A student project at the Royal College of Art.
I have very few drawings attesting to the intense design development of this project since our design tutor, the patrician architect James GOWAN, was convinced I could not ‘see’ the scheme amidst the maze of 0,13 setting-out lines I had overlaid on tracing paper. (A habit copiously indulged in the office of Aldo ROSSI, who even preferred my underlays to the finished drawings.)
So I binned them all and drew the scheme up again from the memory, every scale dimension being clearly fixed in that of my hands. (That other parts of the body other than the brain record memory is now recognised. Yet scientists remain light years behind what artists have always known.)
This project was an exercice in composing a plastically referential architecture that nods and winks at the Arts & Crafts neighbours (Adams, Godwin, May, Shaw, Voysey), not to mention other contemporary maestri such as Rennie Mackintosh.
Given my desire to manifest the precise three-dimensional positioning of each element which I had kept in my mind’s eye, it seemed a suitable challenge to illustrate the very texture of the natural materials (stone, brick, metalwork, painted timber) which are the hallmark Arts & Crafts architecture. This interior perspective took a month to draw with cross-hatching in up to five directions. The astute observer will find my signature.
Exhibited at my Royal College of Art diploma show in 1984, the drawing attracted a fair amount of interest, and a short run of prints on cartridge paper (with a hand-drawn line in red ink) was done for the Manspace Gallery. One was exhibited, and sold, at the Royal Academy of Arts Summer Exhibition in 1985. Another was acquired by fellow student and collector Peter FLEISSIG, for his nascent Museum Without Walls.
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