rational, as well as separate them out from medieval construction and take up the mantle of a liberal art. While painting and art was still interested in the realm of God, and used perspective to better narrate myths, ‘architectural drawings’ took to concerning themselves with depictions of public spaces, akin to scenographic backdrops awaiting inhabitation. There were two important consequences to this. Firstly, a building could now be conceived geometrically and orthogonally in the architect’s ‘mind-eye’ which was the same as the earlier eye of God. Secondly, by having a method which was dependant on the architect’s thought process; the architect could sever the cord himself and the master-mason.

By the mid-sixteenth century, mathematician Lucas Gauricus and philologist Claudio Tolomeis 23 insisted upon the autonomy of architectural drawings. The mathematical and geometric regularity of architectural representations putatively imbued them with the capacity to demonstrate the presence of the transcendental. Further differences between the work of artists and architects were offered by Alberti. According to him, architects could produce two forms of representations: ichnographia and orthographia. The former referred to inscriptions parallel to the plane of the horizon, i.e. the modern plan, whereas the latter described inscriptions on the vertical plane, i.e. the modern elevation. Both ichnographia and orthographia were considered to be honest representations, since they did not alter any lines of angles, which were the suspicions now attached with the perspective-

drawing.12 Robin Evans argues that the development of orthogonal drawings was a by-product of perspective. He claims, “[that] orthographic projection was a laborious extra operation introduced only so that perspective could be demonstrated theoretically on paper, when it could be practiced well without it.”13 Furthermore, he points out that “while hundreds of treatises were published on perspective, there were none dealing exclusively with orthographic projection until the very end of the eighteenth century.”14 Thus, while they were initially construed as subservient to the perspective process, they asserted their own identity through their appropriation by architects as their own tools. The late Renaissance period perceived these ‘mechanical’ representations to strengthen their own position because of a growing interest in abstract instrumentality.

The development of ichnographia and orthographia answered to some of the questions raised about light. However, philosophers suspected that there was still an aspect which had not been recognized. This missing aspect was part of the three aspects of a ‘mental image that constitute the germ of a project”15 as per Vitruvius. This aspect corresponded to sciagraphia or the study of shadows or gnomons. During the late Renaissance, this interpretation was often confused with perspective, but by the 17th century, sciagraphia was used to refer to the section of a building. Naturally, there was also a biological underpinning to the section brought about by the works of 12 Ibid., 27 13 Evans, Robins. “ Architectural Projection” in Architecture and its Image: Four Centuries of Architectural Representation, edited by Eve Blau and Edward Kauffman, 18-35. Montreal: Canadian Center for Architecture, 1989. Pg 24. 14 Ibid., 24. 15 Ibid, 45 24 Figure 2.3: Plate from Barbaro’s Practica della Perspetiva demonstrating how the plan, section and elevation belong together (1569). From Perez-Gomez, Alberto, and Louise Pelletier. Architectural Representation and the Perspective Hinge. Cambridge, Mass.: Mas- sachusetts Institute of Technology, 1997.

25 Leonardo da Vinci and Albrecht Durer. Perez-Gomez describes Daniele Barboro’s (1514-1570), who translated the works of Vitruvius, writing on the section, “The section is useful because it reveals the inside of a building, the architect being ‘like a doctor’ who must know all of the interior parts.”16

The comparison between the architect and a doctor is interesting. Not only did this derive out of the understanding of the architect as a polymath, but also helped ground the section as rational knowledge. At the time, in a spirit of scientific fervor, dissections were carried out on the human body, which could be best understood by the creation of sections. The section was a drawing which intersected the cone of vision (the way in which objects are viewed), and could make a claim of veracity. Alberto Perez-Gomez explains this through Albrecht Dűrer’s experiments, Albrecht Dűrer’s famous machine (1525), for example, consisting of an eyepiece and a glass panel, was mainly intended to demonstrate a rigid method for copying nature by cutting a section literally through the cone of vision. Significantly, Dűrer’s machine is still an appropriate metaphor for the scientific objectification of reality. It shows man placing the world in his cone of vision, making it difficult to acknowledge the reciprocity of perception by the Other (originally, God), the intersubjective (erotic) reality that makes us possible as embodied consciousness in the first place.17

Therefore, the architect was posited as the all-seeing eye, which remains rational and unaffected by its own phenomenal experience. This enabled the architect to see reality (external of him) objectively. The image captured by this eye could be represented as the section.

The ability to produce plans, elevations and sections influenced a shift in understanding. Imagination or creativity (as we still refer to it) was perceived as being superior to philosophical thought, contemplations and even, technical knowledge. This moment, possibly, marks the actual birth of the creative genius within architecture, a sentiment Le Corbusier echoed as a truism centuries later. Perspectival representations had previously enabled artists and architects to be able to see and represent in a manner similar to a/the divine being. The ability to create ‘true’, orthographic drawings out of an imagined idea overshadowed the ability to draw in perspective, and instead draw with a much higher degree of veracity. This notion gave the initial shape to the architectural

16 Ibid, 49 17 Ibid., 14. 26 Figure 2.4: Durer, Albrecht (1471-1528), Draftsman Drawing a Lute (1525). Image courtesy:ArtStor

Figure 2.5 Durer, Albrecht (1471-1528), Draftsman Drawing a Recumbent Woman (1525). Image courtesy:ArtStor

27 identity.

Arguably, architectural drawings staked a niche for themselves and kept up a steady growth during the 17th Century. The development of Cartesian philosophy was of great significance to the project of architectural representation. The res cogitans/res extensa (mind/body) dualism suggested by Rene Descartes’ thesis allowed for man to be posited as a thinking subject, and all things external to him, were posited as object. During the second Enlightenment, a mathematical lens was employed for viewing all ‘external’ reality, which augmented a burgeoning technological obsession. Mapping as a science came about, with the belief that external reality can be conquered, dominated and represented through reductive, instrumental systems. The history of colonization is intimately tied with the history of representational techniques such as mapping, which far from being by-products of it, may actually be construed as what enabled the act in the first place. In other words, the notion that a complex structure can be comprehended through a graphic representation, immediately makes it more accessible, classifiable and eventually capable of being dominated.

In a world that was rapidly changing its shape and form, for ‘architects’ there was a rising concern with the ‘accuracy’ of perspective. Following centuries of development, suddenly, perspective was regarded with a measure of skepticism. Geometry retained symbolism, the value of which decreased. Perspective became an empirical way of depicting reality. Perez-Gomez states that, “The operational homology of qualitative lived space and quantitative perspectival space encouraged the architect to believe that a projection could accurately present a proposed architectural creation.”18 The architectural implication of this is that space was envisaged as represented on a two-dimensional Cartesian grid. Architects could be more responsible for the making of ‘pictures’ than the construing of symbolic ideas. This was aided by a realization that meaning may be a matter of convention that of an inherent quality. The works of Giambattista Piranesi (1729-1778) and Jean-Laurent LeGeay (1710-1786) strove, through architectural representations, to destructure homogenous space and the linear time implied in perspective drawings, and in that can be seen as the progenitors of deconstructivist drawings of the late 20th century. The adverse yet critical reaction

18 Ibid.,50. 28 Figure 2.6: Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720-1778), Carceri, plate IX (1769). Image courtesy: ArtStor

29 to perspective drawings, was founded through a fast cementing belief in orthographic drawings. Concurrently, Étienne-Louis Boullée and Claude Nicolas Ledoux were instrumental for pushing forward the neo-classical movement, in which more systematized methods of representation emerged. They employed perspectives to show the proposed building in a natural setting, with an aim of destabilizing the knowledge of the mason-builder who was perhaps able to better envisage the built product based on years of experience. Architects faced stiff competition from two other nascent ‘modern’ professions: engineering and science. The Ecole Polytechnique, founded after the French revolution, trained both architects and engineers. Descriptive geometry formed an integral part of the educational process. It allowed “for the first time a systematic reduction of

three-dimensional objects to two dimensions and permitted the control and precision demanded

by the Industrial Revolution.”19 Descriptive geometry formed the basis of all modern architectural representational endeavors. J.N-L. Durand, who was suspicious of perspectives, for their ability to distort reality and not be commensurate with measurements, instead advocated the axonometric drawing, a notion later reinforced by Auguste Choisy.

By the nineteenth century, the technical drawings were at the forefront of the palette and vocabulary of architects, who had developed their own niche identity separate from artists and engineers. Descriptive geometry i.e. the plan, section and elevation became the norm for the modern architect.

Representations: Presenting the Problem

The exploration of the history of architectural drawings shows that representation is inherently a political act. It is, therefore, important to comprehend the underlying issue with representation. While there are numerous ways to do so, I have chosen to understand it through some of the writings of Giles Deleuze. Deleuze does not specifically write on architecture (as a practice or a product), but he does critically examine art, and a body of his work questions representation. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy explains that art, for him, has a possibility of being able to liberate, by pushing us beyond matters of perception, to producing ‘signs’ that call for conditions 19 Ibid, 81. 30 of creations.20 On the other hand, Deleuze critiques representation, as being limited by perception.

Deleuzian scholar John Marks expands upon Deleuze’s view of representation, stating “‘Representation’ for Deleuze entails an essentially moral view of the world, explicitly or implicitly, drawing on what ‘everybody knows’… Representation cannot help us encounter the world as it appears in the flow of time and becoming. It constitutes a restrictive (my emphasis) form of thinking and acting.” 21 In other words, our understanding of what is ‘represented’ stems from our unquestioned understanding of what we take to be factual, of which our perceptions, especially visual ones, form a large part. In other words, we are socialized to accept ‘representation.’ For

example, in the case of architectural representations, it is the very fact that we are trained as architects to accept them as forms of translation and communication, that allows us to view them as an ubiquitous language structure. Are architectural drawings truly a language? Edward Robbins would refute this question by claiming that many linguists argue that “architecture cannot be construed to be a language in formal terms. It lacks the internal grammatical logic of language, i.e. it is not self-describing. Moreover, it cannot be generated in the user from a simple set of rules, as a language can be.”22 Essentially, the architectural ‘language’ of representations is only accessible to the chosen few who study it, nor does it have a ‘meaning’ which is read similarly and unequivocally by two different architects, leaving it open to multiple interpretations. A wonderful example of this would be the texts that support Daniel Libeskind’s ‘Chamber works’: a collection of drawings. The collection of drawings is preceded by 4 separate essays by Aldo Rossi, John Hejduk, Peter Eisenman and Kurt Forster wherein they attempt to interpret or connote what the drawings may stand for (Libeskind himself provides no explanation). All four architects read different meanings into the same set of works: Rossi likens them to hieroglyphics, Hejduk looks at them as illustrations of a thought-process, Eisenmann understands them as writing and Forster

reads them as a musical score.23 The act of multiple connotations for the same representation is

20 Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. “Gilles Deleuze.” Accessed October, 19th 2010. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/deleuze/ 21 Marks, John. “Representation” in The Deleuze Dictionary, edited by Parr, Adrian, New York: Columbia University Press, 2005. Pgs 227- 229. 22 Robbins, Edward, and Edward Cullinan. Why Architects Draw. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1994. Pg. 28 23 Liebeskind, Daniel. Chamber Works: Architectural Meditations on themes from Heraclitus. London: Architectural Association, 1983. 31 extraordinary, however, it still works to illustrate the static nature of representation in architecture, wherein interpretations are drawn from architects predicated on their ability to read and understand these collections of lines across a sheet as a drawing. They are united in their opinion that these are firstly, architectural representations, which can then be likened to other ‘forms.’

In spite of representations being capable of multiple connotations, at their very core they are still problematic. What is the nature of this problem? According to Deleuze, the problem with representation is a result of Platonic and Nietzschean philosophy. Platonic thought imagines that there exists an Idea (or the ideal) of which there are copies and simulacra. Copies and simulacra, as representations, are always oriented towards the ideal i.e. they strive to be the original, but cannot be, and thus, are implicitly always inferior. This problem is intensified, for it also implies, that the relationship between an Idea and the representation is always marked by transcendence (the desire towards something at a putatively higher plane). Consequently, representations are barred from being immanent. This renders the representation uni-faceted, as it cannot accommodate within itself notions of difference. Difference can be understood in two ways, one as that which is not the same and therefore the normative other, and secondly, as a simultaneous variation and specificity. Unfortunately, difference for the large part has been described by the former understanding, which has a negative connotation. Due to this, often instinct runs towards banishing difference, rather than embracing it. Representation, then, becomes a fixed, restricted and coded entity, which by its nature works to exclude, rather than include. The best example of this would be the vast corpus of modernist architectural drawings, which used the same tools and strategies of representation. A similar drawing could be furnished to represent buildings and site markedly different in nature. In other words, the method of representation was the same whether employed in France, India, Germany, the United States or Brazil.

Architectural representations putatively take a concept, or the Platonic ‘Idea’ and then attempt to represent it, as a representation which points to both the idea and the proposed built-object. The drawn plan, elevation or section is understood as a simulacrum of the architect’s thought process. The process establishes linearity from conception (of the idea) to birth (of the building). It might be 32 pertinent to question the origin of the Idea itself. Typically, the answer to this would be that the Idea is borne within the forces of the context that the architect is working with/on. The idea, though, cannot be a pure object arising out of its own accord. All ‘ideas’ are necessarily mediated/controlled by the architect, and thus, it may be reasonable to argue the ‘idea of the concept’ is, in fact, the same as the ‘idea of the Architect’, which is not the same as the idea emanating from the architect. To elaborate on this, I take up the example of the Barcelona Pavilion. The pavilion represented through its plan-drawing, is supposed to embody ideals of Germany and Democracy. Yet, there is nothing in the drawing which actually makes this claim, in spite of our purported reading of it. On the other hand, our knowledge that this drawing was carried out by an architect, safely allows us to presume that there must be an idea behind it, which is being projected on and through it. Thus, in essence what is more important is the positioning of the architect-as-an-idea, behind the drawing, more so than the idea itself. With regard to this, it would also be interesting to look at Deleuze’s ‘Image of Thought’. The Image of Thought is an almost moral or ‘truth-based’ view that people accept about a given thing. This operates more so at the level of a social unconscious. In some ways this is similar to Heidegger’s world-picture, which is not just the imagining of the world as a flattened accessible image, but of projecting this image ahead of ourselves in order to be able to confirm to that image. With both the Image of Thought and the World-Picture linearity is ecreated within which we are always moving towards an ideal, that is an ideal due to its qualities of truth and objectivity. The praxis of architecture is wedded to a very similar view of representations or drawings, which are not mere tools of translation, but images that are projected ahead which, de-facto, the idea can be traced back to. As I have argued earlier, that it would be impossible to envisage an idea, if there wasn’t already the idea of drawing (as a translation) subtending it? Instead of the idea being channeled through the architect to become a drawing, we may be able to flip this thought, and imagine the drawing using the architect as the conduit to establish an idea. In essence, the drawing can be imagined apriori to the idea. Two facets emerge from this view. On the one hand, the architect is barred from being able to represent anything, unless there already exists an idea/image of the drawing, which stands ready to be translated and given shape. On the other

33 hand, the notion that the drawing allows for creative thinking is also called into question, as while the architect might be thinking through it, equally he/she is not. If the drawing exists as an idea before existing as a product, then it is precluded from being a tool of exploration.

Though the notion of the Idea may not form the basis of this thesis, it is still important to consider an understanding of ‘Idea’ as it relates to representation. Joe Hughes suggests that an investigation of Ideas is a tripartite question. Firstly, what are Ideas in themselves (Form- Content)? Secondly, where do Ideas come from (Function-Origin)? Lastly, where do ideas go (Meaning)? Ideas may be understood as an amalgamation of entities (ideal elements), which group together as a collection

though they are a meaningless collection. However, this collection possesses a transformative potential. The establishment of relationships amongst these entities around an ‘aleatory point,’

creates a structure which produces ‘singularities.’24 Hughes, additionally, states that “the question of genesis is how we get from one set of rules to another, how we get from Ideas to Representation.”25

The migration from Ideas to Representation becomes a method of confronting the world. Everything is a form of representation since it is borne out of rules and further creates rules. The question of representation becomes intertwined with the question of identity, as to represent is to capture, and the very act of capturing is an act of control, thus stemming from identity politics.

Intersection of Representation, Identity and Gender

The question of identity is often conflated with the image of the Architect. Though there are some significant overlaps, I am more interested in exploring the degree to which the identity of the architect is tied to representations, and the possible gendered connotations of the same.

In the Renaissance period, an interesting figure emerged. This was of the Renaissance man, a

24 The notion of singularities can be tied to a larger historical perspective to do with the exploration of the world beginning in the 15th century and the accompanying development of cartography as a science. Singularity as a term came to replace the idea of the mirror wherein (the latter) the earth could be mapped out akin to God’s eye. As explorations and map making progressed newer lands or islands were discovered which disrupted the previously imagined notion of the world. These were called singularities. For Deleuze, the notion of singularity coincides with points that have potential and decisive points which can allow for perception of movement. For a better understanding of singularities see: Clancy, Tom. “Singularity” in The Deleuze Dictionary, edited by Adrian Parr, 249-251. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005. 25 Hughes, Joe. Deleuze and the Genesis of Representation, Continuum Studies in Continental Philosophy. London ; New York: Continuum, 2008. 34 polymath who was well-versed in a variety of subjects and due to this possessed an elite and noble character. By the Modern period, the architect was one of the figures to don this cloak. As his personality developed, so did that of the architectural drawing. Both were imbued with qualities of veracity and far-sight. However, the same qualities, which were aspects of objectivity, also rendered the two static and hegemonic. These qualities worked to create a hierarchal structure due to which the architect and the representation can be deemed masculine. The qualities of one bled on to the other, and neither had more primacy over the other.

Anthropologist Edward Robbins looks at the architectural drawing as a cultural and social instrument employed by architects upon which their identity is hinged. According to him, though the exact methods of appropriation might differ, the drawing aids in the phenomenal representation of a conceptual practice, and therefore exists prior to the act of building. In his investigation, he places the use of drawings as a carefully constructed moment in the history of architecture which allowed architecture as a discipline to separate and sever its bonds with craftwork. This separation allowed architects the chance to elevate themselves above the ‘labor’ connotations of craftwork. In his words, “Drawing is at once an idea and an act, an autonomous concept and a mode of social production”26 i.e. the drawing is not merely a physical entity which is created as a means to achieve another physical entity (the building). It is both a product and a practice, which develops independent of other externalities of society, culture, economics and politics, yet has an impact on society at large.

