Otakar Novotný: Architectural Graphics

We understand architectural graphics as all efforts and attempts that aim to express the author's intentions in a drawn form, whether it concerns a proposal or the reproduction of a completed construction object. The word graphics is here fully justified in its broad sense, even though architectural graphics were only externally related to graphics in the raw sense, as their products are not the result of a technical printing process, but are originals just like other drawings. However, there is a similarity in both categories, that as ideas, emotional content, and material intentions change, so does graphical expression. It is, after all, not possible otherwise, as each era has its characteristic way of expression in architecture. The differences are not so much in the material, which remains more or less the same throughout time, remaining as the compass and ruler (in painting graphics, of course, auxiliary materials differ, such as wood and copper, steel and linoleum), nor are they in drawing technique (there are not such differences as between woodcut and heliogravure, between etching and aquatint). All these differences lie solely in the expressive intentions and abilities of the architect. We must clearly distinguish between these two concepts, despite the fact that one cannot be thought of without the other. In intention, this formative mental process, the state of contemporary culture is enclosed, with all its certainties and doubts, efforts and tendencies that stir the spiritual life of the time, which is pregnant with thoughts and fruitful in deeds. Intention as an initiatory agent then grants the ability to draw and is also controlled by it far more than in painting, since the architect essentially works on transferring his imagined spatial compositions into a real plane; the architect works in a plane without actually thinking about it, reproducing his spatial visions through drawing, without this graphic product being considered a finished and final work. The mode of expression thus depends on his thinking, and I do not think that in some cultural periods this was absent. There has not been a cultural era where manual skill lagged behind intention and imagination; each era indeed had the capability that it wanted and that artistic desire dictated. All those seemingly primitive forms (for example, in early Christian art) were not forced by the incapacity of the hand but by the will of the author.
The intellectually mystical complexity of Gothic, which ultimately leads, after all, to earnest efforts for the objectivity of the artistic, has left us graphic monuments that appear inept, where the objectivity of architecture is emphasized at the expense of geometrically accurate perspective. It was not the ineptness of the hand that caused this; it was the desire for universal clarity and intuitive exploration of both the whole and the details. And culture continues as long as imagination prevails, overpowering the graphic ability of the hand, and then decay begins when skill and virtuosity triumph at the expense of content. This happens in the early days of the Renaissance when there are efforts to disguise the fundamentally unartistic; we find in this period designs of painted architectures where real windows are surrounded by painting so that they paradoxically seem to emerge from it, instead of being the basic tectonic element to which painting refers. Here, then, the manual abilities are already being released, and fictive architectures are at work, which threaten the structure's integrity. However, the flourishing of the Renaissance halted the rapid decline, indeed due to its intellectual solidity in art and crafts. Architectural designs par excellence emerge, with features that are entirely schoolish, which speak more of their aim for actual realization than of the necessary eruptive expression of the architect's soul. Truly artistic expressions were exhausted in proposals for painted decorations and plastic embellishments, in which Renaissance architects were just as great masters as in construction. However, Baroque reasserted the desire for fiction, certainly aided by the development of theater, which, although it walks hand in hand with the rest of culture and is dictated by it, again reflects its influences in real architectures. Baroque loves distant vedutas, generous interiors with extraordinary perspectives, and surprising details, being carried away by a desire for the extraordinary and the supernatural, until the entire Baroque illusionism culminates in the visionary architectures of Piranesi. This direction had to inevitably end in reaction, and thus the end of the eighteenth century produces solid drawings that are antiquised, whose true period origin reveals only naive Rococo staffage. Ideas are organized, the brain calms down, and the boundary between the two centuries is characterized both by romantic reminiscences (proposals for new constructions but artificially fallen, picturesque drawings of antiquities and ruins) and also by earnest studies of historical styles, especially antiquity. Thus are active Herrmann Neefe, originally a painter, in France Charles Percier, in Germany Friedrich Gilly, Antonio Pian, but above all Schinkel and his student Schadow. We need not have preserved a single painter or sculptor from that time; Schinkel, the architect, would himself accurately depict all the contemporary artistic culture and all concurrent academic tendencies in his works. With Schinkel, the development of true architectural graphics ends, and the entire century is filled with capable attempts few of which stand out above the low level, in which the sketches by Rieth, Klouček, and the works of students of the Paris École des Beaux Arts shine during their time.
It is certain that the entire direction of architectural graphics was aimed at its formal independence at the expense of its substantial underpinning. Gradually, the immediacy of the relationship between design and execution loses its presence, both factors, in Gothic for example, entirely inseparable, gain independence over time to their mutual detriment. In the fourteenth century, we find only small graphic notes sufficient for actual execution; the Renaissance replaces them with more thorough plans and auxiliary models, and around the year 1900 we are flooded with a multitude of drawn paper, without a single great architectural work arising from it.