There is something we call work on paper. It usually refers to the process of sketching — plans, elevations, perspectives — that precedes the concrete work on a project. Through it, an architect conceives the form of the final scheme and works out the functions in plan and section.
Yet the phrase carries another meaning: work that lives on paper alone. Rather than the drafting of construction documents or the resolution of details, it prizes the effect expressed on the paper itself, seeking artistic satisfaction there.
Sometimes both attitudes reside in a single author. I cannot speak for other fields, but I suspect most are alike in this. In architecture — in architectural design above all — the distinction is unmistakably clear.
As in any field, architects differ in temperament. But in this work on paper, especially the latter kind, each author produces expressions so distinctive and personal that they are published as works in their own right.
And as I said at the outset, such works are often never realized as buildings, the final result of architecture; they remain expressed on paper alone. Some authors even call them finished works. So varied are the ways we think about what it takes to complete a building.
Consider the drawings of the Iraqi-born architect Zaha Hadid, familiar to us all. It is not clear whether they were drafted to realize a building, or drawn from the start simply as drawings. Not that none of her work was ever built — but a considerable part of it ends on paper.
At the great motor shows held around the world, leading carmakers unveil products astonishing in performance and design. Most are models soon to be released, or existing products enhanced in various ways. Yet what draws the most attention is the so-called concept car — the preliminary or research-and-development vehicle. It presents, ahead of time, an imagined function or design that has not yet reached production.
That experimental quality — work that does not necessarily advance to practical use — has something in common with architectural design that ends on paper. There must be a design stage in producing such cars too, and among those who work at that stage, surely some only ever work on paper.
Some among them never get the chance to present their work because it falls short; others, so absorbed in working on paper, drift toward forms impossible to build. At this point, such work must be regarded as a separate matter — one that has inevitably broken away from its original field.
Looking at the purpose of the two kinds of work: the essential starting point was design as the basic process of making some object. But in this divergent work, not making the object is not seen as failure or as meaningless — for the content generated on the page is itself taken as having made something.
And in practice, even to the eye and sensibility of someone with no connection to the field, such creations produce a shift in perception. They stir feelings of beauty, of wonder.
There are not yet architects who work on paper alone as a profession, nor buyers who purchase such work as a product, so it has not become an independent field. But it is not hard to imagine such a new field emerging. The effects rendered by today’s varied computer-graphics programs make this work all the more vibrant.
Let me pose a basic question: can the feelings stirred by the dazzling forms on paper also be felt in the building completed from them? Setting aside tangible factors like texture, color, and scale, the answer is very likely no — all the more so for the layperson who cannot read a drawing.
That is not to say these people understand nothing of what the work on paper means. They know, at least, that it is the product of work done for a building’s design. And they take no interest in comparing the work with the resulting building. The building is dwelt in and felt from within, or its view admired from without; the work on paper is appreciated on its own terms.
What, then, do all these things mean? Works are appearing that can sustain an architectural debate on their own — setting aside the actual building, drawing only on the work done beforehand. Trace this back, and we arrive at the error of speaking about architecture without engaging its essence.
Rather than straining to claim work on paper as a subordinate part of architecture, it is fairer to see it as a genuinely new artistic genre.
In this generation, where constructs and manufactures of every kind are produced — independent or fused — transforming our living environment, the functions and settings of architecture, too, are evolving beyond imagination.
Just as a work of architectural design — born of countless deliberations and experiments, of inquiry into detail and material — is judged by its users once complete, so too should the work on paper, conceptual design among it, be judged through another lens, granted its own meaning, and take its place as a member of the architectural world.