Thought there is a good measure of legitimacy to his claim, it would be, nevertheless, tough to categorize drawings as mere collections of graphic data. Contrary to Robbins, I would argue that drawings are borne out of a strong socio-cultural understanding, but presented in a manner so as to obfuscate the same understanding. In other words, it would be difficult to say that drawings are completely autonomous, since at the very least, they are dependent on the architect’s socialization. However, this socialization may be considered ‘subjective.’ Hence, drawings are created and composed in a manner which would erase subjectivity, and replace it instead with seemingly

26 Robbins, Edward. Why Architects Draw. Cambrdge: MIT Press, 1994. Pg. 7. 35 objective structures. By doing so, drawings can lay claim to ubiquity and universality.

The objectivity of the drawing is, debatably, a façade for the objectivity of the architect. The interlacing of representation and identity was further intensified during the Modernist period. Despina Stratigakos, studying architects in early-modern Germany, illustrates how the architect

as imagined (by Karl Scheffler) to be a figure who pursued “a man’s supreme yearnings” 27 and possessed “great, masculine qualities.”28 This was a part of Scheffler’s objection to the entry of women into architecture. Thus, the actor (or instigator) was imagined to be a man (and not just male), who held the key to both the idea and the act, which impregnated with qualities of civility

and nobility (only to be found in men). The idea and act, as stated by Robbins, can be found to be constituted in the architectural drawing.

Act here might have been understood as the act of designing/building, and thus advancing not just the profession but also the world by giving it more value. The lapse, though, in this scenario is that a sudden jump is made from the Idea to the Building. The masculinist Idea finds its translation within the realm of the profession, and more importantly, the built environment which is expected to be rendered masculine by virtue of the Idea being imbued with masculine notions. This is a widely accepted notion, yet it is erroneous on account that architects do not have control over the actual built environment. The slight exception to this may be on-site supervision, which only serves as an attempt to establish their authority to some degree. Their real moment of control is actualized and realized through architectural representations, an argument that historian Robin Evans supports.

Evans suggests that the act of drawing premises itself on the perfect translation of an idea (ephemeral) into the built world, while still retaining its meaning. He derides this notion as being naïve, stating that “a suspension of critical disbelief is necessary in order to enable architects to

perform their tasks at all.”29 Comparing the process of architects with artists, he illustrates how

27 Stratigakos, Despina, “The Uncanny Architect: Fear of Lesbian Builders and deviant Homes in Modern Germany” in Negotiating Domesticity: Spatial Productions of Gender in Modern Architecture, edited by Heynen, Hilden and Gulsum Baydar, London, New York: Routledge, 2005. Pg 147-148 28 Ibid.,149. 29 Evans, Robin. Translations from Drawing to Building and Other Essays. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997. Pg 3. 36 Figure 2.7: Architect at his drawing board. This wood engraving was published on May 25, 1893, in TekniskUkeblad, Norway’s leading engineering journal 37 the latter group, initial sketches notwithstanding, do physically engage with the work that they are producing. Architects, on the other hand, produce representations, not buildings, and it is the act of representing that engages most of their attention and time. Intrinsic to this claim is an issue of distancing. Architects, subconsciously, distance themselves from many of aspects which may be viewed as external to the idea/thought process. Evan’s thesis complicates the argument offered by feminist scholars that architects gender the built environment. In taking away the control of the built environment, architectural representations remain as the only tool of control available to architects. Furthermore, Evans states, Often the spatial metaphor is itself already a metaphor of time, but in this instance space and time are interchangeable. Beneath and behind translate easily into a chronological before. Time passes; we look back. Sediments accumulate, we dig. The face-to-face relationship, no longer possible across time, is replaced by an equivalent arrangement in which the present is construed as a projection of the past, an accessible reality offering evidence of previous events that can be only be recovered through it. Extending from the past it eclipses, the present is turned into the façade of history.30

He argues for a measure of immanence to be accorded to drawings, which he views as facades upon which often-times meaning is forcefully projected by excavating through history, and other philosophies, thus placing the drawing ahead, above or beyond some meaning that must exist. A poignant moment occurs in Evan’s writings when he discusses the different meaning and interpretation given to representation by an artist and an architect. Evans selects different illustrations of Pliny’s story of Dibutades tracing the shadow of her lover called ‘The Origin of Painting.’ The first illustration, painted by artist David Allan in 1773, shows a young couple seated in a dark room full of shadows, except for the light from an oil lamp in the foreground that illuminates both of them. The man’s head is in profile, his back towards us, looking at and holding his lover, who is seated in his lap, as she traces his silhouette on the wall. Her body is exposed to us, but her gaze turns away, looking intently at her lover as she supports his chin with one hand. The scene is intimate. Our presence there seems somewhat voyeuristic, as suggested both by the oval frame of the painting, and the candle in the foreground, which throws the viewer of this scene

30 Evans, Robin. “In Front of Lines that Leave Nothing Behind.” In Architectural Theory since 1968. Ed. Michael K. Hays. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000. Pg 482-489. 38 Figure 2.8: Allan, David. The Origin of Painting, 1773. Image Courtesy: www.nuno-matos-duarte-textos.blogspot.com

Figure 2.9: Schinkel, Karl. The Origin of Painting, 1830. Image Courtesy: www.emeraldinsight.com 39 into shadow. In contrast, the version painted by neo-classical architect Karl F. Schinkel in 1830, is dramatically reinterpreted. It shows a group of people gathered around a rock (quite like an empty white canvas), upon which a young man traces the silhouette of a woman. There is no suggestion of intimacy, as the woman has her back to the man, and another woman holds the first one’s head still. Young cherubic people and sheep witness this act. The light quality is different: the oil lamp which cast shadows has been replaced by the Sun, thus, bathing the scene in bright, ubiquitous light. The angle of viewing this scene also differs. Whereas in the former, our position seemed almost at eye-level, the second version elevates this eye-level to suggest an aerial view, not dissimilar to a plan. Evans does not offer the above analysis in his reading of the two paintings. He leans more

towards theories of labor and differentiation. I, on the other hand, am piqued by a) the change in the ‘author’ from a woman to a man, b) the angle of viewing which suggests omnipresence and c) a shift towards an ‘objective’ act of representation. What colors representation as static and masculine? Dorothea Olkowski employs a feminist and Deleuzian lens to explain that within all walks of life, be it social, cultural, political or economic, representation allows for the creation and substantiation of the normative, on the basis of which all other things are judged. For example, ‘white’ has often been collated with good or pure. As a consequence, all that is not-white tends to become dirty, impure or sinful in varying degrees. Moreover, all that is not normative is thus a) inferior and b) forced to aspire towards the normative. These generalizations or norms are neither abstract nor particular enough to incorporate the notion of difference. Additionally, claims of hegemony which result from the above are often couched in the liberal language of individual rights. Olkowski states, “For liberalism, fixed and knowable truth

guarantees the hierarchical order and grounds representation and truth”.31 This is precisely where the problem with modern architectural representations starts to intensify: in their combined self- belief in both the universal (democratic) and the individual (the architect with the idea), drawings are oriented towards a ‘truth claim’ that helps establish a hegemonic order. For instance, the truth as something pure or white raises the question of poché in architectural drawings. Poche, or the blacking-out of the spaces between the two faces of a wall, was often done to ‘in-between’ spaces, 31 Olkowski, Dorothea. Gilles Deleuse and the Ruin of Representation. Berkeley, Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999. Pg. 10. 40 such as a concealed corridor. During the late Eighteenth century, these spaces took on an immoral and irrational connotation as places of rendezvous between parties who should not be doing so. By the modern period, poché had almost entirely been eliminated from architectural drawings in lieu of veracity, transparency and objectivity.

This truth, supposedly latent in drawings, was accessed by the architect who was a/the Man.32 This ordered representation belittles and ignores anything which is ‘other’ to it, for it is forever and falsely, perpetuating itself as the “Same”. Deleuze explains, “ The same discovered a unconditioned principle capable of setting up its rule within infinity; namely sufficient reason; and the Like found a condition by which it could be applied to the unlimited: namely convergence or continuity”.33 The problem of the Same and the Like is perpetuated in architectural representations, both of which seems to aim towards the continuity of the idea, and in this case, it is an idea of masculinity arising from its own interlacing with truth and universality, so that a structure or code remains rooted in place, and is not disrupted by difference, for it believes in its own purity, in its own ideal. Turning back once again to Deleuze, the World can be read in two ways, “One bids us to think of difference in terms of similarity, or a previous identity, while on the contrary, the other invites us to think of similarity or even identity as the product of a basic disparity. The first one is an exact

definition of the world as icon. The second against the first, describes the world of simulacra.”34 (My emphasis). This can lead to two interpretations. One, drawings are icons as they copies which attempt to represent the Idea, which itself is above and beyond anything else that will ever be achieved, be it the drawing or the building. Second, the drawings are in fact also simulacra because they are attempting to simulate the idea, i.e. they do borrow certain properties from an idea, but the idea itself does not possess any concrete reality, thus, forcing them to be representations of a null- representation or an absent representation. With Jean Baudrillard, the issue of simulacra becomes more important. For him, simulacra go above and beyond mere representation, to the point, that it is a force unto himself. Let us examine this in context of his writing on maps,

32 Interestingly, as has now become common knowledge, the women who entered architecture, and moreover practiced it were seen as suspicious, with their identities as women coming under severe criticism. They were often deemed lesbian or hermaphrodites. 33 Deleuze, Gilles and Rosalind Krauss. “Plato and the Simulacrum.” October 27, no. Winter (1983): 45-56. 34 Ibid., 52 41 Abstraction today is no longer of the map, the double, the mirror or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without an origin or reality: a hyperreal. The territory no longer preceded the map, nor survives it. Henceforth, it is the map that precedes the territory.35

The map traditionally thought to follow (in terms of discovery, invention or production) after the territory that it represents, no more plays its assigned role. It has bypassed the territory to the degree that it no more resembles nor relies on it. The power the map holds is absolute. The ‘copy’ or the ‘representation’ has come to overtake the putative origin to the degree that the origin really is of no value any more.

Hence, architectural drawings can simultaneously be icons and simulacra. As icons, they represent the idea and the architect. As simulacra, they overtake both the idea and the architect. Some part of the this nature of modern architectural drawings lies in their putative objectivity. Olkowski explains (using Catharine McKinnon’s argument) how the Idea of Objectivity itself is very problematic: As a scientific stance, objectivity is justified by an epistemology with two primary characteristics: first, sufficient visual distance from what is viewed so that the viewer is no longer limited by “his” position as material beings; and second, aperspectivity so that the viewer can observe the world from no particular place or time, but rather from all places and times. In short, the observer presumes “he” is no longer part of the process and also assumes that “he” is essential to the object and not merely incidental to it.36

Objectivity is predicated on distance and aperspectivity, which allows a person (in a God-like situation) to see everything from all angles, effectively treating that which is viewed as an object. The belief that an entity contains within it properties that are objective or make it objective, produces a certain degree of homogeneity dependent on the entity’s reproducibility. Difference is actively occluded from such a closed-off system. With regard to architectural representation this entails the architect believing that the drawing is ultimately an (objective) copy of the world or of reality. In its being objective, it is imagined as capturing certain scientific paradigms and truths which make it seem as it could not have been rendered in any other manner. Thus, Boullee’s rendering of the cenotaph for Newton is a copy of a scientific paradigm, which can further give birth to or

35 Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994. 36 Olkowski, Dorothea. Gilles Deleuze and the Ruin of Representation. Berkeley, Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999. Pg 12. 42 produce the building which is the reproduction. The idea of logic works almost insidiously here to create a normative. Furthermore, as Claire Colebrook explains, the idea of logic often ties thought to some “proper image” 37 of itself. Image, and subsequently, something ‘visual’ presents an equal challenge to representation. Ronal Bogue adds that the perception of something visually, is an exercise in failure, as attention to an object comes to rest with the eye, which follows a line of attention, recognition and finally comparison. In doing so, the entity itself gets coded, and subsequently lost. The architectural plan is an example par excellence of this. Firstly, it creates a visual field which is necessarily distant, in fact it is an an infinite distance. Hence, the angle at which it allows access to itself is nearly impossible in real life, hovering as one does over it.

This fact is in and of itself interesting, for it places the creator of the drawing in a position not dissimilar to the creator of the world, who has often been understood in many discourses as having been necessarily masculine. This male position of creation obviates any subjectivity other than its own. Also, implicit in this stance, is a notion of autonomy which by claiming the drawing to be putatively subject-less, imbues it all the more with the subjectivity of the author. This causes the drawing to become more so an authoritative tool of patriarchy. The idea of subjectivity is explored by Griselda Pollock through her work on modernist women artists. She argues that modernity is a matter of representation, and to understand the subjectivities that are brought to the forefront, it is important to deconstruct the “masculine myths of modernism.”38A discussion on this encompasses issues of gaze and the male eye/I.

Thus, many authors while working with issues of the image argue that the image serves to capture and inscribe societal values, and one can well imagine how an image is a projection of our own reflections. The problematic arises when the same images also work to create hierarchies and marginalizations. The image is anything but an innocent medium, it carries with it definite values. In this regard, it would be foolhardy to think of architectural representations as being neutral and apolitical. Rather, what they present to us is a manifesto for the ethos in which they are generated. This manifesto is never made explicit, and its structuring ‘language’, is easily overlooked. Hence,

37 Colebrook, Claire. “Questioning Representation”, SubStance 29 (2000): 47-67 38 Pollock, Griselda, “Modernity and the Spaces of Femininity” in Vision and Difference, New York: Routledge, 1988. Pgs 70-127. 43 the next three chapters return to drawings, as composites of graphical information, scale and linguistic information, to decipher how orthographic architectural drawings espouse a cause and generate identity.

44 lines 3

In the summer of 1947, Minnette returned home to a newly independent Sri Lanka. Now a trained modernist from the Architectural Association, Minnette exuded the same kind of energy and optimism that was true of many parts of the Asian subcontinent, especially with regard to the massive task of introducing to these nascent ‘nations’ the tenets and the vision of Modern architecture. Her task was not made simple by virtue of her exclusive status as the first woman architect 1 of Sri Lanka. She established her own practice, aptly titled ‘Studio of Modern Architecture’ from her parents’ house. Her first commission, the Karunaratne House (1947-1951), became a hugely publicized project, for the novelty of the building as much as for its designer. The clients for this project were close family friends of the De Silvas.

This chapter examines the drawings that Minnette produced for the Karunaratne House (in particular) and representations from her other projects (in general). Against these the chapter analyzes the drawings made by Le Corbusier, a seminal figure in Minnette’s life, for the Villa Sarabhai house (1951-1955) as they share many similarities in terms of spatio-temporal contexts.

The focus of this chapter is to explore tools and techniques employed by the architects, which allows them to imagine the sheet as a space to be captured and controlled. As this chapter shows, the drawing sheet, set up to display certain graphical information through methods particular to a certain group of people. I argue that this is an act of appropriation and control, which is ultimately linked to the identity of the architect. The chapter differs from traditional feminist analysis of architectural drawings wherein drawings are read for the spatial it “produces” to arrive at conclusions about gender and other issues.2 My reading of the drawings will rely more on a

1 Minnette was the first ‘trained’ woman architect in Sri Lanka. The reason I make this distinction is that I cannot claim that there may have been no women practicing architecture, even if indigenously, before or at the same time as her. 2 This is not to claim that usual style of “spatial analysis” is unimportant. As shall be clear in this chapter, Spatial analyses, while important, are however secondary to my discussion as their working is dependent on a collapse between the act of reading a drawing and the act of imagining (or even experiencing) a space, which is what in tune, produces the subject position of the architect as gendered masculine. 45 Figure 3.1: Collection of architectural drawings for Minnette De Silva’s first project: The Karunaratne House, Kandy, 1948. Image Source: De Silva, Minnette. The Life and Work of an Asian Woman Architect. Colombo: GEDSands, 1998.

46 structural method, looking at what is, quite literally, on the sheet, then what is suggested by the drawing.

3.1 A tale of two drawings and two architects: Minnette and Le Corbusier.

Six architectural drawings (Figure 3.1) are published amidst the eight pages of her monograph that Minnette devotes to her first project. These consists of a perspective, plans for the two levels

of the house, two sections, a perspective, and a detail for the roof truss3. In comparison to this

paucity of published material on Minnette, there are more than a hundred documented drawings for Le Corbusier’s Villa Sarabhai.4 This fact is, in itself very telling, not just of the importance the architectural fraternity has placed on documenting the works of two different yet similar architects, but also of the role architectural representation plays in Minnette’s image of herself. That the first page of Minnette’s memoirs of the Karunaratne house opens with a perspective drawing of her proposal, followed by the plans, seems significant.

The perspective (see Figure 3.2), drawn in pencil, is on a sheet longer than it is wider in a ratio of almost 1:2. There is no border to hold in the drawing. An element which adds to this linearity of the sheet, forming a margin of sorts, is a thick black band that runs along the bottom, though placed substantially above the edge of the paper. This band gradually fades out as it moves towards the right side. Its seeming function is to locate the two labels on the sheet: ‘perspective view’ above it, and ‘from the garden. West’ beneath it. The drawing has a visual structure: a first (invisible) vertical axis dividing it into two parts, and then a second axis divided the left part further into two zones. The result is a drawing divided into three visually distinct zones, A (25%), B (25%) and C (50%). Zone B, is arguably the most important portion, as most of the building, drawn in one-point perspective, figures in this zone, while zones A and C are populated with renderings of foliage. There is also a subtle diagonal running from the top-left to the bottom-right corner of the

3 De Silva, Minnette. The Life and Work of an Asian Woman Architect. Colombo: GEDSands, 1998. 4 Le Corbusier, Ahmedabad, 1953-1960/Le Corbusier. Paris: Fondation Le corbusier, 1983. 47 Figure 3.1: Perspective Drawing of the Karunaratne House, 1948. Image Source: De Silva, Minnette. The Life and Work of an Asian Woman Architect. Colombo: GEDSands, 1998.

