Mapping Sites - East: Expressing Interest

This is an extract from East Architect's book 'East: Expressing Interest'. It's a valuable introduction to their approach to understanding a site through mapping. 

This is our favourite way of drawing

Sticking more and more bits of paper to the first one, getting out the wider sketching paper, using the finest black pen around. Writing what you cannot draw. Drawing with four hands, as Jonathan Sergison describes it in his introduction, or even six, it feels like an occasion, with everyone sitting around the table talking excitedly, adding more and more detail, so that the thing on the table becomes complex and comprehensive. Doing this in a group makes you recall and spell out what is so clear in your head both verbally and on paper, one helping along the other.

The ‘thing on the table’ is usually a map, and we are talking about a place. We are trying to be as precise as possible. Every little granite sett, every name, every window might be important, and might help ... in our understanding of where we’re going to. This is not the time to make judgements or to generalise, or for wishing that the world was more tidy or operated according to your ideas or design principles. Wanting to do this drawing – the desire and the process – changes the way I look at a site.

observe the street, from time to time, with some concern for system perhaps. apply yourself. take your time....

note down what you can see. anything worthy of note going on. Do you know how to see what’s worthy of note? is there anything that strikes you? nothing strikes you. You don’t know how to see.

You must set about it more slowly, almost stupidly. Force yourself to write down what is of no interest, what is most obvious, most common, most colourless....

Don’t say, don’t write ‘etc.’ Make an effort to exhaust the subject, even if that seems grotesque, or pointless, or stupid. You still haven’t looked at anything, you’ve merely picked out what you’ve long ago picked out.
George Perec, Species of Spaces and other Pieces.

The drawing is an instrument that reveals or charts the specific conditions of a place with all its complexity, conflicts, contradictions – the banal as well as the sublime. Once this drawing exists, a commitment is made. The room is full of potential. Each opportunity and idea is sparked by something recorded and it is difficult for propositions not to be specific to the given conditions, and impossible to revert to the safety of urban design jargon involving axis, gateways, markers, piazzas and other formal gestures.

These, in any case, can only be drawn with thick marker pens.

The hairy drawing is also an early indication of the urge to extend and adjust a brief, to create loose ends, not all of which need to be tied in. More often than not, the extent of a site is already irregular and uneven. A drawing can test and retest whether the edges are right, or if they are solely determined by practicalities such as ownership or funding, or the preference of a single public sector client. As the public realm does not operate in isolation from its surrounds, the best commissions are those open to negotiation.