Dr Claire Jamieson
University of Hertfordshire
The Narrative Drawing – Explorations Through the Work of NATØ
Emerging from Nigel Coates’s unit at the Architectural Association in 1983, NATØ continued the lineage of radicalism fostered by the school – and were, I argue, the last radical architectural group of the twentieth century. The group formed following the dramatic failure of the 1982-3 cohort by external examiners James Stirling and Ed Jones. Initially conceived around the production of a magazine, NATØ went on to produce several exhibitions together, alongside three issues of NATØ, disbanding in 1987 following a major installation at the Boston ICA.
Their approach was against the professional mainstream of architecture, both in discourse and in terms of practice– and sought to ‘destroy the notion of the profession…travel over the frontier and join the rest outside architecture’ – envisioning a city made by its inhabitants, without the top-down imposition of design by professionals.1
For a group of architects who never constructed a building together, the drawing was at the centre of NATØ's mode of expression. Indeed, it was the drawings for graduation project Albion that provoked Stirling and Jones to renounce the 1982-83 cohort. For Stirling, there was something particular about the students' method of representation which he considered so problematic. He said: 'each portfolio seems to be little more than a bunch of sketches with a few cartoons at the end.’2 The drawings I will discuss today demonstrate NATØ attempts to come close to the vitality and narrativity of the city through an abandonment of the controlled architectural line.
Narrative Drawing
NATØ’s architectural drawingsaimed not only to represent space, but to create an experience that was rich in narrative and that expressed the complexity of their subject – the decaying post-industrial city of London. Stan Allen has observed the difficulties that architectural drawing has in representing the complexity of the city, which he says require ‘techniques that engage time and change, shifting scales, mobile point of view, multiple programmes’ and that ‘to map this complexity, some measure of control may have to be relinquished.’3 Though Allen does not mention narrative, he describes many of the qualities that narratologists have argued both for and against in discussions of the narrative potential of the static image – particularly temporality.The implication is that the experience of the city is inherently narrative, and thus a narrative medium is required to represent it.
To dislocate the concept of narrative from the dominance of the text it is necessary to establish the ways in which narrative can operate in the static image. Narratologist Werner Wolf puts forward a strong framework for pictorial narrativity which starts with the way that we 'see' narratively: narrativisation.4Wolf describes narrativisation as the application of a 'narrative frame', a cognitive construct, culturally acquired, which describes the way that we use narrative to organise and structure information.5
He goes on to describe three attributes that anchor this process: 'experientiality', 'representationality' and 'meaningfulness'.6These are loosely defined as the ability for the image to produce an experience with intelligible meaning, beyond the effect of a description or report, and the depiction of a world where the individual elements make sense in their cohesion. These effects are induced through 'narratemes':including character, setting and action, chronology, causality, and teleology.7For Wolf, an image may possess narrativity to greater or lesser extent depending on the presence or absence of these narratemes – thus narrative is a scalar quality.
Echoing Wolf’s narrativisation, Richard Wollheim describes a process of 'seeing in', an innate mechanism that causes us to identify figures and other forms of recognisable representation in images even though the viewer is aware that the drawing is only marks on a page.8This process is involved and constructive, as Ernst Gombrichhas described:
The reading of a picture... happens in time, in fact it needs a very long time...We build it up in time and hold the bits and pieces we scan in readiness till they fall into place as an imaginable object or event, and it is this totality we perceive and check against the picture in front of us.9
The temporality of this viewing process is likened to a journey by Marco Frascari, who uses the term 'transitus' to describe the 'viewer's mental journey across an image in the act of interpretation'.10
Etienne Souriauexplains the contemplation of the drawing as akin to the time required to move around the sculptural object or through the spaces of a building, both of which involve the body, which is mirrored in the movement of the eye across the picture.11 He refers to the temporal expansion beyond the moment of the image that is established through deeply embedded references to time – the age of characters, the cultural and historical association of place or setting, the symbolism of objects and so on: thus, 'The time of the work radiates'.12This suggests that the way the image portrays temporality is quite different to the text, indeed, the image is able to convey more than one 'time' simultaneously – allowing flash-backs and flash-forwards to occur in a singleview.