48 sheet, which leaves the foreground more vacant, and distances the viewer from the building itself. Since, the sheet proclaims to capture the view from the garden, the (implied) position of the viewer is behind a thicket of trees that have a small clearing in them. It is through this clearing that one “chances” upon the built work, distanced due to the garden it front if it, rising like a prominent mass as the sun catches it. Deep shadows lurk behind and beneath the fin like brise soleil and cantilevers. Its angular mass, and its shifting levels, jut out against the sky, unhindered.

Interestingly, as the drawing of the building moves across the sheet, it fades away towards the right side, and only faint indentations and lines remain. Here, the drawings of trees, once again, form the foreground.

The use of line intensity changes depending on what is being depicted. The lines of the house are precise, angular and hard, drawn mechanically. Those of the foliage seem to relax marginally, still not ‘realistic’, just more fluid, yet abstracted, with an intensity of an entirely different quality than that of the building. Overall, the drawing looks somewhat “messy.” It is, as if, the hand the made the lines, often smudged them purposefully, especially when depicting, “nature.”

If the perspective (one of the very few drawn by Minnette) seems somewhat casual, the architectural plans of the Karunaratne House, that follow, change tone significantly (See figure 3.3). At first glance this drawing, like the one before, also seems to lack any overt margins. Yet, the way elements are arranged, they imply a border while simultaneously threatening to transgress it.5 Furthermore, this sheet is organized vertically with the drawings placed one above the other. First comes the lower level plan, followed by the upper level plan (though this is the public level at which the house is accessed), and finally at the bottom of the page, lies a transverse section. This placing of the drawing creates a strong vertical axis. And unlike the perspective, the line work is more or less uniform in how it has been used to portray different elements, each being drawn very precisely.

This drawing has none of the smudged, messy quality of the perspective representation. There is

5 The plan-drawings shown here, have probably been recomposed for publishing purposes. However, in doing so, the author’s directions may have been carried out. In totality, this does not deviate greatly from the role of the margin within the drawing. 49 Figure 3.3: (Recomposed) Plan Drawings of the Karunaratne House, 1948. Image Source: De Silva, Minnette. The Life and Work of an Asian Woman Architect. Colombo: GEDSands, 1998. 50 however, still a ‘mad energy’ about this drawing, brought on by the vegetation and topographical lines which weave across and around the sheet. At all points the vegetation and the topography seem to breach the lines of the built mass. Compared to the straight, perpendicular, continuous and contiguous movements of the plan of the building, the vegetation and contour lines run amok, in many instances cutting across the ‘house.’ Abstracted, dense foliage, particularly along the North face, is indicated through tight ‘sqiggly’ lines and a remarkable amount of stippling, to which the house-graphic provides ‘quiet’ resistance. Spaces indicated as mediators, such as verandahs and porches, are hatched with a grid pattern. The spaces within the building are empty; devoid of any information except the labels which name them (this will be explored in the fourth chapter).

There is no furniture to indicate what these spaces may be used for, to add to a secondary level of meaning / association. There is only vacuum and silence, for the space to uphold its own dignity. Similar issues can be found in the section-drawing on the sheet.

The walls of the house drawn with thick solid black lines provide a strong sense of demarcation between what is “inside” them and what is “outside, “ and also between ‘architecture’ and ‘nature’. Perhaps one of the most telling aspects in this drawing about this divide is that the trees drawn next to the house are shorter than the house, rendering them subservient to it.

Many remarkable issues emerge from Minnette’s drawings and it is worthwhile to compare them to Le Corbusier’s drawings for the Sarabhai House. Firstly, in spite of a vast number of drawings that were made for the latter project, there is not a single perspective drawing. The only hint of volume is the addition of shadows to some of the sections to imbue them with depth. Not surprisingly then, what one sees first, unlike Minnette’s presentation is not a perspective but rather a drawing (see figure 3.4) which combines the plan of villa, its elevation/ section, all brought into sharp relief through the drawing-information, that is, the title, date, scale, building type, signature – most of which, importantly, were absent from Minnette’s sheet.

The section-drawing is placed above the plan-drawing, but far enough for each to act seemingly independent of the other. As with Minnette’s sheets, there is no margin or border to hold or contain 51 Figure 3.4: Proposal Drawings for Villa Sarabhai, Ahmedabad, 1955 by Le Corbusier. Image Source: Le Corbusier. Ahmedabad, 1953-1960 Le Corbusier. Paris: Fondation Le Corbusier, 1983

52 the elements, and much ‘white space’ shrouds the extents of each drawing-type. Information about the site is conspicuously absent, and is provided in subsequent drawings. The focus is entirely on the drawing of built elements. The elevation shows adjoining trees, but they seem to serve a more ornamental purpose than to indicate actual presence. Furthermore, as ‘ornaments, they are also at a removed distance from the context of the plan, which comprises a set of vertical linear bars, representing walls, repeated horizontally and punctuated by breaks or gaps. In fact so strong is the illusion of the thick lines running top to bottom that the squares marking the columns too seem like shortened bars.

The line-walls are, of themselves, pochéd black; solid, firm and controlled against the white expanse of the sheet. The lines of the elevation which might be imagined to enclose ‘building’ material are empty. Deep shadows are cast suggesting vaults contained within the vertical bars of the plan. The fourth and fifth vaulted-unit shows a group of androgynous figures quite reminiscent of Corbusier’s ‘Modular Man.’ Also not insignificant is the difference that while Minnette’s drawing was bereft of furniture, Corbusier’s is amply populated by them which seem to obviate the need to label the spaces. Indeed, there is a conspicuous lack of text the drawing.

There are three facets of both sets drawings that provide clues to how drawings (re)produce the identity of the two architects. The first and most apparent is the depiction of natural elements in the two. Second, and not unrelated to the first, is the issue of margins which governs, as I shall show later, the relation between the architect and question of the ‘real.” The third facet examines the control of habitation of spaces through the concomitant markings on the plan, as well as the implications this has for the architect’s authority and power.

3.2 The Nature/ Culture Dichotomy

To better discuss some essential similarities and differences that are inherent in the two architects’ works, it is important to invoke arguments that have been made about Modernity’s understanding 53 and representation of nature. Moreover, as many theorists have argued, this understanding of nature was not devoid of gendered underpinnings, and still continues to provide for a complicated situation where there is a good measure of the naturalization of the feminine and the feminization of the natural (Warren, 1993). This provides the grounds for the exercise of control, which is central to my argument here.

Stuart Oliver has noted the discourse surrounding the embankment of the River Thames during

the 19th century. Highlighting various incidents from the discourse, he illustrates how the project of embankment was in reality a very typical project of modernity, which imagined nature or the

natural as an entity that needed to be controlled. The mechanism of this control was ‘culture’ – possessed by mankind, thus, automatically more evolved and ‘applied’ to further provide grounds for culture. The argument for embankment was presented and upon completion explained through three projected ideals: cleansed, protected and improved.6 That is, the embankments would provide for more sanitary conditions (sanitation was in any case one of the greatest concerns of the industrial and post-industrial era). They ‘protected’ the river (and the city) as they “provided a firm divide between culture and nature, and a rigid enclosure for the water”7, as well as improved the river as they ‘secured a better architectural effect’ by eliminating the ‘irregularities’ of the bankside.’ These ideals were perceived as having a degree of heroism about them, since they stressed man’s ability to control the irregularities and vagaries of this unruly natural body. As Oliver notes, The embanking of the Thames can be seen as an emblematic stage in the construction not just of a modern nature in London, but also of modernity’s natural: it re-engineered the river as a ‘modern stream’, and represented an acting out of the discourse of the natural, producing a hybrid ‘real force’ that provided a concrete framing (my emphasis) for nature between the enchaining embankment walls and a representational framing for it within and ideology of engineered modernity. … Its consequence was that the river became a ‘peepshow’ into modernity’s ordered desires, a place of scored-clean audacity in which the application of bureaucratic and engineering power of modernity has disrupted the flows of pre-existing nature and reformed them into a product enslaved by Bazalgette’c chains to the flows of modernity.8

6 Oliver, Stuart. “The Thames Embankment and the Disciplining of Nature in Modernity”, The Geographic Journal, Vol. 166, no. 3, September 2000 ( 227-238) 7 Ibid., 235. 8 Ibid., 235. 54 This shows that the relationship with nature had dramatic effects. It was no longer an entity along which humanity passively existed, but something that had to be strongly acted upon so as to tame or control it, and bring it under the purview of culture. It was thus the other that existed outside of the normative self of culture. The question that arises is why was nature understood as something to be controlled, and even more so what repercussion and connection did it have with the understanding of women?

Sherry Ortner argues that the devaluation of women to a secondary or even intermediate status is a universal fact, which may have particular variations from culture to culture, but for the most part can be accepted as a pan-cultural phenomenon. She gauges this devaluation based on informants’ statements, symbolic devices (such as defilement) and social rules that occlude women from the highest rites of ‘culture’. Given the widely varying cultural differences between parts of the world, the fallacy of genetic determinism, she states that “we must attempt to interpret female subordination in light of other universals of human condition”9. This interpretation is inscribed in the universal human condition of existing with and within nature. As per Ortner, while both ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ are to a large degree human constructs, there is a particular hierarchical relationship established between them, thus “culture (i.e, every culture) at some level of awareness asserts itself to be not only distinct from, but superior in power to, nature, and that sense of distinctiveness and superiority rests precisely on the ability to transform – to “socialize” and “culturalize” nature.”10 Within this view, women get symbolically associated with nature, whereas men are identified with culture. As shown by Oliver’s argument as well, it is always (modern) culture’s mission to subordinate nature that plays out within the subordination of women as well.

Yet, as Ortner also notes, this subordination does not occur through a total collapse of the distinction between nature and women but rather through a positing of women as being closer to nature, as sharing an inherent affinity. Thus, women are understood through bodily functions (menstruation, giving birth, lactation), social structures (nurturing, domestic tasks) and psychic

9 Ortner, Sherry. “Is Female to Male as Nature is to Culture?” Feminist Studies, Vol. 1, No. 2 (Autumn, 1972), pp. 5-31 10 Ibid, 11. 55 structures (subjective, emotional – productions not of an innate nature but of socialization). Most of these structures work to tie women down.

Man, on the other hand, Ortner argues lack such functions and thus “must (or has the opportunity) to assert his creativity externally, “artificially”, through the medium of technology and symbols.”11 (This argument is particularly important in the understanding of architectural representations, as will be seen later.) The caveat which Ortner points out is that it would be impossible to exclude women completely from the purview of culture as they are, like men, full-fledged human beings, and partake equally in the transcendence of nature through socialization. But the irony is that even here a dichotomy is established between nature and culture, wherein the latter is the higher, more evolved stage12. Women sit intermediately between these two polarities, with men occupying the higher ground of culture. And even though their intermediacy does allow them some acts of mediation, from time to time, it, Ortner notes, again, accounts for “not only her lower status, but for the greater restrictions placed upon her activities.”13 14

Thus, we arrive at an understanding of women as very closely allied with our understanding of nature, especially in its relationship with culture. Much like representations, nature was (and continues to be) understood as an entity that works towards transcendence. Modernity’s interpretation of it remains one of control and domination exercised through various ways. Of interest to me, is how this control was manufactured through architectural drawings. I thus return to the depiction of nature in De Silva’s and Le Corbusier’s drawings, gauging them for their similarities and differences.

11 Ibid, 14. 12 Sherry Ortner provides a wonderful instance of the duality between nature and culture, and how the former is appropriated at will into the latter. For example, the act of cooking (domesticity) is generally regarded to be the ‘natural’ domain of women, thus placing them closer on the scale, to nature. However, instances occur where cooking is plucked out of the everyday in the case of ‘fine dining’, in which case it becomes more about ‘culture’ and we see it in the hands of chefs, who are most often men. 13 Ibid., 26 14 Ortner uses European courtly love as an example, where the man was imagined as the beast. I feel this might have other implications of marginalization as well) 56 3.3 Lines that convey tensions

The depiction of nature is perhaps the most fecund ground from which to evaluate similarities and differences between the two drawing-styles, and how they might provide clues to not only the particular subjectivities of Minnette and Le Corbusier, but also to the construction of architecture- as-a-discipline. It is worthwhile to make a minor segue to comprehend ‘depiction’. According to Nelson Goodman, depiction may be understood as making a necessary reference to an object, without actually requiring any degree of resemblance. The act of depiction participates in the

“formation and characterization” of the world. 15 The best example of this would actually be an architectural plan which in no appreciable sense resembles a building. Thus, the depiction of nature or natural elements in the drawings is a technique which doesn’t actually show nature as ‘real’ but allows for an impression of the world (or world-view) it occupies.

With respect to De Silva’s and Le Corbusier’s drawings, the line-work can be divided, in general, into two categories. The first set of lines depicts the non-natural elements, or the representation of architectural elements. The second set of lines depicts natural elements: trees, vegetation, earth, and topography. The manner of usage of lines to show the site and nature is perhaps the place where the biggest differences arise between the representational styles of the two architects.

With Minnette’s drawings, one can immediately discern a significant tension between the representation of natural elements and of the architectural ones. Whereas, the thick, dark lines of the latter run in a manner straight and firm, those of the former seem imbued with more energy. The nature-lines (as I will call them) are not differentiated by line weights, but their thickness and presence is represented through thin lines tightly wound together to form large clumps. Some spread out from central foci in a spidery manner, slightly differentiated to indicate types with the same genus. That is, in spite of a repetition of the same genus of flora, each one has been given some character. Tiny dots stippled around the interstices of the plants give them yet more energy. But the depiction of energy, of a seething mass, is not restricted just to the vegetation, it

15 Goodman, Nelson. Languages of Art : An Approach to a Theory of Symbols. Indianapolis ; New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1968. Pg.40. 57 Figure 3.5: Comparison of the rendering of natural elements in Minnette De Silva’s and Le Corbusier’s drawings. Image Source: Le Corbusier. Ahmedabad, 1953-1960 Le Corbusier. Paris: Fondation Le Corbusier, 1983 and : De Silva, Minnette. The Life and Work of an Asian Woman Architect. Colombo: GEDSands, 1998.

58 find a similar representation in the earth-hatch (done freehand) around the perimeter of the house. What is noteworthy is that Minnette makes a very clear distinction between elements that need drafting with technical precision and which do not. Her drafting of all the architectural elements is precise, almost ‘scientific’. The drawing of natural elements on the other hand is not; she lets her hand move freely across the sheet, penning an abstract representational-tree at one place and immediately followed by drawing a clump of bushes elsewhere. It is as if she wants to suggest the force of nature, which her drawing of the building is managing to hold out. The flora which would otherwise have run amok is kept in check by the presence of a (invisible) margin that curtails its movement off the sheet.

Judging from her representation of natural elements, Minnette seems placed at the intermediate space that Sherry Ortner describes. The nature-lines suggest a relationship between actual nature of the site and the culture of the built environment (so represented). By drawing attention to this, I do not want to suggest that Minnette and/or her subjectivity is rendered feminine by the mere act of representing vegetal matter. That would be, ironically, essentializing both identity and nature by collapsing the delicate web between them. What I want to emphasize, instead, is that there is a tension at play here which speaks of complicated and nuanced subjectivity that recognizes the force of objects outside and thereafter, upon the pristine space of the architectural drawing.

Indeed, Minnette continues with this tension with not just the lines of trees, but also those of topography which run across her sheet with some degree of dominance and appropriation. I would argue that her nature-lines cannot be read without reading the building-lines. They draw our attention to what the anthropologist Mary Douglas calls the purity and pollution binary within which purity and pollution co-construct each other. 16 In Minnette’s drawings the nature-lines exist so that the building-lines can provide a counter to them, but it is equally possible that one might read them in exactly the opposite manner.

Finally, it is here, in this tension, I would like to claim that one can also see a larger tension

16 I use these terms in the manner Mary Douglas does. See Douglas, Mary. Purity and Danger : An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo, A Pelican Book. Harmondsworth [Eng.] ; New York: Penguin Books, 1970. 59 brewing in Minnette between discourses of modernity (colonial-modernity specifically) and post- coloniality, and also between what might be deemed masculine and feminine. That is, one can see a degree of ambiguity in Minnette’s own position as an architect. I will argue, Minnette’s choice to draw the nature-lines with the intensity that she does is more than a mere token to Sri Lanka’s natural heritage and that her depictions mature through the course of her career. Representations of work carried out by her more than forty years later, will show nature-lines becoming an even more prominent feature of her work. In fact, this is a manner in which she will distinguish her drawings from other male modernist architect, most notably Le Corbusier, who arguably has the most influence on her. That is, in the difference between how they depict nature. Whereas her nature-

lines are almost run riot on the drawing disrupting the clear narrative of the architect manifested in the form of a design for a building, his nature-lines (both representations of natural elements and geography) are conspicuously absent.

With the two drawings, the issues of nature/culture and their alliance with feminine/masculine arise again. The established argument here is that culture became understood as being the higher ground and was a field acted upon by men. Thus, it may be argued that Le Corbusier’s drawings can be understood as fulfilling this prophecy of bringing culture. They are pristine and pure, not sullied by any elements that may detract from the wondrous depiction of the ‘house’. In fact, as pointed out earlier, Le Corbusier does not even make a distinction between the interiority and exteriority of space as shown by the plan of the house. No line severs the connection with the absolute white and clean space of the sheet. The plan sits as a jewel, controlling all the space around it. There is nothing that will reign it in. Thus, interestingly, there is no margin or border to the sheet. It is a limitless expanse upon which Le Corbusier can project his thoughts. In fact so absolute is the power imbued to the two drawings on the sheet, that (in the elevation) the house-drawing sits on a single line that slopes downwards on either end, thus providing a ‘natural’ pedestal for

the drawing.17 With his drawings, there is no illustration of conflict. Everything is perfectly and suitably ‘calm’ – an illusion.

