© Frank Harmon
日常素描练习如何提升建筑水准
How a Daily Sketch Improves Architecture
由专筑网李韧，王帅编译
本文最初发表于“Common Edge”，标题为“快速表现如何将人性化带回建筑。”
建筑师Frank Harmon有这样一个要求，他每天都要完成一幅手绘。这个过程大约只有5分钟，只是迅速地捕捉一些生活场景，Virginia Woolf曾经说过关于日常手绘的重要性，“你可以捕捉一些瞬间。”但是如果要将这些瞬间记录下来，你的动作必须要快。Harmon的画作非常流畅，你可以感受到其迅雷不及掩耳之势的作画过程。
This article was originally published on Common Edge as "How the Quick Daily Drawing Puts Humanity Back Into Architecture."
Architect Frank Harmon has a discipline: he tries to do a freehand drawing every day. He doesn’t spend much time on them. About five minutes. These short spurts of depiction have the effect of catching lightning in a bottle or, as Virginia Woolf once said about the importance of writing every day, “to clap the net over the butterfly of moment.” To capture these moments you must be fast. The minute moves. Harmon’s drawings feel loose, fuzzy at the edges. You sense their five-minute duration.
© Frank Harmon
建筑系学生常常害怕速写，因为该过程非常慵懒放松。他们往往会认真地绘制一副精致的画作，而不仅仅只是生活中的一只蝴蝶。这幅精致的画作代表了仔细地观察，同时也很能表达透视技巧与工具使用。只是这不是Harmon速写的关注点，他们十分自由地表达了不同的想法，即捕捉当下，描绘眼前。Harmon的绘画似乎蕴含着巨大的能量，这不仅仅是一种记录，而且还是一种视觉上的拥抱，也是他的针管笔和水彩笔的交织与共舞。
Harmon将这些作品收录在新书《Native Places》之中，同时这也是一个网站的标题，在这个网站之中，他会发布许多小插图，这些插图都来源于他在世界各地旅行时所保留下的灵感与关注。Harmon从小就习惯绘画，在成年之后，他常常随身携带速写本，速写也让他开启了建筑生涯，他认为这是观察事物的方式。他毕业于伦敦Architectural Association和北卡罗莱纳州立大学，他认为，通过自身的观察绘画场地，以及人们的参与方式，能够比在课堂中所学到的东西要多一些。
Architecture students often are terrified of the quick sketch because of this very looseness, a sense of relaxed attentiveness. They strive to make a “pretty” drawing instead of netting the butterfly. The pretty drawing is evidence of detailed observation, perhaps one’s skill in constructing perspective, the control of the instrument in your hand. But that’s not the point of Harmon’s drawings. Their freeness communicates a different value and goal: to be in the moment, sketching swiftly to seize the scene as it unfolds before you. Harmon’s flickering hand imparts great energy to his drawings, which are less documentary and more like a visual embrace—the kiss of his ink pen and watercolor brush.
Harmon has collected scores of his drawings in a new book, Native Places (ORO Editions, 2018), which is also the title of a website where he offers vignettes of sketches paired with his reflections on the places in his world-wide travels that he captures in words and pen-strokes. Harmon started drawing as a child and has carried a sketchbook for most of his adult life. Drawing led him to architecture, and he describes the act of sketching as “a way to see.” He believes he has learned more about the built environment by personally observing and drawing places and how people engage with them than he could have through architecture school alone (he studied at North Carolina State College in Raleigh and the Architectural Association in London).
© Frank Harmon
作为一位搭便车的学生，Harmon时常观察着周围的自然环境和建筑作品，他认为，记录一个场所的最好方法便是将它画下来，而不是拍照。在画谷仓或城堡的时候，他说：“我永远记得那个场所。”Harmon通过笔触不断地挖掘地方场景。他认为，快速记录一座教堂甚至能够让他“重新感受拱券和飞扶壁的建造过程”。
Harmon并不记录他所创作的作品。更多时候，他都是记录周边的事务，这个过程非常迅速。他会记录天气、光线、空气、气味、声音。他所记录的人物情节能够让他产生同情心。许多故事都来源于人们聚集的场所的某个瞬间。这些作品都表达了这位建筑师的内在精神，但是Harmon同样注重在人与人在建筑之中的交流。因为即使没有建筑，人们仍然存在，这便来源于他们所带来的场所意义。
在阿拉巴马州Hale县的乡村工作室项目中，Harmon的这种表达要素看上去尤为强烈，在25年前，Samuel Mockbee与D.K. Ruth便开始了这项工作，后来，奥本大学的建筑学学生则接手这项任务，并一直回馈社区。Harmon说，比起乡村工作室更为重要的是，来自600多名年轻建筑师/建筑商的投入，他们通过这项工作明白了该如何服务他人。“因为这个世界有许多不完美的景象。”
As a hitchhiking student, observing the natural and built world around him, Harmon discovered that he would remember a place better if he drew it rather than take a photo. Sketching a barn or a castle, he says, “I remembered that place forever.” Harmon discovered the architecture of a place by feeling it through his fingers and the point of a pen, or via the quick wash of a brush. He recalls that drawing a cathedral made him “recreate the design and construction of stone arches and flying buttresses.”