Linked to the way the eye moves around the image is the structure of the image. Wolfdescribes three broad pictorial structures which convey temporality in different ways. The first, and most simplistic, is the single image or ‘monophase’ image, which presents a 'pregnant moment' – one moment represented within a larger sequence of action, where the rest is merely inferred.13 The potential in these images lies in their inherent incompleteness, or indeterminancy, that can be a 'powerful generator of curiosity' – compelling the viewer to fill in the gaps.14 The second type is the single image that contains more than one scene or moment in the narrative: a 'multiphase' or ‘polyphase’ image.15 The final mode is the 'serial' image, a narrative made from the combination of more than one individual monophase image, providing what narratologists consider to be the most determinate pictorial narrative.16
I will now go on to show how NATØ’s drawings push at the boundaries of pictorial narrativity, expressing narrative through the quality of their line, content, form and structure, and the way they worked as a group.
Towards a new expressionism
Under Coates’s guidance at the AA in the early 1980s, Unit 10 began a move towards a way of drawing architecture that was informal, immediate and physical. These drawings were a purposeful move away from the laborious and contrived conventional architectural drawing. As Coates explained:
Albion is presented with the kind of funny drawings that implant the feel through the pencil. A scribble, an attack, a transfer from factual form and back again. Drawing, but still real.17
Adrian Forty has contrasted written language’s ability to present vagueness, ambiguity and indefiniteness with the lack of such expression within the architectural drawing – either a mark on the page is there or it is not.18However, Forty makes a concession for the architectural sketch, accepting that it has the potential to communicate in ways that extend beyond the conventional drawing, coming closer to the subtleties of language.19He proposes that the quality of line in the architectural sketch is able to be tentative, exploratory and hesitant.
Writing on contemporary drawing, curator Emma Dexter describes the potential for presentness and immediacy when there is a strong relationship between the body and the marks on the page, constituting 'an unmediated record of an act'.20In recording the direct movement of the body across the page, the drawing describes a temporal process – 'a map of time' – a line cannot be drawn at once, it has a starting point that extends outwards.21These bodily and temporal qualities of the sketch can be clearly seen in NATØ’s drawings, which resisted the more perfected, abstract architectural line.
For the 1983 Albion project, NATØ took overlapping strips of a post-industrial site in Rotherhithe, working together to overlay projects for across-fertilisationof functions and forms. The drawings produced were perspectives and views onto scenes of action and parts of the building:
Plans and sections had mostly disappeared in favour of a lurid form of illustration that accompanied the elaborate 'stories' which manifested the workings of each particular part of the city under scrutiny by each student [...] it was full of imaginary content, character and portraiture of the people who would live in it.22
The Albion overview drawing by Martin Benson demonstrates the movement and pace that the fluid, sketched line could imbue. At first glance, the drawing appears to be moving, with an intrinsic energy created by the numerous lines, dashes, strokes and flourishes. Clive Ashwin describes breaks in the outline of a drawn form as 'escapements' – creatinga sensation of movement.23By contrast, a closed line reduces the ability to express indeterminacy and vagueness, providing a clearer, more definite outline of a form. Arrows sweeping across Benson's drawing, pointing in different directions, further the impression of action –vectors for the eye that suggest the infiltration of one thing with another.