17 In actuality, the piece of land would probably have been very flat given its geographic region 60 While Minnette’s and Le Corbusier’s portray dualities of tension/calmness, they are still united by one over-arching similarity, and that is again over the depiction of nature. Whether through making its presence felt or marking it by its absence, both exercise the control typical of modernity and modern architecture over nature. With Minnette, nature is framed: within the sheet, and without the lines of her building. With Le Corbusier, it is ignored and relegated as being not worthy of soiling his building-intentions. Both acts mark control and domination. In doing this, their overall subjectivity is rendered masculine as its acts upon an entity by imagining it as external to itself and in the need of taming, in the best case, and complete annihilation in the worst.

3.4 The Sheet as a the World

The previous section attempts to illustrate how the nature/culture dichotomy is exercised in the portrayal of information on the drawing sheet. It also shows how this mechanism also embeds and (re)produces a gendered architectural identity through the drawing. In this section I focus on the sheet itself which I show is imagined as space and as the space which it attempts to represent, in spite of its distinctly different nature from the ‘real’ space.18

According to the theorist Jean Baudrillard, the characteristic condition of postmodernity is its seeming lack of any referent. Commenting on how this is manifested in terms of representation he notes, “Abstraction today is no longer of the map, the double, the mirror or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without an origin or reality: a hyperreal. The territory no longer preceded the map, nor survives it. Henceforth, it is the map that precedes the territory.”19

18 Jaideep Chatterjee also makes a similar argument regarding the collapse of the space architectural drawing and that of the real space. According to Chatterjee, “design as a worldview, is based upon a particular ontological view of the world, in which the being of entities, indeed, of the world itself, is understood as an unchanging substance; an “unchanging” reality that undergirds the manifold variety of appearances. The design jury and the curious status of architectural representation… produces this particular meaning structure (world view) of the being of entities, and in doing so produces, propagates the “world” of the architect and the subjectivity of architects within that world, in line with the ontological view of the world as substance.” See Chatterjee, Jaideep. “The Gift of Design: Architecture-Culture in Postcolonial India.” PhD. Diss., Cornell University, 2010.

19 Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation, The Body, in Theory. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994. Pg 6. 61 Baudrillard calls this the ‘precession of simulacra’, a stage where the copy or the representation has come to overtake the putative origin to the degree that the origin really is of no value any more. In its place, stands the map or the representation, which encapsulates the ‘real’. His thesis allows us to view architectural representations, and specifically those in question here, in a completely different light. Within this the drawing-space or the sheet is no more truly subservient to the ‘site’ by being a representation of it. Ironically, it stands liberated from that relationship, and is the “real” space upon which the architect acts or performs even.20 To clarify, an elevation of the Eiffel tower is not just a mere representation, but within that shared imagination, the Eiffel tower itself. Thus, what is proposed is a collapse between the object-out-there and the representation, to the degree that it is the representation which is the object.

It is within this context that we return to our drawings by Minnette and Le Corbusier. Having established a thesis where the drawing sheet is the site, to the extent that it is now the sheet which is acted upon, it becomes interesting to note differences and similarities in their imagination of this space of the drawing. It is somewhat tenuously related to the actual site. However, it is a surface which inscribes a world, a world or architectural ideas which can be projected and transfixed upon it. It works both like a receptacle and a mirror.

Specifically, looking at both drawings it is easy to see how the world/sheet is a tabula rasa. There is no other information already present on it sullying it prior to what the architect places on it. It is the space of purity, whiteness, or even sanctity. By corollary, the person acting upon this sheet- site is imbued with a power which is all encompassing and limitless. With Minnette, her work takes over the sheet, and can barely be restrained. As is the case with most of her representations, and particularly with regard to drawings that are used as ‘presentation drawings’ there is never an actual margin or border, which contains the rest of her work. At times a border might be implied by its very lack. This does allow for a clue into her identity. Like other architects, especially modernist architects, her architectural identity cannot be curtailed. The sheet is the site upon which she builds the same. However, her own identity extends beyond being just an architect, in that

20 Ibid. 62 Figure 3.6: Comparison of the transgressed margins in Minnette De Silva’s and Le Corbusier’s drawings. Image Source: Le Cor- busier. Ahmedabad, 1953-1960 Le Corbusier. Paris: Fondation Le Corbusier, 1983 and : De Silva, Minnette. The Life and Work of an Asian Woman Architect. Colombo: GEDSands, 1998. 63 she is simultaneously a woman architect from postcolonial Sri Lanka. Indeed, this complexity is expressed in the manner in which she covers the extent of the sheet with her work, spreading her thoughts out as far as possible, but aware of the constraints she faces, as a woman architect from Sri Lanka within the global power structure of the discipline of modern architecture. Thus what is interesting is that in figure 3.3, we see that it is not the house which is held in by the invisible border, it is nature. In other words, control is then placed on natural elements, not her own work. There is what one might call a sense of self-defilement in her work, which is nonetheless is very controlled.

This particular observation also gives us a fascinating insight as to how her drawings, and through them her subjectivity, operates differently from Le Corbusier. His presentation-work does away with the border entirely. The drawings sit like jewels or sacred artifacts at the center of the sheet, but far from seeming isolated, they work to command all the space around them. For example, examine the plan drawing: what is shown are a series of parallel vertical lines, that enclose ‘space’ between them. In the absence of any horizontal lines between the verticals, this space is limitless and may extend endlessly. Connotatively, one might argue that no distinction is made between interiority and exteriority, thus suggesting pure space over which the architect has complete control. By controlling exactly how and what is allowed to appear on the sheet, Le Corbusier does treat his drawings as sacred by cordoning them off from (depictions of) extraneous objects or the ‘natural’. Consequently not just the drawings, but the whole sheet is elevated (figuratively) from its surroundings. It exists not in the frames of nature, but in that of culture. On the other hand, arguably Minnette, while exercising control, still operates within the realm of the natural by including it and juxtaposing it with her the image of the built mass.

Through both Minnette’s and Le Corbusier’s drawings we see a similar outlook towards the border- less drawing sheet. The sheet is not imagined as a mere surface, it has a potential far greater than that. It is an image of the world; that is, it captures a world upon which the architect’s ideas can be placed. While not talking about architectural drawing per se, the philosopher Martin Heidegger

64 notes the problem with such a view of the world as a picture. According to him, in such a case, not only is the world seen through a particular world-view which he calls the world-picture, the world- picture is almost akin to a flattened out plane upon which our ideas and thoughts are projected, for us to be able to read them back and give meaning to our own experiences. This is tied into issues of objectivity and science. Through a conversation of physics, Heidegger illustrates how a picture assumes a mathematical form, its meaning derives through itself and for itself emphatically, hence specifying in advance that which is already known.

An architect’s relationship with the drawing sheet works much on the same lines. The sheet is understood as being the site, yet more than the site. It is the site of control. It is not an inert, passive entity, and actively allows for the setting-up of power dialectics. This power or control is exercised by both Minnette and Le Corbusier, and in that, is an act of domination and masculinity. However, the method of control differs for both even within similar representational tactics, thus, nuancing the actual gendering of the drawing.

3.5 The Space between Bed and Room

The third difference I would like to discuss with regard to the drawings of the two architects can be seen in their different approaches to the designation of the spaces marked, which may further provide us with clues as to the subjectivities which are captured by the drawing. This difference has to do with the labeling of spaces that are understood as interior spaces in a traditional reading of the plan.

In the representation of Villa Sarabhai, in particular the plan, much as Le Corbusier does not actually have a graphical entity such as a line distinguish between what is within and without; he does allow us a (connotative) reading of the spaces that are to be understood as interior spaces. He does this through meticulously arranging furniture-diagrams in the spaces between the walls so as to demarcate spaces intended for living, as different from those for cooking, parking etc. By doing 65 this, he illustrates how he intends for the house to be used. His method is typical of many architects, both his contemporary and now. Furniture layouts, as they are called, as graphical informational devices that explain the usage and movement within a denotated space, thus, giving it a measure of accuracy. It is implied that through the act of placing ‘furniture’ the space now has a greater degree of ‘reality’ and the manner in which people will act within in can, thus, be better gauged.

Without the furniture layouts the parallel, black vertical bars on the sheet would have been perceived as just that: black bars running vertically at equal distances. However, by adding this second layer of graphical information, Le Corbusier incites the trained architectural mind to comprehend the drawing connotatively. The first two bars, do not merely enclose space, they enclose a space within which it is possible to sleep (bed), work (desk) and sit (chairs) – and all that can be achieved in ‘modern’ ways of carrying out activities, for the same activities are equally facilitated by an empty floor. The adjacent space suggests another seating arrangement meant for larger numbers through an L-shaped object (table) and squares (chairs) – our imaginations conjure up a dining space, as clearly the next bar too has a seating arrangement, but of a different nature. Again, sitting is suggested and even further categorized into formal (sofa) and informal (loosely clustered chairs) and so on through the subsequent bars.

In contrast, drawings for the Karunaratne House (in fact, most drawings through Minnette’s career) do not follow the same strategy of designating spaces. Minnette opts to name her spaces, instead of ‘applying’ furniture lay-outs to them. Thus, all we get from her is ‘bedroom’, ‘guest room’, ‘kitchen’ or ‘study’, though often spaces like bathrooms maybe designated with plumbing fixtures. This, then, provides a curious turn in events. For someone who is so strictly invested in depicting information visually, it is curious that Minnette “marks” spaces textually and not pictorially. Moreover, with the application of a textual label, Minnette leaves those spaces otherwise empty. There are no hatches to suggest materiality, nor other information that might be used connotatively.

In many ways it would be futile to question why the two might have differed over this informational- strategy. It is possible though to make reasonable assumptions centered around what this might 66 tell us about their approach towards architecture. The simplest assumption, and one made often by feminist scholars is that, by determining furniture layouts Le Corbusier was attempting to define the space and the lives of the inhabitants, something Minnette was not. Though not incorrect, this still remains at the level of conjecture, since it is not as if Minnette desists from designating spaces. In that, both are exhibiting their control over (imagined) space, though she leaves a little bit more room for ambiguity. Another way to understand this may be through the nature/culture dichotomy that I have discussed in previously. Arguably, since Le Corbusier imagined his representational work operating within the realm of culture, these were further strategies of depicting that (western) culture. I will, instead, argue that the difference in strategies is less about controlling lives, than it is about different ways of they communicated with their audience about their work and themselves. I will explore this idea in greater detail in the fourth chapter.

3.6 Conclusion

An analysis of the various facets represented through line work tells different narratives about the imagination of the two architects. Their appropriation of different yet similar techniques of drawing, when analyzed through the lens of a nature/culture dichotomy seems to lend Minette a more nature-oriented approach when compared to the high-culture methods of Le Corbusier. Yet at the same time, both feel it necessity to control elements (and thus the world) whether this is made obvious through the presencing of certain elements, as opposed to the absencing of others.

67 scale 4

“”I am writing to enquire whether you would care to undertake the job of drawing a plan for a small house for me on the banks of Bolgoda Lake – near San Michele. I have an acre of land and no money.”- Bunny Molamure” “Dear Mr. Molamure … I have developed your plan in my mind and it is a question of setting it down. As all the preliminary work is done by me personally and not entrusted to a draughtsman, so I have to follow up each job as it comes. From my experience with all my clients, there is hardly ever any divergence from the basic sketch I give; it usually expresses all the wishes of my client. – Minnette De Silva.””1

Thus far, I have raised the question of the manner in which the identity of the architect is embedded in the act and the object of drawing. I have also noted that this identity though gendered, is not sex-specific. Continuing this line of thought, this chapter examines the role of the “architectural scale,” in the production and comprehension of architectural drawings, and thus in the subjectivity of the architect.

Most, if not all architectural representations, are drawn to scale. Traditionally, it is argued that this is due to the impossibility, not to say redundancy, of drawing out a plan in situ and then erecting a building upon it, without any measured translation. Perhaps, such an act would also render the drawings of sections and elevations redundant. In this chapter, however, I grapple with the very reality and presence of architectural drawings of which scale forms an extremely important structuring mechanism, as without it, drawings would fall into the category of ‘sketch’ – which too are scaled implicitly, if not explicitly.

At one level, the discussion of scale that I hope to generate here is linked to, but not the same as, the long standing discussion within architecture on proportions. Architects, as is known, have long been concerned with issues of proportions. There is no dearth of literature, both primary and

1 Extract from written communication between Minnette and her client in 1955 regarding a design proposal for Bunny Molamure. From De Silva, Minnette. “Bunny Molamure House, Bolgoda, 1995 (sic)” in The Life and Work of a South Asian Woman Architect. Colombo: GEDSands, 1998. 68 secondary, which illustrates architecture’s and architects concern with the question of proportion. Indeed, within the western historiographical narrative of architecture, proportion has played a central role beginning with the Greeks, making its way through Alberti till one reaches its modern avatar in the form of Le Corbusier’s Modular Man. Within this narrative, the central thematic of

proportion has been its role as metaphor for truth, veracity.2 However, there is almost no discussion on the use of scale in architectural drawings, the primary mode of production for architects.3 While one may attribute this oversight to the somewhat fundamental nature of having to draw ‘at scale’, it is still curious that such central issue in architecture has been obviously overlooked. In the section that follows, I consequently turn towards the discipline of Geography, a ‘science’4 that

closely deals with representations, and wherein a critical lens has been placed on questions of scale, amongst other aspects of representations and map-making.

4.1 Defining Scale

In common parlance, scale is the relationship between distances drawn on map or a drawing to its actual or real measure on ground. Scales, understood in a mathematical sense, can be denoted as representative fractions (RF) such as 1:100, 1:1000, 1: x etc or as line/bar scales, which facilitate reading ‘real’ distances straight off the representation.

Derek Gregory gives the mathematical definition of scale as, The traditional definition in cartography refers to map resolution. All maps represent the world by reducing the size and diversity of its component spaces for visual display, digitally or on paper. Cartographic scale expresses the mathematical relationship between the map and the Earth, usually denoted as a representative fraction. For example, the small fraction, 1:500,000, indicates that one unit of distance on the map represents 500,000 units of Earth space. Such a map would show large expanses of terrain – much more than say, the larger fraction of 1:24,000. Hence the common confusion between large-scale (or large-fraction)

2 For example, see: Le Corbusier. Modular I and II. Translated by Peter de Francia and Anna Bostok. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1980. 3 For example, Vittorio Gregotti picks up on the issue of scale, but does not really address the politics that accompany the use of scale in architectural drawings. For more, see: Greggoti, Vittorio. “Scale della rappresentazione = Representations scales.” Casabella 48 (1984): 2-3. 4 Many geographers such as James Duncan, David Harvey, and Trevor Barnes et al, have argued against the previously scientific nature of geography, and have tried to illustrate how geography, as a discipline, is socially constructed. See Barnes, Trevor J., and James S. Duncan. Writing Worlds : Discourse, Texts, and Metaphors in the Representation of Landscape. London ; New York: Routledge, 1992. 69 maps that show less space but typically more detail, and small-scale maps that show more space, but with less detail. Each type of social and environmental diversity has its own ‘best resolution’ in terms of cartographic representation; thus, the choice of cartographic scale depends on the problem at hand.5

Such a mathematical explanation of a scale seems to envision it as a rather innocuous entity. In various branches of Geography such as Human, Cultural, and Political, such “innocence” of the scale has, however, been contested over the last few decades. This, in turn, actually opens up ground for the method through which a certain degree of politics may be exercised through the drawing.

Thus, it is the politics of scales, which is perhaps more pertinent to our understanding of architectural drawings. In architecture scale comes to define the level of detail that a drawing exhibits, and often, it can be telling of the ‘type’ of project an architect is involved in. That is, “large” scale projects define prestigious firms and so on. As in cartography, architectural drawings seem to make use of both representative fractions and line scales. There usually being no ‘correct’ method of denoting this. Thus, the use and the type of scale employed is often in the hands of the architect.

4.2 The Politics of Scale

In a seminal essay, J.B. Harley illustrates the construction of knowledge and thus power, through the production of maps. He argues that maps and cartography have traditionally been understood

as a science of and for the nobility.6 Not only did this keep the map making out of the access of the masses, but it gave ‘legitimate’ grounds for the domination and control of masses and of other countries. The sanitized space of the map was touted to bring order and control to the chaotic, law-less or even god-less land, enabling the monarch, or via extension, the military grounds for domination. The making of maps was then, he argues, ultimately a production of power through

5 Gregory, Derek, R.J. Johnston, Geraldine Pratt and Michael Watts . The Dictionary of Human Geography. 5th ed. Chichester, U.K. ; Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009. Accessed March 26, 2011. http://www.credoreference.com.proxy.libraries.uc.edu/entry/bkhumgeo/scale 6 Harley, J. B., Paul Laxton, and Center for American Places. The New Nature of Maps : Essays in the History of Cartography. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001. 70 the production of representational space.7

In recent times, geographers like Neil Smith, James Duncan, Neil Brenner, Eric Swyngedouw and Sallie Marston have argued that “the production of scale is implicated in the production of

space.”8 Instead of treating scale as a mere representational device, theorists have turned Marxian, Phenomenological, and even Feminist lenses onto scale as a tool that is embedded in, and giving rise to, larger politics.

Broadly speaking, there are a few thematic areas through which scale has been discussed within the discipline of geography. The first, naturally, is the mathematical definition of scale which

informs the work of physical geographers and which, currently, is a focal point within discussions of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and remote sensing etc. The second definition is operational or methodological, which relates to the level of resolution and to data collection. This understanding of scale creates relationships between the micro-level of the body and the macro- level of global phenomenon, making the argument that scales operate across many levels and intersections. For example, a discussion of certain socio-economic processes would necessarily encompass a discussion of scales through methods of data collection and the scales of analysis. The third definition of scale is that it is socially produced. Here the scale is seen through Marxian understandings of capital production and its analogies with production of spaces. The final understanding of scale is through an ontological lens. Within this stream of scholarly investigation the argument that is forwarded is that scale(s) is not and cannot be pre-ordained but rather emerges out of structures of meaning and existence within which being unfolds. Given that this work is concerned with the social and ontological dimensions of architectural representation, I examine the latter two in greater detail in the section.

