Thinking with the Hand

As one’s hand moves across the paper surface - holding a pencil or a brush, tracing lines, volumes or signs - an invisible yet seminal process takes place between our visual and sensitive apparatus, our environment and the structures of our minds. 
This process is non-linear, unpredictable and organic: through the act of drawing, sensitive information is constantly exchanged, in a fluid feedback between the outer and inner realms. 
The digital and electronic tools that we use daily, in their apparent efficiency, speed and utterly precise automatic processes, sometimes seem to have overlooked some essential qualities that the simple, low-tech practice of drawing can maintain alive, turning setbacks into strengths: slowness, error and approximation, unicity of the artefact, subjectivity, the relationship to the body and its carnal condition, the focus and concentration required for the right gesture, and finally essential architectural notions, such as human scale, atmosphere, weight and physical presence…
Handcrafting our ideas into being, materialising thoughts, giving manifest and tangible form to invisible intuitions and deeply bred mental images : this course will propose an investigation of the hidden qualities of drawing, in a continuous dance between the two-dimensional space of the image, the three-dimensional realm of architecture, and the fourth dimension of time phenomena, light, sound and movements. 

Learning to give concrete form to ideas through the use of manual, organic, analog processes: drawings, sketches, diagrams, models…
Developing manual thinking and its specific qualities through the practice of drawing, a reflection on analog design methods, and the production of artifacts.

• Quality education
• Affordable and clean energy
• Decent work and economic growth
• Responsible consumption and production

In presence

The course is structured like an art studio: each session starts with a short 15mn lecture about a specific theme of investigation, then proposes 3 hours of hands-on exercises so that the students can directly put theory into practice - drawing, painting, experimenting with materials and tools (charcoal, ink, pencil, on paper, wood, found materials…), and finally pinning up the results on the wall for a collective review at the end of the course.
The idea is to have the students experience first-hand how our way of thinking is directly affected by the tools we use, and to provide them with basic skills in different analogical representation techniques, as well as relevant references in art - fostering a sense of critical thought about the impact of technology on our work and life as an architect.

The exam is based on the conception and production of an architectural artefact (a model-drawing), demonstrating the student’s answer to the question “what can the hand do, that the machine cannot?”, supporting it with texts, references and a clear conceptual method. We will also review the student’s production of drawings during the sessions, the relevance of their ideas and the handcraft quality.