Environmental representation: Bridging the drawings and historiography of Mediterranean vernacular architecture

Abstract

Architectural drawings, which are projections of spaces on a paper surface, can be categorized according to the projections’ directional and temporal relation with the represented space. A projection becomes a documentation when it departs from an existing spatial organization for recording it on paper. The projection serves the design process when it departs from the present to foresee a spatial proposal in the future. While the former records the present within limited interpretive range, the latter is more constructive.  While these two types of projections are known widely, there is another highly interpretive type of projection, the potentials of which, are generally underestimated. As the architectural historian’s tool, this third projection type represents bygone architecture. The task of this drawing, which is one of the least questioned issues of architectural history, is to restore an incomplete image by referring to material and textual sources. This drawing type contributes to the methodology of architectural historiography while conceiving, explaining and representing space.

For illustrating this situation, this study analyzes the vernacular settlements and their environmental integration because this selected context reveals the interpretive nature of the third type of projection in a successful way. In this framework, the cut-away axonometric is considered as an appropriate drawing method for uncovering the integrity between architecture and its site or culture and nature. The outcome of this theoretical insight into the prolific relations between drawing and architectural history is coined as “environmental representation.”

In history architectural products have been integral components of the environment. Then, the architectural representation of historical buildings through drawings becomes critical since the majority of architectural drawings tend to isolate buildings from their environment. This conventional representation of historical architecture has been the dominant tool of typological analysis. Typology, which is intertwined with plan drawings, categorizes historical buildings according to their spatial, structural and material organizations and disengages the buildings from their socio-cultural and environmental context. If this methodological problem of typology is regarded as a problem of drawing, a new mode of “environmental representation” can be proposed.

This study proposes “environmental representation” of architecture through cut-away axonometric. This graphic proposal is based upon the theoretical references of “environmental aesthetics”, which is an interdisciplinary field analyzing the participatory human engagement in environment. “Aesthetics,” as a term, defines this bodily engagement into environment through the use of all human senses. In this theoretical framework this study challenges the assumptions of scientific theory for architectural representation of the “abstracted object” and proposes an alternative method of “environmental representation” on the basis of “aesthetics”. Within this scope, the proposed cut-away axonometric drawings produced by the author is analyzed in order to represent exemplary historical contexts of architecture selected through the vernacular settlements of the Anatolian Mediterranean.