The social and ontological relevance of the scale:

Making her argument in terms of social production and epistemology, the geographer Sallie Marston

7 Ibid., 51-82. 8 Marston, Sallie. “The Social Construction of Scale.” Progress in Human Geography 24, no. 2 (2000): 219-42. 71 argues that scale is tool used in framing reality. Drawing upon the works of Neil Smith, she argues, for example, that there nothing that is ontologically given about the usual scale divisions of micro- macro, local-global, regional-urban. [S]cale making is not only a rhetorical practice; its consequences are inscribed in, and are the outcome of both everyday life and macro-level social structure. Finally, the framing of scale – framings that can have both rhetorical and material consequences- are often contradictory and contested and not necessarily enduring. In short, scale construction is a political process endemic to capitalism.9

Marston argues that scales are not linearly ordered and that there is a need to understand social processes and their representations, as being poly-scalar or working across multiple scales, such

that they incorporate the idea of spaces/places occurring at various scales but always and necessarily impinging on one and other.

An aspect of Marston’s work notes the intimate connection between scales and the production of identity. Drawing on Smith’s work she notes that [Smith] suggests that a theory of the politics of scale can help to address this challenge because scale is the main axis around which geographical difference is organized. Rather that yield to difference as an individual-level construction, Smith insists upon the materially anchoring difference and the subject through a theory of scale where positionality is the product of contest and negotiation around socially demarcated boundaries: boundaries that are established at a particular scale and that may be permeable or not .10

Marston illustrates such a politics of scale in her own work on social construction of the scale within the household. Examining a number of women’s movements and practices through the 1870s-1920s, Marston focuses on the construction of scale by women around new cultural ideas that defined the status and place of women in society. As women operated across changing and fluctuating boundaries of the house to the global, or the private to the public, the scalar changes were reflected in the formation of their own gendered identities. Contrary to feminists who make the claim that with the rise of bourgeois society, men and women occupied different and non- overlapping spheres, Marston argues that the reality was, in fact, far more negotiable and mediated,

9 Ibid., 221. 10 Ibid., 232. 72 with women beginning to look at their own spheres of expertise and influence as affected by ‘exterior’ issues. Examining texts such as Household Engineering, A treatise of Domestic Economy, Marston argues that the dichotomous relationship between male/female or public/private spheres

was reconditioned due to the “explicitly political vocabulary”11 of the texts.

A somewhat similar argument about the ontological and socially produced nature of scale is also forwarded by Mitch Chapura, who suggests the need for poly-scalarity. In his view, scale is a device employed to create organizational structures and thus, can not be seen as lacking agency.12

Chapura and Marston’s work make a compelling case in terms of the political and ontological

underpinning of the scale. Transferring their insights to architectural drawing begs that one can then make the following argument:

1. Scale establishes a taxonomic structure within which hierarchies are enacted, both at the level of drawing and at the level of comprehension. This taxonomic structure influences the author’s and the audience’s levels of intimacy and distance from the phenomenon of the drawing.

2. Scale establishes the fixity of the drawing. Though drawing-sets may contain various drawings drawn at different scales, the composition of one graphic within that, for example the plan, will show all the elements at exactly the same scale, even if our actual interaction with the built object happens at various scales.

3. Following from the above scale is then, arguably linked to identity.

Let us return to the drawings of Minnette and Corbusier to examine the above points in detail.

4.3 Scale as a Taxonomic Device

Looking at the large body of work, Minnette undertook between the years of 1948-1960, a pattern

11 Marston, Sallie. “The Social Construction of Scale.” Progress in Human Geography 24, no. 2 (2000): 219-42. 12 Chapura, Mitch. “Scale, Causality, Complexity and Emergence: Rethinking Scale’s Ontological Significance.” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 34 (2009): 464-474 73 begins to gradually emerge. A majority of the works were designs for private houses. The drawings that accompanied and facilitated the conversation between Minnette and her clients have some interesting similarities.

Across the board, Minnette seems to have employed one scale at which she made her representations. This was usually of an eighth of an inch to a linear foot. Though equally trained in the metric system, which was being used across the Indian sub-continent, especially with the advent of Modernism, she, interestingly, chose to employ the English system. Minnette does not herself explain this preferences when it comes to drawing styles, but it is possible that her choice of the scalar system may have been informed, in large part, by the audience for whom she was making these representations. Recently independent Sri Lankan clients might have preferred to keep with the structures of mensuration that they had grown up with during the Colonial rule. In this, Minnette shows her divergence from Le Corbusier, who for a similar client-base in India, still chose to adhere to the metric system. In fact, unlike Minnette, his drawings for Villa Sarabhai, in many cases, do not even make the scale explicit.

For example, in Figure 4.1, a sheet illustrating plans, elevations and sections for a proposed design for the Pieris, Minnette makes the scale and the information it conveys very explicit by placing it at a prominent location just under the title of the drawing. It is seemingly far more for the benefit of the client, as opposed to her own knowledge(s) and purpose.13 The drawing in question is a ‘formal’ drawing, in that, it seems to have been used for presentation purposes far more rather than as a mechanism for Minnette to think through her own thoughts. Often, the ‘sketch’ drawings are marked by an absence of the annotation of scale, though one would imagine, that over a period of time, many of them were automatically be drawn at that scale.

Corbusier’s drawings, on the other hand, when examined for issues of scale differ quite significantly from Minnette’s. For one, it is difficult to discern immediately the scale at which they are drawn. Second, in spite of the for whom Corbusier prepared these plans the scale is annotated in French, 13 Of interest here is the extract with which I begin this chapter, wherein Minnette assures her client of the development of the ‘plan’ in her mind, which throws up other issues of scale. Would an imagined drawing be automatically scaled since its very imagination is hinged upon its ‘drawing-ability’? 74 Figure 4.1: Drawings for House for Mr. Pieris, Colombo, 1952-1956 by Minnette de Silva. Image Source: De Silva, Minnette. The Life and Work of an Asian Woman Architect. Colombo: GEDSands, 1998.

Figure 4.2: Comparison of the annotation of scale in Minnette De Silva’s and Le Corbusier’s drawings. Image Source: Le Corbusier. Ahmedabad, 1953-1960 Le Corbusier. Paris: Fondation Le Corbusier, 1983 and : De Silva, Minnette. The Life and Work of an Asian Woman Architect. Colombo: GEDSands, 1998. 75 and marked more like a representative fraction (figure 4.2). This is particularly interesting as it is a considerably more mathematical form of putting the scale onto the sheet. Indeed, Corbusier’s employs a scale more common to engineers, and one which makes it seem more scientific rather than notational. He also follows a metric system which makes one wonder as to how the drawings would have been received by his clients in India who, much like Minnette’s clients, were used to the English system of measurement.

In terms of its mathematical implications, the drawings of both Minnette and Le Corbusier seem to have very similar proportional relationships to the imagined object on the ground. Both make, in cartographic terms, small-scale drawings, that is drawings which show a smaller area but in greater detail (Figure 4.3). Due to this, the question of the selection of that particular scale becomes more important. Usually plans for houses adopt the one-eighth scale, as a scale that allows for ‘sufficient’ detail to be shown without it going down to a micro-level. This scale can bebest understood as a meso-level scale, in which the materiality and other aspects of the proposed design can be illustrated comfortably. There appears some veracity to this claim when the drawings of the two architects are cross-referenced. Minnette attempts to portray all information in her drawings, and thus, walls are hatched differently from the roof, levels and level changes are made apparent. Le Corbusier, on the other hand, keeps this information to a minimum, choosing more pictorial aspects over informative aspects. For example, his drawings at the same scale could have chosen to show material hatches in the walls, but they instead show a dark fill indicative of “some” element. That this element is understood as a wall is dependent on the reader’s socialization into the world of architectural symbols, which for the most part is true for Minnette as well.

Scale in Le Corbusier’s drawings, especially those of sections and elevations, is also hinted at by the inclusion of human figures. The drawing of amorphous human beings is often a scaling device for architects, to allow ‘lay-people’ a method of understanding drawings, and the proportions implied in them. Thus, a human being drawn in the space suggested by the two walls and a vault (Figure 4.4), would make the reader assume that the room height is approximately twice the height

76 Figure 4.3: Use of fiigures v/s measurements as scaling devices in Minnette De Silva’s and Le Corbusier’s drawings. Image Source: Le Corbusier. Ahmedabad, 1953-1960 Le Corbusier. Paris: Fondation Le Corbusier, 1983 and : De Silva, Minnette. The Life and Work of an Asian Woman Architect. Colombo: GEDSands, 1998.

77 Figure 4.4: Comparison of the scale-based detail and composition in Minnette De Silva’s and Le Corbusier’s drawings. Image Source: Le Corbusier. Ahmedabad, 1953-1960 Le Corbusier. Paris: Fondation Le Corbusier, 1983 and : De Silva, Minnette. The Life and Work of an Asian Woman Architect. Colombo: GEDSands, 1998. 78 of the human being inscribed within. This is a suitably ambivalent method as the human being is in many respects a dimension-less human being, whose ‘true height’ is not really known to us, nor even matched to the particular client’s body type or physique. The drawn-human, and often Corbusier’s, modular human with eyes at a particular height, is a suggestive, pictorial gesture he makes towards the understanding of scale. Interestingly, such gestures are conspicuously absent from Minnette’s drawings. With the exception of the architectural elements and the annotated scale, there is actually no ‘marker ‘that would allow for reasonable assumptions about scale and measure in her drawings.

However, the true politics of the use of scale, in these instances, is determined by the attitude towards inclusion and exclusion. Sallie Marston argues that scale determines and is implicated in the social construction of spaces. In architecture, where this might even seem somewhat self- evident, the question can be changed to ask how scale is actually constructing the identity of the architect by setting up a system of hierarchies; that is, what is the role of scale in setting up taxonomies of inclusion and exclusion, of self and the other?

Firstly, it is important to recognize that scale is a distancing device. While the scale employed by both architects in their drawings, works to allow a degree of access into the real and imagined spaces of the drawing, their first act is to remove or place the user at a distance. Imagine here a model of an aircraft (or any such object) which serves to give us an idea of the ‘real’ object, but holds us at bay by setting our own body in a markedly different relationship with it, where we essentially are not granted access. Scaling of an architectural drawing works in a similar manner. Our bodies are implicated and extricated simultaneously in the comprehension of architectural drawings. At no point, as readers, can we physically experience the space of the drawing. This determines a forced externality to the idea which is represented as the drawing.

Secondly, and following from the above, the scale actually becomes a mechanism of control. Whereas the audience for the drawing is rendered passive, the active control resides in the hands of the authors. For them, the drawing has played itself out at many scales, within their imagination 79 and on paper. By choosing to use a particular scale, the architect has the authority to include and exclude information. It is a case of production in which the consumption is pre-determined and not changeable, thus often forcing the audience into having greater dependency on the architect to be able to comprehend the information with which they are being presented.

This control is then imperialist in nature, making clear demarcations between the idea-controlling active architect-self and the product-consuming passive audience. There is a hierarchy implied in this process, which, in Mitch Chapura’s words has as “its historical association with patriarchy and its connotation of a system of rigidly ordered ranks in which higher ranks control lesser ranks.”14

Dualities such as these often carry with them connotations of one being placed in a manner more superior to the other. The use of scale in both Minnette and Le Corbusier, as well as architects at large, implicitly set this structure in place, even as both unconsciously do render the use of the scale a little ambivalent by using other devices in their drawings that mitigate it. Yet, given the disciplinary identity which gets linked to the production of drawings as space, the scale, I will argue, has a very distinctive effect on producing their identity as architects.

4.4 Scale as a Device for Fixity

The architectural scale is possibly the most important tool allowing for architectural drawings to simulate a reality which does not really exist. Borrowing Jean Baudrillard’s term and understanding of the hyperreal – that which has no origin and implies a depth of meaning that does not actually exist, it is possible to interpret the work of scaling mechanisms in drawings as facilitating this phenomenon. In his discussion of the Beaubourg effect, Baudrillard cites Pompidou Center as a simulated embodiment of democratic culture, which actually works against itself, in its very content value. He deems it the cultural equivalent of the hypermarket due to its overt nature as a circulatory operator not only through the circulation systems of air, water, electricity, but most

14 Chapura, Mitch. “Scale, Causality, Complexity and Emergence: Rethinking Scale’s Ontological Significance.” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 34, no. 4 (Oct. 2009): 462-74. 80 importantly the masses. It is the masses which both attach and annihilate its meaning and structure. Though Baudrillard does not make this claim, it is implicit that much of what he discusses with regard to the Beaubourg effect is predicated on the poly-scalarity of the phenomenon.15

As I have discussed in the previous sections, the notion of poly-scalarity is often discussed and promoted by geographers to deconstruct the fixity or the frozen-ness of representational understanding.

In this sense the unitary scale deployed architectural drawings needs examining. A quick look at Minnette’s drawings shows that she has a proclivity to use a singular scale for drawings pertaining

to a similar project type i.e. most of her design proposals for residences have been drawn at the same scale. She is not alone in doing so, and is joined in this practice not only by Le Corbusier, but also many other architects at large. Figure 4.1- A House for Mr. W.I. Pieris designed by Minnette is a good example to determine her use of scale. The sheet has 6 drawings on it: two plans, two elevations and two sections. All the drawings are drawn at one-eighth scale. What is of note is that their composition alludes to the similarity of their scales, but not to their relationship to each other. For example, both elevations are placed above the plans on the sheet, but actually correspond to differently oriented facades, and thus could have just as easily been composed so as to correspond

to the same side on the plan as the façade that they portray.16 Similarly, the sections are stacked one atop the other on the right side of the sheet, and it is notations/ symbols such as the section line which alert us to their actual point of intersection with the plan. A smaller site plan sits almost unnoticed on the page and is constructed at a different scale. Through the scale-relationship between the other drawings, it is made evident that the small site plan is not of as much significance.

Le Corbusier adopts some of the same tactical moves, often, juxtaposing a plan with an elevation at the same scale. Due to the volume of the work and drawings that were produced by his atelier,

15 Baudrillard does discuss the various levels at which the Beaubourg effect permeates be it at that of the neighborhood, government, administrative officials, masses, etc. in Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation, The Body, in Theory. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994. 16 This would, however, detract from an orderly arrangement, necessitating a completely different manipulation of composition on the sheet. A move away from ‘order’ may seem to direct itself in the realm of ‘chaos’ which would have gone against the Modernist grain of the drawing. 81 drawings for the same plan exist as varying scales, but in the systematic progression of drawings these come at a much later stage.

The early presentation drawings provide the most grounds for an inquiry into the fixity of scale. While the same drawing might be produced at different scales depending on the need, the question, I raise here is with regard to the need to portray all parts of one drawing at the same scale. Thus, while making a plan-drawing for the first floor of a house, why does Minnette treat all elements with the same degree of importance by ensuring all the elements behave at exactly the same scale?

To explain this point further, let us return again to maps and cartography, where symbolic devices are often used to illustrate the importance of certain features over others, even if this means going counter to the otherwise systematic scale of the representation. For example, in some medieval maps the crest or symbol for a fort or clerical structure may be shown as significantly larger than the village it was situated in, even though, in terms of actual on-ground measurements it may have been much smaller. The same play of scales to highlight varying degrees of importance is hardly ever exercised in the drawings of modern architects. On the contrary, based on the particular biases of the author of the drawings (usually in line with larger level standards) the drawings exhibit a marked degree of ubiquity in terms of their own internal logic.

Additionally, architects often lament the inadequacy clients’ show in reading and comprehending drawings. The major complaint is that clients have difficulty reading drawings such as the plans. It might be reasonable, though, to assume that there would be a greater degree of interactivity and understanding of the elevation drawing, which would afford said client an immediate sense of what the ‘building would look like’. In light of this, the drawing of all architectural representations at the same scale without emphasizing (through scaling) any particular one which may be more communicative is an oddity. One explanation for this singularity is that for architects the “honesty” of the representation lies not so much in its potential experiential quality as much as it does in its own geometric relations. The scale of the plan is complimented by the same scale of the elevation, in which case, both are linked and worked together. By being at the same scale, each verifies the 82 validity of the other as their method of generation would seem to derive from the construction and subsequent projection of the other. In other words, a taxonomic and inter-related structure is implicitly set up within the set of drawings on the sheet. Within this structure (and based on Minnette’s statements as noted at the beginning of this chapter), the plan would have been the primary graphic to be drawn from which the elevations and sections would have been generated. However, the seeming linearity of the relationship between the elements though obfuscates the other complexities and vagaries of the generation of the drawings. These ‘vagaries’ are eventually dependent on the whim of the architect, though both the architect and the drawings work to deny this fact. The aim of the different orthographic projections, which co-relate through the use of scaling techniques, is to lay stake to the claim of the drawing being a pre-ordained objective truth.

The singularity of scale points to the politics of power inherent in the production of architectural representations. Arguments that align themselves with the necessity of poly-scalar understanding in the field of representation (of any kind of data) do so on the grounds that it cuts acrossa larger cross-section, incorporates more variables and narratives and are thus more inclusive in nature. Since space is inherently produced through socio-cultural and economic methods, the use of multiple scales facilitates a better understanding of the space. The use of a single scale within architectural drawings imagines a reality where all aspects and elements are rendered exactly the same. It is the imagination of a universal nature in which elements due to their exact sameness of scale are available for manipulation by the architect, who behaves as the puppeteer. The construction of this objective space has two implications. Firstly, it shapes the identity of the subject-as-author, in that the subject is outside of the processes of the construction of space, and thus is able to exercise a degree of control on them. Secondly, it also shapes the identity of the subject-as-audience, wherein the subject is actually reduced to one-dimensional entity, forced to experience space and life in the ‘real’ space of the drawing, in ways completely contrary to the experience of ‘actual spaces’. With the second condition, questions of temporality are also raised. In the creation and subsequent experience of the singular-scale drawings, time and experience gets fixed along an already ordained path by the architect. The uni-scaled drawing has no temporality 83 and is unlike our actual experiences of a space that do not happen in the absence of time. Take for example, a space which a person experiences as a child, a young adult and elderly person. The manner in which time changes our bodies also shapes our bodies’ scaled relationships. The same space changes its relative scale and resolution to become large, small, accessible or intractable. This lived relationship with scale is not made evident within architectural drawings. Architectural representations exercise a very strict control.

