It’s not every day that your teacher tells you to miss class. Only a week into our semester, four of my classmates and I found ourselves ditching our scheduled courses to participate in an international collaborative drawing workshop at the Museo Nazionale delle Arti del XXI Secolo, MAXXI. Under the instruction of Momoyo Kaijima, of Atelier Bow-Wow, we would be a part of a group of students from five universities around the world chosen to explore some of Rome’s most interesting and historical spaces through “public drawing”.
When it came to which sites we would be given, believe it or not, it came down to a simple game of rock-paper-scissors. It was a funny start to a week of intellectually and creatively challenging explorations. My group ended up getting Piazza Navona, a place I never new existed until stumbling upon it on a late-night gelato run the night before. We began examining vedutas of these spaces and how they have been graphically documented in the past. This then went onto site visits, many sketches, and critiques. I went from casual strolls and running into Piazza Navona by chance, to spending hours drawing and documenting how this space is used in a matter of hours.
This week-long workshop created a rush of adrenaline that allowed all the students to basically draw for 10 or more hours a day. It was meticulous, but it was very exciting. These hours spent weren’t just machine work, but also a space where we shared dialogue about our experiences in architecture school, cultural backgrounds, laughs, communicated often in three or more languages in each group, and much more. Its amazing how much my brain had taken in, in just a week. The way I view architecture’s role in relation to humans has been transformed. The drawings we created were beautiful and explored spaces in ways that created narratives specific to our sites. They also explored the role these spaces have had through time and the power architecture has to influence societal systems. In a few weeks our drawings will be exhibited in the MAAXI, make sure to check them out.
Until next time,
Cornelius Tulloch