Architectural drawing’s use for communicating construction knowledge is well documented. Technical drawings are crucial legal documents and important for a building’s design, construction and subsequent operation. Made up of plans, sections, detailed views and explicit descriptions, a complete drawing set is an essential tool to track and consign any changes or alterations made to the building or its components. Along with their contractual and prescriptive nature drawings are equally essential in transmitting design possibilities or normalized building strategies. Pattern books have been a fundamental tool for marketing, selling and manufacturing buildings and their parts. Similarly, the renaissance’s technical “field measuring” of classical examples identified key proportioning elements and regulating lines for architecture.
Architects elucidate their conceptual, technical and administrative vision for buildings. Technical drawings can in some cases also portray how a building is to be used, a type of instruction manual for edifices. Modernity’s disavowal of historical references inferred a renewed importance for drawing to illustrate newness and the technological components of industrialized construction. Metabolists cultivated by modernism used drawings to develop utopian views of future cities of mobility. More-over these visionary cities were inspired by and based on industrialization and automation sustained by post war Japan rebuilding programs. Metabolist drawings metaphorically articulated an optimism for a highly adaptable architecture.
Kisho Kurokawa’a capsule tower built in 1971, has in a certain sense become the symbolic model of the Metabolist movement. Along with this modular tower, Kurokawa proposed renewed housing prototypes as the union of collective infrastructures onto which individualized dwelling units could be plugged, added and removed according to a building’s life-cycle needs. Developed in 1975 as a tourism hub in Bagdad, Iraq, the systemic illustration below pictures a typical metabolist comprehensive strategy for building and housing. The cylindrical infrastructure tower was conceived as a prestressed concrete, load-bearing servicing core, a tall “cob-hive” structure. The core would also act as a crane during construction and could conceivably continue to help maintain the structure over time. Capsule service space units plugged into the vertical core define living spaces while balcony platforms and curtain wall elements complete open served spaces and the architectural proposal. Kurokawa’s drawings represented the medium and message of this adaptable urbanity.
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| Kurokawa's proposal for a a vertical dwelling cluster |
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