4.5 The Politics of Scale is the Politics of Identity

It is doubtful that there are any representations which in some manner or the other are not intrinsically scaled. Geographers such as Sallie Marston have already put forward the argument that the politics of scale are the politics of identity. The two go hand in hand. Architectural drawings certainly are predicated upon the employment of scale to facilitate their generation and their legibility. While there is this dependence on scale to be able to diagram or draw, it is also important to recognize the other aspects of scale. In this chapter, I have attempted to argue that scale facilitates for two phenomena – distancing and fixity. It distances by occluding the intended audience from being able to engage with it through their own faculties and experiences. The architect in essence creates an object which stands for knowledge and power that is possessed by the creator of the object, and can only be accessible to the reader in limited and already determined ways. In doing so, an automatic hierarchy is set into place which, on the one hand, places the architect/the idea/ the representation at a superior level while simultaneously placing, on the other hand, all that is external to it at an inferior level. Additionally, architectural representation in the form of a plan/section/elevation is a fixed and seemingly immutable phenomenon with regard to scale. It functions, in most cases, at a singular scale which gives equal emphasis to all of its components, in a manner so as to suggest the veracity of its being, and by extension, that of the architect.

Having reasonably established a connection between scale and architectural identity through the

84 use of scale and its own devices of distancing and fixity, it is important to state that the identity which is developed through the mechanisms is rendered masculine, in spite of the person’s specific sex.

The use of scale as inherent to drawings is an attempt towards objectivity, which within a scientific temperament is regarded as dichotomous to subjectivity. It is within a scientific understanding of the world, and more importantly, of one’s self that the image formed and projected of the world can be putatively viewed as being objective. Many feminists, including Catherine MacKinnon, have argued that the possessor of this distanced and objective view is often a masculine being.

The masculine gaze is the all seeing, dispassionate – yet hugely invested in the creation of the objective- gaze. The holder of this view is simultaneously collated with the holder of knowledge. Many theorists, especially following a Foucauldian paradigm, have argued with the immediate and palpable relationship between knowledge and power. As MacKinnon states, The posture scientific epistemology takes towards its world defines the basic epistemic question as a problem of the relation between knowledge –where knowledge is defined as a replication or reflection or copy of reality – and objective reality, defined as that world which exists independent of any knower or vantage point, independent of knowledge or the process of coming to know, and, in principle, knowable in the full (my emphasis).17

The architectural drawing is a device that proclaims knowing the world in all its varying facets by supposedly being able to make a replication of the world, and putting it down as a representation. The notion of complete and objective knowability is an extremely masculinist idea. It is a patriarchal notion which is based on notions of supremacy. Yet, the architectural representation is nothing but an extension of the architectural identity.

Thus, by corollary, it is architectural identity which is masculine, and uses scaling as a device to render architectural representations masculine.

17 MacKinnon, Catherine A. Towards a Feminist Theory of the State. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1989, 97. 85 text 5

“But what of the plans? Because the plan is a drawing, with lines and angles subject to continuous variation, the first guess would be that is technically a sketch. But on the plan are measurements in words and figures. This suggests we have here a combination of sketch and script. But I think this again is wrong... … An architectural plan counts as a digital diagram and as a score.”1

In the years following the gradual demise of modernism, architecture turned its focus onto other fields from which to draw inspiration. The attempt to re-impregnate the field with “meaning” brought about a turn to disciplines as diverse as literary theory, structuralism, and post-structuralism. While architectural theory picked at the skeleton of modernism, architectural practice re-invented the act of building by looking at it through semantic lenses. This movement took root and played- out for many years.2 My focus in this chapter is not outlining this exchange between text and architecture as building. What concerns me here is the politics of annotations within architectural representation in the (re) production of architects and architecture as a masculine gendered discipline and subjectivity respectively.

Drawings, as has been noted repeatedly, are a composite of (for the major part) graphic information and (for the minor part) linguistic information.3 The latter is an important constituent of representation in architecture, but is hardly ever discussed. Text or annotation, as it is more commonly referred to, is an act of labeling to which most architects during the modern era did not attach much significance. It is a minimal amount of linguistic information that is to be put on architectural representations to describe the artifact. Thus, a plan drawing is labeled ‘plan’ in some

1 Goodman, Nelson. Languages of Art : An Approach to a Theory of Symbols. Indianapolis; New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1968. Pg. 218-219 2 For a better discussion of the post-modernist movement, see Jencks, Charles. Post-Modernism. New York: Rizzoli, 1988. 3 Goodman, Nelson. Languages of Art : An Approach to a Theory of Symbols. Indianapolis; New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1968. Pgs.218-224. 86 unobtrusive corner of the sheet and under the graphic representation itself. What this chapter points out is that the act of annotating is not as innocuous as it is made to seem. Yet before doing so and given the multitudinous avenues such an investigation can take, the drawing itself as text so on and so forth, I would like to delineate the specific kinds of texts or annotations that I am interested in.

My primary concerns lies mainly with the “linguistic” text found in/on presentation drawings made by architects. These texts, as we shall see, work to primarily “label” spaces and such within architectural drawings. To these kinds of texts I ask the following questions: what role did labeling play in such an enterprise? Was it merely an act carried out after the act of drawing, and thus, superimposed as a figurative and literal (pun intended) layer on the drawing?

A secondary concern of this chapter lies on/in the kinds of linguistic texts that are often found in the form of extensive notes and communications jotted-down on the drawing, as an act carried out simultaneously during discussions with client. In this sense, the drawings tend to take on the role of a diary, where ideas and debates are explored between the two discussant parties. This text serves as record of new thoughts that might have come up and other issues that might need incorporation into the design-construction process. Here, drawings serve as a large, and some ways, even limitless, expanse upon which to think-out ideas in a linguistic form. Needless to say, this text is extremely important, as it offers scope for both a denotative and connotative reading of the architect’s ideas, and by extension, even identity and personality. This phenomenon forms the secondary focus. To these texts, this chapter asks the following questions: through what methods/means is the act of annotating and texting a political act, which give us an insight into the construction of the (gendered) identity of the architect?

In both these cases the chapter also develops its arguments through an analysis of presentation drawings prepared by Minnette de Silva and Le Corbusier. There is good reason for such focus on presentation drawings. Firstly, they, as is known, work as the primary media through which architects project their “plans” and “designs” to a larger audience, becoming venues where the politics of architects self-image play out. Secondly, as these are also the primary documents through 87 which they purportedly “communicate” with clients, it affords a singularly productive avenue in which to understand the gendering of the architect vis-à-vis the “public at large.”

5.1 Contextualizing the Question

That we exist through language is an important assertion that has been made repeatedly in the discipline of Phenomenology by philosophers such as Martin Heidegger. Taking a very simplistic and possibly even reductivist, view of language, one understands it as a means to communicate.

This aspect of language, communication and our dependence (if not existence) on it, is made apparent by Minnette. Writing and communicating plays an enormous role in her life, arguably due to her unique circumstances of being in a position of double marginality; a South-Asian woman as well as a woman architect.

Minnette wrote her autobiography towards the end of her life. In some ways, this tome seems to have been of immense personal significance to her, and as a repository of her thoughts continues to be very informative even now. Thus before discussing her drawings directly, it is perhaps worthwhile to detour to this work in order to first gain a sense of her through her self-representation.

As a story, the book runs in the form of a chronicle i.e. events (with descriptions) are listed in a chronological order. The plot or narrative that links all of them becomes apparent only upon traversing the course of the book. Structurally, the book is divided into events which are explained both graphically through photographs and linguistically through accompanying descriptions. A significant event that happens midway through the book is Minnette’s return to India to practice architecture. From this point on, a majority of the graphics accompanying the text, are actually architectural drawings. These are often intermingled with photographs, not just of the works, but also of significant events in Minnette’s life. Perhaps, one of the most remarkable facets of book is the juxtaposition of her own work with sketches, letters, and photographs of works from Le Corbusier. Nothing is written about the nature of the relationship between the two beyond their 88 very first meeting in Paris. Interestingly, much of the text or written matter in this section is not a description of projects or design proposals in the strictest sense. Instead, Minnette narrates stories about the client and her responses to them, or other such ‘anecdotal’ tales. In many ways, the book makes Minnette appear a story-teller. This is also reflected in her drawings , where text is not merely a technical instrument .Indeed, her drawings, published in the book as representations of herself, often tended to be text-heavy. Her employment of the written language is at par with her graphical demarcations.

The point that I would like make, to highlight the importance of text in Minnette’s life, is that she writes an autobiography, as the only written published record of her ideas and personality. In comparison to other modernists, who often wrote ideologies or manifestoes to spout their ideas, Minnette changes the nature of discourse for herself. Take, for example, Le Corbusier, a Modernist whose presence looms large over Minnette, who wrote several books which in some manner or the other, promoted the Architectural Modern Movement. His ‘Towards a New Architecture’ is an example of one such book, which illustrates his espousal of science, technology and architecture. Implicit in such a book is the desire to expound upon the objective, and thus, supreme and transcendent nature of Architecture. Minnette’s writings, on the other hand, are far more ambivalent. They have instances which demonstrate her belief in the ideals other than those propagated by Le Corbusier and other modernists. Yet at the same time, like other Modernist architects there is also a lot of affirmation of her subjectivity and her experiences. In this sense, there a tension in her book, where her subjectivity which she (ultimately) is discussing sits at odds with the objective way in which she wants to ‘display’ it. This is apparent in her use of visuals such as photographs, pamphlets, brochures, and cards which work as ‘objective’ devices that record her life and serve as “evidence” to her. The writing, then, is far softer and far more ambivalent. It allows for Minnette- the person/the woman/the architect/the South-Asian/ or the Post-colonial subject to emerge (see Figure 5.1). Her writing of herself if far more involved. It does not depend on the use of graphics to simultaneously explain and work as structure that distances the reader. It is evocative without being explicitly so. 89 Figure 5.1: A page in Minnette de Silva’s autobiography illustrating the importance of visuality to her. Image Source: De Silva, Min- nette. The Life and Work of an Asian Woman Architect. Colombo: GEDSands, 1998.

90 Figure 5.2: An initial page in Minnette de Silva’s autobiography showing the Sinhala script. Image Source: De Silva, Minnette. The Life and Work of an Asian Woman Architect. Colombo: GEDSands, 1998.

91 Minnette’s relationship with text or linguistic devices is interesting and complicated. The text works in a subjective manner for her. Her drawings rely substantially on text. Keeping this is mind, it is not surprising that one of the first few pages of her autobiography illustrates a chart marking the development of the Sinhalese Script (see Figure 5.2) .Much of her work, whether the autobiography or the architectural drawings, seems to implicitly encourage a reading between the lines, thus, establishing the layered nature of her work, and arguably, her identity.

Before undertaking a close reading of the significance of annotating on her drawings in particular, and the implications for drawings in general, it is important to establish a rather basic understanding of the relationship between text and image.

5.2 The Act of Writing

The act of writing and/or scholarship has traditionally been recognized as a process which affords to a few, a measure of privilege and exclusivity. Before the advent of printing and the public school system, writing and reading was largely the domain of priests-scholars and often of royalty. Writing is a form of representation that also has a markedly visual nature. Its dissemination has had a large influence on society. For example, Juhaani Pallasma critiques the visual bias of modern society (understood as a society formulated in the Renaissance period) by arguing that the nature of society transformed from one which depended on oral narratives to a one which had access to literature, and thus, used its visual sense more. The popularization of the act of writing (and by corollary) the act of reading has had a definite impact on how we approach the world. On the one hand, there can be arguments made in its favor which would center on issues of democratization, and on the other hand, it could be construed (as in traditional settings) as a method of wielding power. This dichotomy will be explored in the act of annotation in architectural drawings.

To understand such annotations, I invoke aspects of literary structuralism which was at its peak during the 1960s, following the works of Ferdinand de Saussure. Terry Eagleton explains that 92 according to Saussure language is a system of signs, which needed to be approached synchronically i.e. as a complete system at a given point of time. A sign is composed of the signifier ( a sound- image or graphic equivalent) and a signified ( meaning).The relationship between the two is arbitrary. Thus, The three black marks c-a-t are a signifier which evoke the signified ‘cat’ in an English mind. The relationship between the signifier and the signified is an arbitrary one, There is no inherent reason why these three marks should mean ‘cat’, other than cultural and historical convention (my emphasis)… The relation between the whole sign and what it refers to (what Saussure calls the referent, the real furry four-legged creature) is therefore also arbitrary.4

The system of signifier-signified also works through a process of negation. C-a-t is a cat because it is not b-a-t or h-a-t or v-a-t leading to endless affirmations and negations. If we examine some (for there are an infinite number) of such relationships between architectural drawings, we can discern several signifier-signified relationships at play. The most obvious is the drawing as a signifier for a signified space, or as a signifier for a signified idea, or even as a signifier for the architect. How does this structure effect the annotations on an architectural drawing? For example, how does the word ‘bedroom’ when marked on a sheet, respond to these structural categories? The easiest explanation would be that the text ‘bedroom’ is a signifier that corresponds to the space demarcated on the drawing to invoke the signified of a space for sleeping in. Yet nothing about either the signifier or the actual marking (as the space drawn on the sheet) in reality tells us anything about the act or space of sleeping. The process of understanding a set of 8 parallel and perpendicular lines as holding the meaning “a space for sleeping” only happens through socialization.

Furthermore, the annotation’s meaning is even more complex than the somewhat simplified explanation provided here, for text not only “point” or “index” literally but also metaphorically. Roman Jakobson’s thesis about ‘metaphor’ and ‘metonym’, is especially insightful in this regard. Eagleton states, “In metaphor a sign is substituted for another because it is somehow similar to it: ‘passion’ becomes ‘flame’. In metonymy, one sign isassociated with another: ‘wing’ is associated

4 Eagleton, Terry. Literary Theory: An Introduction. 2nd ed. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. Pg. 84. 93 with ‘aircraft’ because it is a part of it, ‘sky’ with ‘aircraft’ because of physical contiguity.”5

How do metaphors work within architectural drawings to describe space? Again, using our example of the mark ‘bedroom’, how does that word come to stand in for or substitute the reading of space? The text placed within an actual enclosed space, works to give that space meaning in spite of there being no perceivable similarity between the graphic and linguistic information. Yet by their very juxtaposition, they come to be substituted for each other. In other words, the text ‘bedroom’ is the drawing ‘bedroom’ both of which are substitutes for the imagined space of the bedroom.

A somewhat different way to think about metaphors is provided by the anthropologist James

Fernandez who notes that “metaphor (and metonym) is defined [here] as the predication of a sign-

image upon any of the set of inchoate pronouns – the essential social subjects.”6 He illustrates the manner in which identity, especially at younger stages of life, is determined through metaphoric experience and expression. Fernandez focuses his attention on the taking on of animal-metaphors through games (as rituals) within children which help to shape their subjectivities. He does not limit his argument to children, and puts forward a compelling case wherein adult humans have also been, in traditional (and contemporary) environment, involved in this primordial metaphoric process. He makes a distinction between structural metaphors which confirm to the shape of experience and textual metaphors which confirm to the feeling of experience.

Fernandez’s arguments about metaphors allows us to link architectural drawings to the subjectivity of architects in an innovative way. Naturally, architectural drawings do not make use of animal- metaphors. However, the use of metaphor is a method to ground the objectivity of the drawing. The act of imbuing the drawing with the metaphor of objectivity through various means, then, allows us to draw connections between the act of representation and the act of identity-creation.

Lastly, I turn to Jacques Derrida to investigate the need for this linguistic marking on architectural

5 Ibid., 86. 6 Fernandez, James, John Blacking, Alan Dundes, Munro S. Edmonson, K. Peter Etzkorn, George G. Haydu, Michael Kearney, Alice B. Kehoe, Franklin Loveland, William C. McCormack, Daniel N. Maltz, Michel Panoff, Richard J. Preston, Charles K. Warriner, Roger W. Wescott, and Andras Zakar. “The Mission of Metaphor in Expressive Culture [and Comments and Reply].” Current Anthropology 15, no. 2 (1974): 119-45. 94 drawings which already possess a graphical mode of informing. Derrida states, If men write it is: (1) because they have to communicate; (2) because what they have to communicate is their “thought,” and their “ideas,” their representations. Thought as representation, precedes and governs communication, which transports the “idea,” the signified content; because men are already in a state which allows them to communicate their thought to themselves and to each other when, in a continuous manner they invent the particular means of communication, writing.7

It is through the act of writing that wo/men feel they have and can communicate their ideas and thoughts. This has a huge implication in terms of architectural drawings such as plans, sections or elevations, whose graphic nature can often seem incomprehensible to people not trained to read them. The act of annotating takes on an important dimension due to its political nature, where it can be placed so as to communicate-and-involve or state-and-distance.

This kind of ‘depiction’ and ‘description’ in the form of labels participate in the formation and characterization of the world, according to art-historian Nelson Goodman. Labels can be both pictorial and verbal. They are guided by the system within which they operate. “The properties required for a notational system are unambiguity and syntactic and semantic disjointedness and differentiation.”8

The dialectic between annotating and depicting becomes apparent in the drawing-works of Minnette, wherein she uses text as an important layer. In contrast, Le Corbusier’s drawings have an entirely different relationship with this kind of depiction.

5.3 Pictorial/Literal Representation

A study of Minnette de Silva’s drawings shows an interesting relationship between the author and the manner in which she uses text. In the mostly monochromatic rendering of her drawings of plans and sections (and to some degree elevations), three types of text are apparent. Firstly those texts

7 Derrida, Jacques. “Signature Event Context.” In Limited Inc. . Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1988. Pg. 4. 8 Goodman, Nelson. Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols. Indianapolis ; New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1968. Pg. 156. 95 that work as labels for the space illustrated such as ‘bedroom,’ ‘living room,’ ‘kitchen,’ and ‘car port,’ etc’ which replace conventional furniture layouts ( I use this term broadly to designate all the non-architectural elements which are often drawn on plans to suggest their purported function). The second type of text is that which gives the technical aspects of the drawing, often words like ‘scale,’ ‘plan,’ sheet title, project name etc. The third and last category of text is the information set which is more particular to the author in that it lists information such as the author’s name or signature, designation, address etc. The three categories or groupings that I employ are to a large extent categories based upon the information commonly found on a majority of architectural drawings. In their generic sense, they are not particular to Minnette and most (if not all) of these information-types can be found on many Modernist drawings. It is worth noting here that a similar examination of Beaux Art style drawings does not yield the same effect and information. In the latter, there is minimal annotation to be found, thus, reiterating the important need for studying annotational practices during the Modernist period.

