48-357 Anatomy and Organic Form
9 units, Carnegie Mellon University
This course arises out of a brief exchange I had with Tom Maynes, Morphosis Architects, during the QA following a lecture he presented at CMU during the spring semester 2010. During that lecture, he had declared drawing dead for architectsthis despite the fact that the most compelling explanations he made during his talk were done with rather good gestural drawings. It had seemed to me that the work he showed lacked formal order, complexity, scale and proportion goo would be a good word for my sense of it, and I have speculated ever since that a course in classical anatomy would be helpful in addressing those weaknesses in their idiom. Closer to home, I began to think it would be important for our students because they as all students do will tend to pursue the formal clichs of our time Maynes, Patrick Schumacher etc. In effect, there is an assumption behind this course that through drawing that focuses consciously upon the formal order of real organic conditions, we can come to assimilate a sense of that order in a way that can make it ultimately transferrable to design. A more nearterm goal is that by drawing organic shapes and forms, students will gain strength in understanding the geometry of nonrectilinear shapes and strengthen their ability to visualize them. This course is a studio drawing course centered on figuredrawing. Prescribed media are limitedcharcoal and cont principallyand may be supplemented by students as desired. The course has three parts Part 1 centers on the skeletal structure of dinosaurs and three conditions hips, shoulders and torso. Part 2 develops techniques for figure drawing. Part 3 adds tissue, muscle and tendon, to consider whole systems of the human body. Within part three is an indepth project focusing on a subject of a students own choice. Students can expect to spend 9 hours per week on the course inand out of class.
Prerequisites: 62-126 or 48-126
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