PS19 Architectural Drawings as Artifact and Evidence

According to Vitruvius (1.2), Roman architectural design was manifested in three ways: iconographia (floor plans), orthographia (elevations), and scaenographia (perspective drawings).  As the foremost extant ancient architectural treatise, Vitruvius’ text has long been key to scholarly interpretations of the methods of Roman architects.  For example, it has been widely theorized that architectural drawings were executed on lightweight perishable materials (wood, parchment, papyrus) and then circulated throughout the Roman world.  Yet surprisingly, no evidence for these documents is preserved in the material record. In fact, there is little indication that scaled architectural drawings were ever given the kind of autonomy in antiquity that they acquired during the Italian Renaissance and still hold today.  So how did ancient architects design their buildings?  In 1979, Lothar Haselberger of the German Archaeological Institute discovered the first in situ 1:1 architectural plans of an ancient building inscribed on the Temple of Apollo at Didyma (Haselberger 1983).  Once historians understood where to look, full-scale architectural plans were suddenly revealed on buildings throughout the Roman world, from Pergamon (Turkey) to Cordoba (Spain), and Bulla Regia (Tunesia) to Pompeii (Italy).  Perhaps most astonishing of all were the 1:1 plans of the Hadrianic Pantheon scratched on the pavement in front of the Mausoleum of Augustus, a revelation that propelled revolutionary new schemes for the original plans of the famous temple (Wilson Jones 1987).  Forty years after the German discoveries at Didyma, this paper examines the myriad of ways that the revelation of Roman 1:1 architectural plans has transformed our understanding of the processes of architectural design in the ancient world.  Through a historiography of the discourse, it compares, reconciles, and ultimately liberates the concrete evidence for architectural agency from the longstanding scholarly tradition founded on the writings of Vitruvius.

This paper examines the intersections between making architectural drawings, the techniques of surveying, and laying out building foundations in the early modern Ottoman world. In the foundation ceremony of the Sultanahmet Mosque in 1609, the chief architect marked the locations of the walls, mihrab, columns of the mahfil and the minarets on the ground based on his geometrical knowledge and according to his matchless drawing (resm) as underlined in historical accounts. The only extant comprehensive “Book on Architecture” from the premodern Islamic world, written by a scholar, Cafer Efendi emphasizes both the geometric and poetic qualities of this drawing, which is a unique reference to the broader implications of architectural images in the early modern period. This paper sheds new light on the agency of visual images and the link between geometrical/technical knowledge, act of drawing, and Ottoman building practices. In order to understand these inherent connections, which also disclose the complex relation between theoretical and practical knowledge on site, I will explore the various implications of the term resm. In architectural historiography, resm has often been translated as “plan” which might be misleading due to the fact that terms were not standardized up until the nineteenth century. The paper argues that the use of the same term both for the trace of a building on site, whether in the form of excavation lines, stretched cords, or demolished parts of buildings, and drawings made on paper, underline their analogous relation; whereas physical signs made the geometrical order visible in the material world, they became translatable into mathematical lines.

The discourse of Chinese architectural history is shaped mainly on built architecture, and hardly mentions the individuals who designed them. In fact, the question whether Chinese ancient architecture was created by architects employing conscientious and inventive design, or simply constructed by anonymous craftsmen based on mere experience, has confused Chinese academia for a long time. But the existence of the Qing Dynasty Yangshi Lei archives, which contain more than fifteen thousand architectural drawings attributed to the Lei family (who served the Qing court from the Kangxi reign to the end of the Qing dynasty, 1686-1914), makes it possible to address this issue. Significantly, these drawings are the only surviving architectural drawings from China’s dynastic period. Though the collection and research of the Yangshi Lei archives began in the 1930s just as architectural history was established as an academic field of study in China, it has suffered from neglect for over the last 80 years.

By analyzing their architectural drawings, this paper focuses on the Yangshi Lei family, illustrating what exactly the Leis did when they were employed by the Qing court as the Zhang’an (掌案, Chief architect) of the Yangshi Office (樣式房, Architectural Style Office) to take charge of imperial architecture design, and how they played an important role in a series of building activities, including site selection, urban planning, architecture design, construction and supervising through different kinds of architectural drawings. The aim of this paper is to reveal the existence and the essential features of the profession of architecture named Yangzi Jiang (樣子匠) in Qing dynasty and explain why they can be seen as “architects” in the imperial Chinese context, which could suggest a new approach to understanding Chinese architectural history.

How has the study of Piranesi’s drawings affected the way that he has been understood as an architect, printmaker, and author? Much of Piranesi’s large body of surviving graphic work can be separated into broad categories of function: drawings for architectural projects, preparatory drawings for prints, drawings for furniture and sculptural pieces. Although these categories can be useful for understanding how Piranesi used drawings in the workshop, they also create other interpretative problems. Often the categories overlap, as sketches of architectural fantasies and drawings of sculptural objects became the subject of prints, for example. A categorization of Piranesi’s drawings based on function also omits the type of drawing he made more than any other: figure studies. Piranesi constantly made figure studies, but he almost never did so in preparation for prints. Compared to his architectural drawings, Piranesi’s figure studies tend to be smaller, faster, sketchier, and made on materials recycled from books. For all these reasons, the figure studies have fallen farther down the historiographic hierarchy, and the scholarship on architectural subjects has provided the main context for interpreting them. An examination of how scholars have considered Piranesi’s drawings in the past suggests some ways that previous priorities might be reorganized. Investigating Piranesi's drawings of the human figure leads us toward a new view of Piranesi himself, and of his total enterprise within the context of eighteenth-century architecture.