Labels (for space)

In order to explain the importance of text in Minnette’s drawings, I return to Le Corbusier’s drawing for the Villa Sarabhai. Whether in the initial presentation drawings or subsequent iterations of the plans, function or functionality is called out with the use of plan-representations of furniture. For example, Figure 5.3, shows two plans for the house at different points of time in which elements like couches, tables, and chairs have been added. In the first one, the reader (assuming that one can do this as the reader) is encouraged to understand space and one’s movement through it by a sequence of events suggested by furniture. Thus, a ‘car’ parked at the center of the plan, at what might be a focal point on the sheet (if not in reality) suggests that the connoted space functions as a car-port, from which the reader/the projected inhabitant of the actual space is led into a ‘living room’ of sorts. Note the central ‘couch’ along one wall with a ‘table’ in front of it. More ‘chairs’ lie skillfully scattered around the room. From this space, one progresses to a ‘dining room’ as might be reasonably assumed from an L-shaped table with seating arranged around it in an orderly fashion.

96 Figure 5.3: The use of graphic metaphoric information to denote/connote space in the drawings for Villa Sarabhai, Ahmedabad, 1955 by Le Corbusier. Image Source: Le Corbusier. Ahmedabad, 1953-1960 Le Corbusier. Paris: Fondation Le Corbusier, 1983 97 As intelligent readers we think of this as the ‘dining’ not a ‘conference room because we are already aware of the fact that this is a (plan for) house. Should for some reason, this truism escape us, a title on the left side of the sheet intimates us to the being of the drawing. The ‘dining’ room connects us to another space, which is slightly ambivalent in that multiple functions are suggested. A ‘desk’ with a ‘chair’ towards the north end suggests a place of study, but ‘seating’ and a ‘(day) bed’ is present as well. Perhaps, it is a space more private and intimate in nature? In this manner, a reading can be made of the entire plan, which is not particularly different from reading a map. Routes are traced based on icons upon which spaces are understood from an architectural point of view.

Armed with such an analysis let us turn to Minnette’s drawings. Significantly, furniture layouts are absent in her drawings. However, their absence, and subsequent replacement, with the same information relayed textually, is powerful (in terms of its presence) and captivating. Labels instead of “furniture” elements convey spaces (figure 5.4, 5.5 and 5.6). They are placed centrally to the space depicted, and stand out from their immediate surroundings on the sheet. The labels form the focal point of the space that they are supposed to represent. The only exception to this practice of labeling is seen consistently in Minnette’s rendering of bathrooms. They are almost never labeled (from what can be discerned through drawings she publishes in her book), and are the only spaces where she actually puts in elements like a Water closet or a basin, and hatches the floor to depict tiles. Thus, with the exception of bathrooms, the only way to read her plans and even sections is through the text. In fact, it is actually interesting to look at the attention Minnette pays to labeling spaces in section as well. The drawings that we have been looking at probably belong to a presentation set, where the text is placed neatly in capital letters. If we look at other instances of drawings, where Minnette seems to have used the drawing more as a record to note down and explain ideas, one can still see the need to write over the drawings. For example, in figure 5.5, which is a rougher section-drawing, one can see a car as the only furniture shown, but the spaces which could easily have had furniture in elevation, have been named.

98 Figure 5.4: Plan drawing for Mrs. D. Wickremasinghe Flats, Colombo, 1954 by Minnette de Silva. Image Source: De Silva, Minnette. The Life and Work of an Asian Woman Architect. Colombo: GEDSands, 1998.

Figure 5.5: Drawings for Mrs. N De Saram House, Colombo, 1956-57 by Minnette de Silva. Image Source: De Silva, Minnette. The Life and Work of an Asian Woman Architect. Colombo: GEDSands, 1998. 99 Figure 5.5: Drawings for ‘House for a Businessman’, Nawala, Colombo, 1954 by Minnette de Silva. Image Source: De Silva, Minnette. The Life and Work of an Asian Woman Architect. Colombo: GEDSands, 1998. 100 Unlike many architectural drawings, where annotations are one of the last articles of information to be placed on the sheet, Minnette’s drawings show deep imbrication between the linguistic and graphic markings. And the absence of either one would render the drawing illegible. Without the corresponding labels, it is impossible to gauge the meaning of all the spaces depicted in the drawing. Does annotation, or for that matter, the pictorial elements, actually work to add meaning to information, which would have been in their absence, just a collection of ‘lines and angles’ (in Goodman’s terms)? What is the relationship between the graphic content and the linguistic content?

Explaining the connection between a newspaper photograph and the corresponding text (as the article, caption or headline) the linguist Roland Barthes notes that the linguistic structure of the text and the graphic structure of the photograph are concurrent and communicate with each other

to form a message.9 In spite of their heterogeneous nature, they share contiguous space. All works have a denoted and a connoted aspect through which they function as an analogon. Connotation in the photograph is achieved through strategies such as trick effects, poses, objects, photogeny, aestheticism, and syntax which are employed at a graphic level. At a linguistic level, text is called upon to play the same role.

In talking of the role of text with respect to the image, Barthes describes the former, firstly, as being of a parasitical nature where it is intended through invoking secondary signifieds to give meaning to the image. Secondly, the reduction of distance between the words and the image increases its connotation, by increasing its putative objective-value. This distance is both literal and metaphorical. Thirdly, text amplifies the connotations being made by the image. 10Thus, if a photograph shows a bright sunny house with a driveway leading up to it, and a few trees on the side, with a caption under it stating ‘A Place you can call Home’ immediate connotations are drawn up on the societal value of living in such homes, and the image of the home as being a sunny and bright place.

9 Barthes, Roland. The Responsibility of Forms : Critical Essays on Music, Art, and Representation. 1st ed. New York: Hill and Wang, 1985. 10 Ibid, 23. 101 Barthes illustrates the nature of the relationship of text and image using the Panzani advertisement as an example. The Panzani advertisement is a still image which shows “pasta in packages, a can, a bag, tomatoes, onions, peppers, a mushroom, everything coming out of a half open string bag, printed in yellow and greens on a red background.”11 The careful crafting of the image is to lead the user to believe that putting together pasta is both a natural and a quick exercise, but not one which is reminiscent of TV dinners and canned food. Certain signs embedded in the poster suggest this, the half-open bag reminiscent of a leisurely shopping trip, the contents spilling out. Other signs work at a more subtly level. The color scheme of the ad is suggestive of the colors of the Italy. One of the greatest supporters of this ‘Italian’ aspect of the advertisement, is the name of the pasta- brand itself. Though a product of France, the name itself is supposed to suggest the “Italianicity” of the pasta through an assonant structure. 12 All labels and captions are in French which allows any reader with a working knowledge of the language to tap into the meanings asserted.

Through a reading of the image, Barthes argues that the function of the linguistic message is to anchor and relay the meaning of the graphic message. This allows for an ontological grounding of the image. It is afforded meaning, stability and objectivity, since its suggestions or connotations are corroborated by the text. In the absence of the text, the image might be lost in an endless sea of signs.

Following Barthes one can argue that the naming of space on architectural drawings achieves two goals. Firstly, it anchors or grounds the graphical content by validating it. This process of validation allows a person who is not the architect to be able to comprehend the space. Text provides a way to do so. Secondly, it also anchors the identity of the architect, because through the act of comprehension of spaces, his or her ideas are grounded and take on a tangible form that is accessible to others. In light of this, the different positions taken by Minnette and Le Corbusier become more complex and interesting. Keeping in mind that Minnette was perhaps the first woman-architect working in Sri Lanka, it would have been of utmost importance to her, both to be able to reach out to the client

11 Ibid., 25. 12 Ibid., 23. 102 and to be able to establish her own identity as the architect. Being trained as a modernist the plan, section, elevation language of architectural discipline and representation were central to her and I hardly question that Minnette truly believed in these tools for their value in objectively translating an idea. On the other hand, it is also reasonable to assume that they may not have served quite as well as tools of communication when interacting with her Sri Lankan clients. Indeed, for the first 20 years of her practice, most of her projects were of a residential nature, during which she must have needed to interact quite closely with the clients. Given not only her natural proclivity towards writing (Minnette was an incessant recorder of events, keeping diaries akin to schedules), but a quick recognition of her own clientele, may have sub-consciously encouraged her to “write” space over “pictorially” depicting it.

Comparatively when we look at furniture layouts such as those drawn by Le Corbusier, one has to acknowledge the difficulty a person (without an architectural training) would face in reconciling small squares with chairs or couches, and rectangles with tables. Our experience of furniture is not one where we view such things aerially. To decipher these graphic marks as house-hold elements can be a substantially daunting task, which immediately distances the viewer from the material to be read. Thus, as much as this method grants access, it also denies access, by controlling the knowledge of what is depicted. Implicit in this is a struggle for power between the author and the receiver.

To some extent, Minnette’s use of text ameliorates this struggle for power. It is more inclusive, and the reading of text can happen in a more ‘normal’ fashion. It allows for the reader to participate in the reading and perhaps, imagining of space. The use of text as opposed to furniture layouts also hints at a lesser degree of control and authority in determining how the client would use the space. The text is suggestive, but suitably ambivalent at the same time. It is flexible enough to change as per the client’s wishes to inhabit the house. After all, there is nothing in actuality which calls out that ‘I am a bedroom’. Le Corbusier’s “style”, in comparison, is infinitely more authoritarian. Not only is the ‘function’ of the space suggested, but the manner in which this function unfold is also

103 pre-determined. Notice again, the carefully strewn chairs and the organized couch: conversations and interactions in this space are meant to traverse between relaxed and structured conversations in the bourgeoisie living room.

There are, thus, varying degrees in which the two architects use markers to annotate their drawings. The differences between the two are evocative of the power struggles that they establish through their drawings with their intended audience. Whereas Le Corbusier takes a masculine and unilateral approach, much on the lines of the Gesamtkunstwerk, Minnette’s response is far more contextual and mediated through the particular circumstances of her own subjectivity. There is, however, a caveat that I would like to insert here. In spite of their different responses to the act of annotation, both architects are united in the language(s) they use for annotation, and its contextual appropriateness. All of Le Corbusier’s annotations (including information like scale, orientation, and sheet) are in French. This is surprising given that the proposal is for a house in India for an Indian client, who with all likelihood may not have spoken the language. In some ways, he sticks with his native (and only) language, but he uses it to create a distance between himself and the client. Minnette too uses English--a colonial language--to write on her drawings. There is no instance of her using a Sinhalese script, though she might have known it. This is especially ironic as she begins her autobiography with a chart showing the evolution of the Sinhalese script. Thus, in spite of some sense of national pride, she chose a foreign language for her communication. The issue most deeply embedded in this move is the act of viewing English language as being capable of objectivity and universality. Though inadvertent, in the theme of distancing is again broached and established through her depictive structures.

5.4 The ‘other’ Information

Apart from the labeling of spaces, text also appears on architectural representation as information which is supportive of, and subservient to that of design-annotation. Names of the drawings, titles,

104 Figure 5.7: Drawings for House for Mr. Pieris, Colombo, 1952-1956 by Minnette de Silva. Image Source: De Silva, Minnette. The Life and Work of an Asian Woman Architect. Colombo: GEDSands, 1998.

Figure 5.8: Drawings for Villa Sarabhai, Ahmedabad, 1955 by Le Corbusier. Image Source: Le Corbusier. Ahmedabad, 1953-1960 Le Corbusier. Paris: Fondation Le Corbusier, 1983 105 scales, orientation, and even information about the architect can be included in this category. Manifestly, the purpose this “text” is to orient the reader in the direction of proper comprehension of the drawing. In this system, then, drawings on the sheet will have text under each graphical system, denoting the ‘type’ of drawing it is.

Compare again a drawing made by Minnette and a similar one made by Le Corbusier (Figure 5.7 and 5.8). The one by Minnette is a proposal for a house for a Mr. W.I.Pieris and has on it (as mentioned in the previous chapter) sections, elevations, floor plans, and a site plan. In all of Le Corbusier’s

drawings for Villa Sarabhai, there is no drawing sheet which collates as many graphical notation13

With both architects, a title has been placed under each drawing on the sheet: elevation-drawings (for example) are labeled ‘elevation’ and further categorized by the corresponding orientation of the façade. As with the naming of spaces, the use of a title under the graphic, works in tandem with the image. It serves the purpose of anchoring it as being objective information. The naming of the drawing validates the identity of the drawing, without which it might be information that gets lost amidst all the perceptions and signs we deal with on a daily basis. In describing propaganda maps, geographer John Pickles begins a process of trying to understand such maps as a message containing both graphical and linguistic systems. Speaking specifically about the text on such maps, and following Barthes, he claims that the caption, “reinterprets the maps and points us to specific or specified meanings; the caption circumscribes our reading of14 themaps.” Titles are meant to guide our experience and comprehension of the map, and portray the information depicted (which might be construed to be of a very random nature) as the information that is sought. Putting it in a slightly different manner, the drawing of the elevation here corresponds to an elevation that does not actually exist, but is imagined or projected to exist. By virtue of naming it ‘garden elevation’ or ‘ north elevation’ or any such name, a temporal and physical distance between the two is collapsed. It is interesting to note that in many of the more formal drawings that Minnette produces the complete drawing-sheet itself is named “A House (or similar project

13 All drawings are different from the cover drawing which is the only one which does not give a title individually to the plan and elevation 14 Pickles, John. “Text, Hermeneutics and Propaganda Maps.” In Writing Worlds: Discourse, Text and Metaphor in the Representation of Landscape, edited by Trevor J. and James Duncan Barnes. London, New York: Routledge, 1992. Pg.221. 106 type) for Mr. W.I. Pieris (or other client)”. The drawing is not named as ‘a drawing for a house for

a client”, instead, the drawing is the house.15 The (title) ‘Ground Floor Plan’ creates a physical and linguistic mark which corroborates the existence of not just the plan that has been drawn, but of the plan of the house (that will be) and the intent of the architect to be able to draw the idea as the plan or the plan of the idea.16 In this sense, the title and the drawing share a relationship where the two become inextricably bound to validate each other. The title acts as a signifier for the signified drawing while the drawing works as a signifier for the signified title. The form of one contains the concept of the other to form a closed sign-system. In the absence of either, the sign would fail to work as intended by the architect. As with any sign, multiple interpretations are possible, but in the case of the titling of drawings, this association is curtailed. Thus, the true value of the sign lies not so much in its readability by the other (though there is dependence on this) but on its ability to be able to furnish the architect’s claims. This brings up issues of accessibility and authority. The architect exercises control by limiting the margins of exploration. Why would this controlling be necessary?

In as much as the drawing is a work of the author, it is also marked by the absence of that very author. Absence as an issue is imminent in all literary works according to Derrida. He states, “[e]very sign, whether in the “language of action” or in articulated language (before even the intervention of writing in the classical sense), presupposes a certain absence (to be determined), the absence within the particular field of writing will have to be of an original type”17. The absence he refers to included both the absence of the addressee and the author whose ‘representation’ supplants the presence. Through the act of placing titles, the author-architect compensates for the absence of many things, some of which are circumstantial and some beneficial in their absence. The client is imagined as absent in this process, hence the architect is the originator for the title which has to be passively received by the audience. Moreover, the method of labeling or putting titles is also a safe-guard towards the meaning of the drawing being grasped in the absence of the

15 Chatterjee, Jaideep. “ The Gift of Design: Architecture-Culture in Postcolonial India”, PhD. Diss.:Cornell University, 2011, Pg.116. 16 Ibid., 117. 17 Derrida, Jacques. “Signature Event Context.” In Limited Inc. . Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1988.Pg. 7. 107 Figure 5.9: Minnette de Silva’s signature on a drawing for Ivor Fernando Flats, Colombo, 1956 by Minnette de Silva. Image Source: De Silva, Minnette. The Life and Work of an Asian Woman Architect. Colombo: GEDSands, 1998. 108 author. This might be its greater role.

Signatures on the drawing sheet work much in the same way. Like artists, architects have taken to signing their drawings. The act of signing may be attributed to legal issues and the need to be responsible for the work assumed. However, it needs also to be understood as an act of singular authorship. The signing of a drawing marks its possession. This possession is not just of the drawing though and is also equally the proprietorship of the idea. In its entirety, signing a document is taking control of it. Let us examine the role naming (of themselves) plays in Minnette’s and Le Corbusier’s drawings.

If we compare a selection of drawings by Minnette, she tends to sign her name on the lower right corner, with her title (architect) and credential A.R.I.B.A (Architect of the Royal Institute of

British Architects). 18At times her address may accompany this information, but it is not always the case. Minnette does not employ any stamp, logo or other insignia to foreground her own identity on each one of her drawings.

Le Corbusier, on the other hand, has a standard logo which he employs in each instance. The acronym of his atelier is often stated clearly and boldly on the sheets, under which all other information, such as the date of production, the scale, even legends to read the plan or other drawings, follows. His name, or more precisely the pseudonym, that he adopted does not show up

anywhere.19

The method of naming allows clues to the personalities of both architects as they are made manifest through representation. While Minnette abstains from naming her practice as the front from which she operates, and instead projects her own personality as a woman (the name Minnette will automatically suggest somebody of the female gender), Corbusier is in some way, more secure with his own identity, and can allow three marks in the forms of letters to encapsulate all that he stands for. These three letters (AMS) stand for the name of his atelier.