Harmon doesn’t write about the drawings he creates. More often he writes about the life happening in them and around him, as he quickly sketches. He comments on the weather, the light, the air, scents, the sounds of people. What comes through is great empathy for the human beings who populate the places that he records. The stories are about folks gathered in a place, sharing a moment. The drawings capture the spirit of the place that this architect came upon, but Harmon’s words focus on the personal exchange taking place between the people framed by the architecture. It’s as if the architecture recedes and the human drama advances, shaped and given meaning by the places in which they transpire.
This element is most poignant in Harmon’s drawing of a Rural Studio project in Hale County, Alabama, where Auburn University architecture students have been designing/building to give back to this community ever since Samuel Mockbee and D.K. Ruth started the studio 25 years ago. Harmon comments that even more important than the architecture created by the Rural Studio are the more than 600 young architect/builders who have learned to serve others through their work, “…because the world has many broken places.”
速写是一种完美的媒介，它能够表达建筑对于人们的塑造和改变。快速表达同样适合于建筑设计，这也是这位建筑师特别喜欢的要素。Harmon对于传统建筑非常着迷，因为它们能够很准确地表达传统居民的价值观和世界观。对于建筑师而言，这是极具价值的研究课题，因为这些可以表达出那些未接受建筑教育的人会如何解决所遇到的环境与自然问题。
建筑历史学家Sybil Moholy-Nagy认为这种方式非常聪明，但是Harmon并没有提及Moholy-Nagy所带来的影响，但是他引用了Harwell Hamilton Harris的话，这是一位北卡罗来纳州的老师，在那里Harmon于上世纪80年代早期开始了他的教学生涯，同时Harwell Hamilton Harris也是传统建筑研究者的先驱。
The quick sketch is the perfect medium for focusing on how people might be shaped or changed by the architecture. The expeditious drawing is also well suited to rendering vernacular design and building, which is a particular favorite of this architect. Indigenous buildings are fascinating to Harmon for the information that they impart about the values of the people who fashioned them, and also how they saw the world. This is fertile research for any architect because it offers evidence of the ingenious ways that people who are untutored in architecture engage with the natural and built environment to solve problems.
The architectural historian Sybil Moholy-Nagy described this aptitude for building wisely as revealing the “native genius” of the vernacular (or as she referred to it, “anonymous architecture”). Harmon doesn’t mention Moholy-Nagy as an influence, but he does cite Harwell Hamilton Harris, who taught at North Carolina State, where Harmon began his teaching career in the early 1980s, and was a proponent of architects learning from vernacular building.
© Frank Harmon
但是，简单的传统建筑也并没有看起来那么简单。Harmon通过草图来解释了其中的原因。他最喜欢的对象便是谷仓，因为这些农业建筑有许多观察入手点，“这就好像地质学家挑选岩石一样，这些谷仓描述了他们的时代和场所。”一座谷仓坐落在场地上，在这里有水源，建筑向南而建，吸收了阳光的热量，对侧同时设置有窗户，满足了自然通风。在东边设置有门廊，避开了西边方向的雨水。谷仓的建造材料来源于周边树林，建造时产生的木板刨花被当地农民焚烧掉，用于种植烟草，这并没有浪费多少材料，传统的智慧促进了建筑的生成，Harmon说，谷仓适合大地，这种建筑“是平凡的成果”。
在这位建筑师的画作之中，一些常见的物体都以不同寻常的方式出现，例如椅子、邮箱、屏风、窗户、门廊、台阶、柱子、阳台，这些物件都细致地表达出了曾经的人和事。Harmon的画作似乎能够看到所有建筑中的人性光辉。
It turns out that simple vernacular structures are not so simple after all. Harmon has a gift for explaining why through his sketches and words. One of his favorite topics is the barn. He writes that these agricultural structures can be for the observant architect “…like rocks a geologist picks up. They tell a story about their time and location.” A barn is sited on a rise of land because water drains away from it there. The main elevation is to the south, gathering the warmth of the sun, with windows on the opposite side for ventilation. A porch is on the east side because rain storms come from the west. Wood to build the barn was cut from nearby trees, and to cure tobacco the farmer burned shavings from the sawmill where the boards were made. Nothing was wasted. Native wisdom guided the architecture. The barn fit the land, and the beauty of this structure, writes Harmon, “is a result of this ordinariness.”
As subjects of this architect’s drawings and commentary, ordinary objects take on extraordinary presence: chairs, mailboxes, a screened door, windows, porches, steps, columns, balconies are rendered with a spirit of the place and the people who have used them, sometimes over many decades. Harmon’s drawings are a way to see the human dimension present in all architecture.
Office Kersten Geers David van Severen
Pezo von Ellrichshausen
Rural Studio
Monadnockl
Elding Oscarson
AOA Architects
© Frank Harmon
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