William H. Fain, Jr., Italian Cities and Landscapes: an Architect’s Sketchbook. Balcony Press, Los Angeles, 2007Maybe it’s a holdover from my years in academia, but the beginning of the summer just doesn’t seem the time for a Powerful Editorial Message. Not that you’re expecting one. I have a thought, though, which may be apt for the vacation season. One (compound) word: sketchbook.
I had the privilege of offering a continuing education session, called “Words from Drawings,” at the AIA Convention in Boston in May. The idea was to suggest that, when you’re trying to figure out what to write about a project of yours, you might employ the time-honored, beer-soaked napkin sketch to help focus your thoughts. This session was at 8:00 a.m. (5:00 a.m., California time), so it was a bit of stretch asking the participants to imagine they had a beer in hand. Some may have conjured a faint recollection of a Mimosa. But it turns out that, when you ask 300 architects to sketch their work for one another, you get a roar that any South End saloon would envy.
It’s really not possible to tell how such a session has gone, though, because only the people who like it come up to talk to you afterward. One said, “That was great! There was such a buzz in the room!” Hell yes, with that many people talking at once. It’s not rocket surgery. One person suggested that it would have been interesting to have asked for a show of hands of those who had sketchbooks with them. Perhaps AIA Conventions are not the hottest beds for draughtsmanship. (The new Boston Convention & Exhibition Center, by Rafael Viñoly, is handsomer than many such venues, but there’s only so picturesque you can make a gazillion square feet of meeting rooms.)
I had been thinking about sketchbooks, not so much because of the session—which, as I say, was premised on napkins and other convenient scraps—but because I recently picked up a copy of William Fain (FAIA)’s Italian Cities and Landscapes: an Architect’s Sketchbook. Our friends at Balcony Press in Los Angeles have just published this beautiful facsimile of the sketchbook that Bill kept while a Rome Prize fellow in 2002. I recommend it for both pleasure and instruction. (There is some particularly wonderful atmospheric perspective in the sketches of Lake Como, well worth emulating.)
But, a more important recommendation: let’s all dig our half-filled sketchbooks out of the piles of less attractive paper on our desks and take some time this summer just to sit and sketch. And sip.
Originally published in arcCA 08.2, “Landscape + Architecture.”