Robert Mull’s Brookside drawings depicts five tin platforms housing civic functions which resemble table-tops, onto which are assembled a jumble of ‘totems’; as Mull describes:
Giant hat stands, tables, pets: these crudely drawn domestic landmarks become the toys for five civic playpens. Eating under huge tables, signing-on at the hat stands or walking your dog through the cut-out trees in the tin park, you become the player.24
Mull employs a messy, frantic style of sketch which evokes movement and activity around these platforms. A series of mixed-media drawings on collaged layers of paper reduces the scheme to its most basic set of totemic figures, eschewing architectural content in favour of a field of fragments ready to be activated by use: ‘like pieces in a board game with instructions list, they await the addition of motive’.25
Of particular feral energy are the drawings by Mark Prizeman. His Wolf Housing is encircled by a dog racing track, mixing home, leisure and other work functions in one strip of Albion, while part of the scheme is traversed by a large roof which houses a family of wolves. Asomewhat naïve-looking perspectival vignette, depicting a ragged courtyard with housing in the background, a dog track, and numerous individuals, is characteristic of Prizeman's work. Layers of action, characters, sub-scenes and situations are manipulated to animate the polyphaseimage into one of perpetual motion.
High levels of Wolf’s experientiality, representationality, and meaningfulness are embodied in the different actions and scenarios taking place. Indeterminancy is maintained through ambiguous chronology, causality, and teleology which engenders confusion and complexity.Literary theorist Gary Saul Morson has explained that narratives that contain such suspense and possibility can be described as having presentness – a heightened sense of the present moment that pertains to the multiplicity of possible, yet unwritten, futures.26The lack of clear end point or sequencing in this drawing is typical of NATØ's narrativity, which did not seek to present closed plots, but instead to evoke the continuous, cyclical, and open ended nature of the urban experience. For Wolf this would suggest lower narrativity than more concrete, resolved narratives, however I would argue that this is a strongly narrative work that evokes a different type of narrative – one that reflected the fragmented quality of the postmodern city.
Drawing time
NATØ’s ArkAlbion installation re-imagines the Southbank, exploding County Hall, Waterloo Station, and St Thomas' Hospital in a marauding landscape that fuses 'office, factory, shop, home, into one volatile city fibre'.27
Coates’swide polyphase sectionsand perspectivesare part of a larger installation of images and models, creating multiple layers of narrative. Individually,they act like tracking shots in a film – moving horizontally across a scene. The 'pregnant moment' is extended into a polyphase image, portraying one moment across a large area, so the viewer sees multiple scenes of action. The horizontality of the drawings encourages the viewer to physically move while reading them, with motion emphasised by the coloured streaks that draw the eye in different directions both inline-with or against the horizontality of the page.
Coates presents many 'times' at once within these drawings. By contrast,Jane Rendell observes that the conventional architectural plan and section show space as a slice in one moment of time – typically showing a static arrangement of space rather than use or inhabitation.28 This time is pleated, or folded, as parts of the drawing are rendered sparsely – producing the effect of skipping across them quickly – and others are drawn in greater detail, creating a pause in contemplation. Thus the drawings create structures of significance in a manner akin to the literary narrative, which is able to summarise parts of the story that are less important to the reader, and focus on the real-time detail of an event that is of greater consequence. Notably, this is a pattern that Delueze and Guattari evoke in their description of the urban condition as a mixture of 'smooth' and 'striated' spaces which contribute to an effect of 'differentials of speed, delays and accelerations, changes in orientation, continuous variations'.29It is this experience of moving through the city –the ebbs and flow between open and narrow spaces, crowded and empty, gridded and free-flowing – that NATØ suggest through their polyphase drawings.
