How to draw a story
November 8th, 2009Last week I was having a look through the first site that ever sat on this domain. It was an architecture and photography portfolio from my uni years, and whilst clicking about I stumbled across an old project.
The project was to design a school on a brownfield site to form part of a brand new extension to a town just outside Edinburgh called Granton.
With only 3D models of what the rest of the new town was going to look like, sources of inspiration were limited to the history of the site and the surrounding architectural remnants. I decided to try and design the school so that it would tell a story. The story didn’t have a beginning, middle, and an end, per se, but it told the history of the ‘place’ and how it connected to the rest of Scotland. I racked my brains for weeks over how to use different vistas of the same space, or interlocking spaces to give just enough info and evoke just enough emotion to covey this story of sorts.
Flicking through my notes I saw this quote:
“Often a transition is marked by a structure,
as a sentence is marked by punctuation,
bringing pause in the rhythm of one’s progress.”Ian Hamilton Findlay
I wasn’t totally happy with the final design, but I always though that the ambition was an honourable one. Perhaps if I’d been reading www.xkcd.com back then I’d have had more success.
Here’s how to draw a story:
That there is top notch data visualisation. ;)