18 This task is made difficult because often the drawings published in her autobiography are edited. Thus, the sheet in its entirety is not shown. 19 Le Corbusier is the pseudonym Charles-Édouard Jeanneret adopted in the late 1920s. 109 What this suggests is that he seems to treat himself as a far more potent, and readily understood, brand than Minnette can even imagine. What is also noteworthy is that even when Minnette does buttress her name with that of her firm (Studio of Modern Architecture), it is usually her name which is her first line of projection, façade and defense; thus suggesting a desire, and probably a pressing need, to validate not only her identity and achievement as an architect, but as a woman architect. In fact such a nuancing of naming, and consequently an acknowledgement of her own heterogeneity is even present in the very title of her biography The Life and Work of an Asian Woman Architect. Indeed, there is, in every instance of signing, an indelible stamping and validating of her experience as a woman-architect. Finally there is another issue to be noted here. As Minnette worked out of her own house even when she does mention her firms address it always creates connotations of her own rootedness with her house and family (In fact, she begins her own writing in her book with a section on her house).

A different appropriation of power and authoritarianism can be gauged from the two architects branding practices. For Le Corbusier, it is an understood, matter-of-fact issue where he does not feel the need to prove himself and the ‘objective’ name is enough to proclaim his subjectivity. For Minnette, the naming is a struggle for power. She tries hard to establish her own identity.

Elaborating on the practice of such practices of signing oneself, Derrida notes, A written signature implies the actual or empirical nonpresence of the signer. But, it will be claimed, the signature also marks and retains his having been in present in a past now or present [maintenant] which will remain a future now or present [maintenant], thus is a general maintenant, in the transcendental form of presentness [mainennance]. That general maintenance is in some way inscribed, pinpointed in the always evident and singular present punctuality of the form of the signature… In order for the tethering to the source [my emphasis] to occur, what must be retained is the absolute singularity of a signature- event and a signature-form: the pure reproducibility of a pure event.20

In other words, what the purpose of the signature is, Derrida argues, is to make present the absence of the person signing. However this making-present, though, perpetuates and fixes the presence of the author in the object so authored, thus, anchoring it to the object. In one way, it is a temporal-

20 Derrida, Jacques. “Signature Event Context.” In Limited Inc. . Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1988.Pg. 20. 110 mechanism which projects the past-brought-to-the-present into the future-brought-to-the-present. The movement which is suggested by this, is in fact, what establishes the linearity of time. And once the moment time is established as linear, it can be transcended. Thus, the act of signing renders the author both omnipresent (present at all times) and omnipotent as his/her presence exceeds the temporalities of the receiver and of time itself.

This dialectic captures the true power and masculinity of the act of signing within architectural drawings. While power is mediated differently by Minnette de Silva and Le Corbusier, it is certainly exercised. Neither one is willing to let go of it. By signing on the document two goals are achieved.

Firstly, the author-architect is fixed as being present at all times, where both realized –past and the un-realized future are permanently immortalized in that signature on the drawing. Architects become, literally and figuratively, embedded in the drawing. Their power is deemed large and timeless, and hence, transcendental. Secondly, signing underscores the idea putatively latent (or translated by) within the drawing. It works on the same mechanism as described by Barthes, wherein the caption accompanying a press-photograph, adds to the objective and truth-value of the photograph, which may otherwise have multiple connotations. In this sense the signing of one’s “name” channels the attention of the reader or receiver to the notion of the architect as being the larger-than-life (implicitly) figure who holds the key to the transformation (and reduction?) of an idea into a drawing, with a perfect one-to-one correspondence. It, simultaneously, also underscores the knowledge possessed by the architect, in whose presence (or ‘nonpresence’ to borrow from Derrida) the meaning of the drawing can be accessed.

5.5 Conclusion

To think of annotations on drawings as an extraneous layer, which have no relationship, other than to embellish (or even at times soil) the drawing, is an erroneous line of thought. By examining the drawings of two modernists who employ different methods to annotate, one can establish a deeper

111 significance to the act of annotating. Architectural annotations, whether as linguistic or pictorial notations, underscore the graphical information given in the drawings. The same role is played by the act of signing as well. This linguistic code helps to establish the connotative reading of objectivity and veracity of architectural drawings. Additionally, it delineates the authority of the architect who is rendered all- and ever-pervasive, omnipotent and thus, masculine.

Although, Minnette de Silva and Le Corbusier negotiate and mediate this power differently, they both fall victim to it. I would be amiss, if I failed to point out that Minnette does show a far greater degree of sensitivity and contextuality by annotating in English with words, so as to make a drawing somewhat legible to an audience not trained in architectural representations. This might be seen as problematic from a post-colonial point of view, and points to her own colonial training. However this is an attempt at inclusion. Corbusier, on the other hand, makes no such concessions and goes so far as to use French as the language for his miniscule annotations, thus, blocking the audience from interacting with the drawing at many levels.

112 conclusion 6

In a section of his book, The Location of Culture Homi Bhabha discusses the ‘change’ that the meaning of a literary work undergoes under conditions of cultural exchange. His interest lies in the hybridity that accompanies the imposition and acceptance of any structure be it in the guise of culture, society, religion, or any such aspect. Specifically, leaning upon the understanding of the Bible by a group of peasants in India, he notes how the peasants appropriated the book contextually. To the extent to which discourse is the form of defensive warfare, mimicry marks those moments of civil disobedience, within the discipline of civility: signs of spectacular resistance. Then the words of the master become the site of hybridity – the warlike, subaltern sign of the native then we may not only read between the lines but even seek to change the often coercive reality that they so lucidly contain. 1

There is, needless to say, a dialogic and often dichotomous relationship between the hegemonic structures proposed by the West and the manner in which the same structures are understood by the putative Other. This relationship is enacted upon a stage of power and authority. Both sides work simultaneously to achieve and ameliorate it. For some colonizing nations, one of the tools was the aforementioned Bible. For the Modern discipline of architecture, the mantle came to rest squarely on the shoulders of architectural drawings, orthographic projections which encapsulated the plan, the section and the elevation.

In this thesis, following from works of Edward Robbins and Robin Evans, the springing point has been the argument that architects produce drawings and not buildings. This very specific and integral act of representation/reproduction forms the hinge of architectural identity, predicated as it is on the act of ‘perfect’ translation from an idea to an object. Hardly seamless, and definitely linear, the translatory mechanism of the drawing assumes for itself an objectivity, universality, as well as ubiquity.

As this work argues not only is this idea of representation problematic, it is inherently gendered.

1 Bhabha, Homi. ‘Signs Taken for Wonders’ in The Location of Culture. New York: Routledge, 1994. Pg. 172. 113 Many feminists have correctly argued that space is a gendered construct emanating from the gendered identity of the architect. While largely true, this translation too is problematic in view of the fact that architects are responsible for the production of drawings, not buildings. Thus, my exploration has attempted to touch upon and expose this chasm. I have argued through the course of this work that architects produce drawings which, through their universal structure, are rendered masculine due to the authoritarian stance that they crave and successfully establish.

The focal point of this exploration has been drawings produced by Minnette de Silva, a “South Asian Woman Architect,” and Le Corbusier. Roughly contemporaries, comparisons of their drawings carried out in similar spatio-temporal contexts reveal interesting nuances and issues.

My understanding of orthographic drawings, in general, makes me view them as composites of graphical and linguistic information, composed at a certain scale. I do not argue that there might be other structures through which drawings may be divisible, Art History and Criticism, for one, has certainly offered many lenses. However, given the paucity of structural analyses of architectural drawings, as well, as their marked difference from works of art (in that, architectural drawings claim both translation and objectivity), it became necessary to have lenses that were immanent to architectural drawings. The lenses I, thus, employed were lines, scale, and text.

A comparison based upon the first lens of Lines, which included aspect of graphical information depicted in the drawings and the use of the sheet showed certain differences between the works and sensibilities of Minnette and Le Corbusier. Whereas Minnette was given to a profuse depiction of natural elements such as varieties of fauna in all three types of orthographic architectural drawings, Le Corbusier seems very restrained in his usage. Trees, and other such elements, almost take on an ornamental, background status, which is in stark contrast to their foregrounded status in her drawings. Differences creep up in the quality and intensity of their lines themselves. Whereas, his are precise and pristine, her lines change depending on the drawing type. Thus, the perspective takes on a messy and smudgy quality, whereas the plans are very neat. Yet, the intensity of the former is present in the latter, where the organic and wavy lines of flora and site topography sit is 114 distinct tension with the rigid and unyielding lines of the house. Their relationship with the quality and content of what is depicted is transferred onto their understanding of the drawing sheet upon which their actions are enacted. Le Corbusier’s representations, sit centered on a sheet much larger than the space that the graphics actually occupy. There are no margins to contain the implied force of the lines and the idea. The emptiness of the sheet gives complete primacy to the architectural idea which it has received as a passive entity. On the other hand, Minnette’s sheets vary. At times they do not have margins or borders, and often, they do. In some instances, the border contains the natural elements, and in others, the sheer number of different drawings composed on the same sheet. Unlike Le Corbusier’s drawing, where one plan and one elevation is shown to capture the idea, Minnette’s drawings often have multiple plans composed on the same sheet, to simulate the capture of the building at multiple points at the same time.

The differences between the two invoke issues of a nature/culture dichotomy. I must re-iterate that I do not intend to suggest that Minnette’s inclusion of floral elements renders her more feminine as an architect. That would be a fallacious interpretation. However, it certainly adds a more ambivalent and sensitive proclivity on her side. The problem arises, because in spite of these inclusions and/ or exclusions, there is a tendency on the part of both architects, to depict to control. By rendering them on paper, on doing away with them completely, Minnette and Le Corbusier firmly establish their authority over nature. This authority is an authority borne out of the understanding that their acts implicitly constitute culture, and in that are actually, hegemonic acts. Their appropriation of the drawing space or the sheet can be viewed in a similar manner. The drawing is collapses with the actual site. By actively showing or hiding elements, the particular challenges of the site are faced and dealt with. In this manner, the control of elements through the wielding of this particular tool of representation, shows architectural drawings as being masculine in their outlook.

A similar skein of authorship stems from the investigation of issues of scale in both Minnette’s and Le Corbusier’s drawings. There has not been much written on scale with regard to architectural drawings. To understand scale, I turned to the discipline of cultural geography, which illustrated

115 how scale is a hugely contested issue. Scale is usually understood as a mathematic device establishes a proportional relationship between a representation and the ‘reality’ that it attempts to represent. However, the works of scholars like David Harvey, Sallie Marston, Mitch Chapura, Neil Smith, and others illustrate that scale is not merely a mathematical proposition. It has methodological, social and ontological underpinnings. The works of these geographers follow from that of Henri Lefebvre, and thus, to many of them the production of scale is implicated in the production of space. Consequently, they argue for a critical appraisal of scale, deviations from its fixity and poly-scalarity.

In light of these concerns, the architectural drawings of the two architects in concern show more similarities than differences, though minor differences exist. Firstly, for projects at a residential

scale both work at 1/8th of an inch, which is a commonly used scale for the drawings of that building type. There drawings are small-scale drawings i.e. a smaller area is shown in greater detail. It is in the depiction of this detail, that the two architects exhibit different sensibilities and identities. Whereas Minnette painstakingly incorporates a large amount of detail in terms of materiality (through hatches) and topography, Le Corbusier abstains from such information, instead choosing to liken his work more to art. Many such instances are available in the drawings. Secondly, all elements of a drawing are rendered at exactly the same scale. For Le Corbusier, drawings may exist at different scales with the drawing-set as a whole. With Minnette, multiple drawings are drawn on the same sheet, but with few exceptions these are all drawn at the same scale. In essence, all elements on a drawing behave in exactly the same manner.

There are some interesting implications to the use of scale here. For one, scale is employed as a taxonomic device. With artful inclusions and exclusions, it actually determines and controls the readers’ access to the drawing. Therefore, it creates a hierarchy between the author and the audience. Secondly, scale works as a device of fixity by allowing architects to simulate under controlled conditions a reality of their imagining. The lack of poly-scalarity enables the architect to imagine the world exactly as per his choosing, where all elements work in perfect harmony. In

116 essence, this act allows the drawing to be understood as objective, and by extension, the architect to be understood as objective and rational as well. Thus, scale in architectural drawings, is necessarily underpinned with social and ontological aspects.

If scale united Minnette and Le Corbusier, their attitude towards text definitely set them apart. For a moment, I extricate myself from the focused view of their drawings, to look at the importance of text, in general, to their lives. To understand the place of text, it becomes necessary to consider the ‘textual’ works the two left behind. Whereas Le Corbusier writes a few books which may be seen as ideologies such Towards a New Architecture (and of course his diaries too have become seminal documents), Minnette writes one book: her autobiography. This very difference is extremely telling of the distinct ways in which Minnette and Le Corbusier navigated their identities as architects, as colonizing and colonial/post-colonial subjects, and as man and woman. Minnette’s life is fraught with the necessity to thrust forward her exclusive (and often isolated) position as the first woman architect of Sri Lanka. It is unlikely that Le Corbusier faced the same pressure. The need to communicate through text, thus, forms the basis of the next lens.

There is a startling difference, immediately apparent, between the plans of Minnette and Le Corbusier. This difference is brought about by the manner in which they define spaces.For her it is done by labeling the space. Minnette hardly, if ever, uses furniture layouts. Le Corbusier, on the other hand, hardly ever uses text. His descriptions of space are pictorial, not linguistic. The choice of language, that both employ, is interesting as well. Minnette annotates in English, Le Corbusier in French: both working in languages embodied and comfortable to them. Though they were both avid diary-keepers, Minnette exhibits a far greater proclivity towards uses the drawing as a diary, then Le Corbusier does. Another significant difference manifests itself, in the manner in which both sign their drawings. Le Corbusier places his plume-de-nom along with a standard and stenciled name of his studio. His signature, graphically, does not contest (in terms of space, visibility, position) the other ‘actual’ graphics of the drawing. Minnette’s signature on the other hand, stands out due to its almost organic flourish. She undersigns her name with her professional

117 credentials. These aspects lead to several interesting interpretations of their work.

Following from the work of structuralists, it becomes evident that a tension exists between the use of linguistic and pictorial information as a metaphoric device in the works of Minnette and Le Corbusier. The primary function of text is to underscore the objective nature of the drawing. Through linguistic structuring, the text mirrors and orients the meaning of the ‘idea’ putatively embedded within the drawing. In this, both architects, again, exhibit their authority and hegemony. However, there are variations within this authoritarian structure. Without delving into the spatial connotations of it, the use of furniture layouts on drawings, actually denies the audience access to the drawing. Their reading of it is necessarily dependant on the architect, as they, as the audience, have not been socialized to read this form of ‘writing.’ Actual text, in that regard, is far more inclusive, as it allows for reading not dissimilar to that of a book. The issue of language used is pertinent here. Both architects deny the context of their audience (whether clients or contractors) by using non-local or non-native languages. English and French, both markedly colonial tongues, also hierarchize the architect’s positions. They determine the authority of the architect, as the signature determines their presence. The signature becomes a ‘stamp’ that not only marks the presence of the architecture in the past, as someone creating this document, and more importantly the idea, but it also perpetuates the presence of the architect into the future. The architect, thus, becomes permanently associated with the idea/drawing or the act of creation and production.

In sum, through all three lenses, one sees that architectural drawings are, in effect, sites for the authority of the architect to play out. An authoritarian structure which controls degrees of inclusion/exclusion of all that is external to the architect can be nothing but a hegemonic structure. Hegemony, predicated upon notions of objectivity and universality, by nature, is masculine as per the arguments of many feminists scholars because it positives a masculine figure as having access and control over rationality. Rationality here stands for culture and stands opposed to nature and corporeality. Modern architectural drawings have used this dichotomy to position themselves, as distinct as and higher than other forms of representation. That being said, I must insist, that the

118 masculinity of architectural drawings is independent of sex-specificity. The comparisons between drawings by Minnette de Silva and Le Corbusier are excellent examples of this. Despite variations in sensibilities, which are influences by their own individual contexts and socializations, in the final analysis, the meta-socialization as architects takes over their works. While I have chosen these two architects, one can easily see that the arguments concerning lines, scale and text can be extrapolated to a majority of the corpus of Modern architectural drawings. Indeed, in many ways unifying language of Modernism was also its own worst enemy, in that, it wiped out the very differences that could have enriched it.

To briefly recapitulate, architectural representations such the plan, the section and the elevation, constituted as they are of scaled linguistic and graphical information, are embedded with a masculine structure and outlook. Having identified a problem inherent in orthographic architectural drawings, I foresee several questions and avenues arising out of this study.

For one, what is the implication of the masculinity of architectural drawings on our training as architects, especially architectural students who are being initiated into this world? As young students and as older scholars, each one of us meets the discipline with our own individual socialization and personality. Why then should this personality been obviated towards creating representations (which stand both for ourselves and for the discipline) that remove these narratives. Along the same lines, the question, thus, becomes as to what role do narratives have to play in the construction and production of architectural drawings. There has to be a further examination of the very idea of translation through lines, scale and text. Each one of these components has been employed in a variety of forms across the globe to establish different narrative structures. How might they inform our practice of architecture, so as to make it more inclusive and less hegemonic.

In the same vein, while this study focuses on masculinity, the idea of any kind of marginalization and dominance becomes pertinent to it. Thus, the thesis question expands to include differences of race, geography, and colonialism. Chandra Talpade-Mohanty has argued in her excellent essay ‘Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses’ that the same project of 119 feminism cannot be extended to the ‘third world’ women ( the term itself creating a ‘third world’ which does not exist, and thus, working to subjugate) because this attempt to emancipate the ‘third world’ women only serves to attach them to new masters or mistresses, as it overlooks the lived experiences and voices of the very women it seeks to represent. 2The project of architectural representation, too, needs to examine its very structures. The site of this examination, though, cannot be traced anymore to a particular location given the advent and spread of Modernism/ Modernity. Thus, each tentacle of the spread-out discipline of architecture, has to evaluate and mutate its methods of representation within a contextual specificity.

In conclusion, there can be no universal project of architectural representation which is not an universal project of masculinity. Objectivity should not be seen as strength of the representation. Instead, one must recognize that as the weakness of architectural representations. Just as we might shy of assigning a generic number to a human being instead of name, we must be skeptical of assigning a generic architectural drawing to an idea and a narrative. We must question the role putatively innocuous elements such as lines; shades, scales, and text have to play in the establishing of an identity in the discipline of architecture. Here, notions of translation stand equally implicated. Orthographic architectural drawings are not mere vehicles for translation and transmutation, they possess and propagate an identity of which we must, at all times, be cognizant.

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