Just a quicky

I went to life drawing tonight and realised something quite important.

If I'm going to do any decent life drawing there needs to be a balance.  A balance between loosening up enough to get a pencil line on the paper but aware enough to put the right stroke on the paper or at least step back afterwards and check that line and proportion was right.

The same analogy can be said for designing. During our lecture on Monday Julia gave us a great lecture on materiality and Jamie piped in. He talked about being a great designer.  His justifications for this were:

1. He had a big head
2. He reasoned what he did and had already answered his 'why what how'.
3. He only worked with people who agreed he was great.

Ok, by his last admission he could have hoisted himself by his own petard BUT there has to be a balance within good design between grounded creativity and good cold hard practical reason. I have a propensity to become nervous and adrenal and then before I know it I'm carried off down the wrong track without asking myself any clear questions.

My first impression of Calverley Ground was that I really liked the sandstone retaining walls at the back and wanted to retain them and follow them through in my design.  I have however missed an incredible design opportunity to introduce something really interesting to my design by just blankly dismissing other options and not properly questioning why I want to continue with sandstone.

I had that horrible moment where I wanted to collect my master planning and redo it. In life drawing the model pulls a pose that you think you know but you have to really look and question that pose to fully understand it. Keep questioning.