From drawing to architecture
An important part of NATØ’s approach that is not acknowledged through the analysis of individual drawings is that they were conceived to be viewed as serial images – either arranged as a single project in NATØ magazine or in an installation such as ArkAlbion – an effect which is further doubled by their assumed backdrop against the existing city.The narrativity of NATØ’s drawings is strongest whenconsidered as a multivalent whole, a method that grew from the very nature of theeducational 'unit', described by Coates as 'an organism with its own cross-currents'.30The collaborative, multi-authored nature of NATØ worlds is a key part of the inherently tangled, multi-route mode of narrative that this approach generates. As such, a way of working and a strategy for drawing is also an attitude towards urbanism:
Architecturally, the effective dislocation of any single incident, whilst remaining intact as a single 'frame' in the overall narrative, reforms when it is brought to bear on its city context. Only parts of the story can them be glimpsed in the clearings between existing buildings. Individual scenes should be available for hijacking by the 'audience', as the starting point for an ever renewing plot.31
In this respect, the drawing (or the urban environment) provides enough markers and content to anchor recognition and intelligibility, but provides gaps for active, interpretative meanings.Coates describes this as a ‘loose fit’ mode of urbanism, where 'the city arises not so much as a result of planning, but via the collation of incidents and processes’ – against the planning and determinism of the architect’s masterplan.32
Word count: 2449
1.Mark Prizeman, handwritten note to NATØ members, February 1984. Private collection of Mark Prizeman.
2. Nigel Coates, 'Ghetto & Globe', NATØ, 1 (1984) pp.8-11. (p.8).
3. Stan Allen, Practice: Architecture, Technique and Representation, 2nd edn (Routledge, 2008), p.40.
4.Werner Wolf, 'Narrative and Narrativity: A Narratological Reconceptualization and Its Applicability to the Visual Arts', Word & Image, 19 (2003), pp.180–197.
5.Ibid., p.182.
6. Ibid., p.185.
7.Werner Wolf, ‘“Cross the Border - Close That Gap”: Towards an Intermedial Narratology’, European Journal of English Studies, 8 (2004), pp.81–103, (p.88)
8.Richard Wollhein, 'What the spectator sees' in Norman Bryson, Michael Ann Holly and Keith P. F. Moxey, Visual Theory: Painting and Interpretation (Polity [in association with Blackwell], 1991), p.119.
9. Ernst Gombrich, 'Moment and Movement in Art', Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 27 (1964), pp.293–306. (p.302)
10. Marco Frascari, 'From models to drawings: imagination and representation in architecture' in
Marco Frascari, Jonathan Hale and Bradley Starkey(eds.), From Models to Drawings: Imagination and
Representation in Architecture, Critiques (London ; New York: Routledge, 2007), p.28
11.Etienne Souriau, 'Time in the Plastic Arts', Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 7 (1949), pp.294–307.
12. Ibid., p.301.
13. Werner Wolf, (2003), p.190.
14. Marie-Laure Ryan, ‘Narration in various media’, Living Handbook of Narratology, [accessed 12.10.2017]
15. Werner Wolf, (2003), p.190.
16. Ibid.
17. Nigel Coates, ‘Ghetto & Globe’, p.11.
18.Adrian Forty, Words and Buildings: A Vocabulary of Modern Architecture (London: Thames & Hudson, 2004)
19. Ibid., pp.37-38.
20. Emma Dexter, Vitamin D: New Perspectives in Drawing (London; New York: Phaidon Press, 2005), pp.6-10. ( p.7)
21. Ibid., p.10.
22. Nigel Coates, Narrative Architecture(London: Wiley-Academy, 2012),p.58-60.
23. Clive Ashwin, 'Drawing, Design and Semiotics', Design Issues, 1 (1984), pp.42–52.
24. Robert Mull, 'Spanner in the Works', NATØ,1, (1984).pp.16-19.
25. Ibid., p.19.
26. Gary Saul Morson, ‘Narrativeness’, New Literary History, 34 (2003), pp.59–73.
27. Nigel Coates, 'ARKALBION', NATØ, 2 (1984), pp. 20-21.
28. Jane Rendel, 'Seeing time/Writing place' in Marco Frascari, Jonathan Hale and Bradley Starkey (eds.), (2007), pp.183-192.
29. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus (Continuum International Publishing Group, 2001), p.532.
30. Nigel Coates, 'Albion: The Art and Science City, Newsletter’. Private collection of Mark Prizeman.
31. Nigel Coates, ArkAlbion and six other project, (London: AA Publications, 1984), p.14.
32.Nigel Coates, 'Albion: The Art and Science City, Newsletter'.