In my first semester of architecture school I drew a curve. Long and wiggling, ducking in and out of itself. It was a wall. I was happy.
When I showed it to my teacher she laughed. How did you construct that, she asked. I just drew it, I said. She laughed again. You can’t do that—you can’t just draw a curve. You have to build it from other stuff, circles and arcs and describable geometry. She showed me a project all architecture teachers love, a cheeky primer on how to draw a croissant using tangents, radii, etc. Ignoring the primer, which made my mind and eyes bleed, I tried to explain that I fundamentally didn’t understand why someone, including me, could not simply draw a curve.
She was gracious, a patient and usually careful educator. But decades of swimming in the sweet chlorine of architecture had rotted part of her brain, and she could not respond with precision. It’s not done, she said. Now take your curve and r-r-r-r-rationalize it. No, you may not “just draw” a curve. You just CAN’T!
Five years later, there are curves in a project I am trying to get built, a little park in New York City. I didn’t make the curves, someone else did, and they are rational. And now I know why: it’s cheaper and faster. She could have just said that, but it would have been crass.
Fear of money really slows things down. I would have liked to learn how to draw a cheap curve that could be created with off-the-shelf products or a simple fabrication process. Instead, proudly thinking that I was rejecting an exercise in fetishistic formalism and the tawdry imprint of Europe (see: croissant), I spent the rest of that semester drawing curves that only Lauren Sánchez could afford. Lauren, if you are reading this, my curves are still for sale.
Tunnel of dust 