Contemporary Architectural Drawing

[Blog post for Drawing I]
[Late. Sorry.]

"Today, I'll be writing a post about an architect named Ralph Johnson. According to his Wikipedia page, some of his most notable projects include Boeing's worldwide headquarters and a terminal (which one is not specified) at O'Hare International Airport. He has also designed a building called Skybridge, 22 West Washington as seen regularly on the local news around here (sort of), and this green skyscraper which is entirely one residence.

"How I came across Ralph Johnson? By finding a page about the surprisingly amusingly named Ralph Johnson Bunche House. Not to be confused with the Ralph J. Bunche House, which was the boyhood home of a famous guy from before my time named Ralph Johnson Bunche. Bunche's original home is now listed in the National Register of Historic Places, as is his later home, the Ralph Bunche House -- as the building is referred to by governmental documents."

Top, the Ralph J. Bunche House. Bottom, the Ralph Johnson Bunche House.

And then I finally realized Ralph Johnson didn't design the Ralph Johnson House, as the 1949 building is called on that webpage I found, at all. Nope, that architect was Harwell Hamilton Harris, whose Wikipedia page features a better biography than Johnson's, but a disappointing failure to clearly provide actual examples of his work. Fortunately, ArchitectureWeek provides nicely on that front.

Ralph Johnson House, by Harwell Hamilton Harris, at Los Angeles, California, 1949 to 1951.
Top, lower plan. Bottom, upper plan.

Here, we have some design drawings which look like they were made on a computer. From 1949. Quite impressive, considering. I'm just sad the images aren't higher resolution.

Even with higher resolution, I wouldn't be able to figure out what that pipe is doing on both stories of the house, going through a lake or something. I can't tell what the circle to the left is about, either. But it's hard to go wrong with nice, simple walls and doors, plus tiny little furnishings which make it clear what many rooms are for despite any textual labels being thoroughly unreadable.

Note the bold lines which make some walls pop. Note the approach to drawing 'trees' from top-down in a clean yet detailed manner, as best you can at this size anyways. Note the lack of clear labeling for staircases and front and back doors, making the plan's functionality difficult to locate knowing not where it should be. Know that proper functionality does exist, seeing as Ralph Bunche lived in his new house for over thirty years.

Admire the drawings, and wonder how long they took to produce at the time and how long similar schematics would take to produce now.

20th Century Contemporary Drawing

[Blog post for Drawing I]
[Previous post was harder than the first three. Current post was harder than the previous post. I hope next post won't be harder than the current post...]

It's really quite frustrating trying to track down... well... some random preferably-nice-looking drawing made sometime between the end of World War II and the year 2000 AD. Mainly because most artists are painters or sculptors, not using drawing to produce a finished product.

Web #1 by Vija Celmins,

1999, charcoal on paper.

Hey, this might work. The page I found this on is happy to gush about fragility and the universe and something something something. Um, okay, that's nice.

It is kinda an interestingly shaped spiderweb. I wonder why it is shaped so. The outer frame looks to be held by three to five objects, with plenty of lines radiating in towards the center. The cross-silks show up a short distance along the way there, but eventually give way when nearing the center for some reason, only to resurge in a tangle at the web's center.

Well, it looks like a tangle from here. The picture of the work's not very high resolution, even though the original is, by my calculations, 15.8494112 feet across diagonally. I'm pretty sure my calculations are wrong, since it's officially about 17 2/3 in by 21 in. Oh well. Guesstimating the thing to be about the size of a nice computer monitor, and also by consulting my 18 in by 24 in drawing pad, well, maybe it's not really big. I still can't tell from the pic if the tangle is more detailed than a simple blotch of white.

I do wonder how Celmins got those lines so fine, especially on the cross-silks or whatever they're called properly. They're not even pencil-line, but instead erased out of charcoal, presumably. How do you get a really fine line when using an eraser? Use the corner of a really hard one?

But the real reason I'm talking about a work by this artist in particular is another work of hers. It's an etching, and doesn't really have any business being in this post according to the assignment I'm working to, but it just fits in so perfectly with my previous post.

Constellation - Uccello by Vija Celmins,

1983, aquatint and etching on paper

The contrast of a perspective-heavy psuedo-3D drawing next to a very-much-flat batch of stars is not helped by the two portions of the piece being of different dimensions. But some people appreciate this sort of thing. I just appreciate stumbling across something while doing this assignment, which has to do with what I stumbled across and ended up using while doing the previous assignment.