Robin Evans Translations from Drawing to Building- Text 05'10'12

'To translate is to convey, It is to move something without altering it.'

Quotes from this text which I have found interesting;

Before embarking on the investigation of drawings role in architecture a few more words might be spent on language... the common antilogy that would have architecture be like language but also independent of it. All things with conceptual dimension are like language.

With our minds prefixed on the predominance of language we might even risk enclosing architecture...denying it communication with anything else to preserve its integrity. This is unlikely.. there is one unfailing communicant and that is the drawing. 

To insist on direct access to the work may be to designate the drawing as the real repository of architectural art.. earth art, performance, installations constructions.. architectural themes, several are remarkable not just for the fact that they make little or no use of the drawing, but for the impossibility of their development through the medium.'

Turell's work 

'if drawn up within current architectural conventions, could only construed as indicative of witles simplicity. Their effect as installations can none the less be completely overwhelming..... Observers not being able to believe their own eyes..

 it is impossible to envisage its depth even by an act of conscious will'

'Involvement, substantiality, tangibility, presence, immediacy, direct action vs disengagement, obliqueness, abstraction, mediation & action at a distance.

The Campanile drawing- 'required two imaginative steps never before taken together.. a completely abstract conception of projector lines... an ability to conceive of the thing being represented (the surface of the building) as not equivalent to the surface of representation.'

Evans, Robin.  Translations from Drawing to Building and Other Essays. Cambridge:  The MITPress, 1997