Seeing the World Through Design

Designers, architects or landscape architects who draw and record their travels in sketches have a special way of seeing the world. It is a methodology where images are engraved in their mind rather than on film. The photograph shows you reality as seen through the camera lens, while the sketch records the emotion and character of place as seen through the eyes and hands of the designer.

I studied architecture at the University of Minnesota and Yale University and later was fortunate to win a Rome Prize Fellowship in Architecture to the American Academy in Rome. During the two years I lived there, I had the opportunity to travel extensively throughout Italy and Europe, drawing places that have a strong and close integration between humans, architecture, and landscape. To me the most beautiful places in the world are those that express this connection in a profoundly human way.

I find that when I look back at my sketches it was the rural hill towns in Italy that attracted me the most, because they were so different from the rural communities in Minnesota where I grew up. On a recent visit to Italy, my wife and I were having breakfast on a restaurant terrace in the hill town of Montepulciano and I made this sketch showing the edge of the city and the valley below (Figure above). The sketch illustrates the nature of an Italian hill town as a city on a hill where for centuries farmers lived together as a community, loaded up their donkeys in the morning and went down into the valley to grow food, and then returned in the evening back to the community.

Since my early travels in Europe, I now have over 35 sketch books filled with drawings that record places I have visited. They are important as I have expanded on my architectural and teaching careers, and later as founder/director of the Center for Rural Design at the University of Minnesota. The Center, now terminated, was the first in the world to consider design as a problem-solving process for rural issues.

Several of my sketches are included in my first two books to help explain rural places, and my third book now in process will include 200 drawings. The sketches are of rural places that have a strong connection between the natural and cultivated landscape, reflecting the character of people who live and work with the land, urban places where rural culture and agriculture are closely connected, and the most dramatic places where the land and water meet linking agriculture and boat transportation for transfer to food markets elsewhere.

Sometimes when I am sketching in a public area I will have a whole group of school kids hanging over my shoulder watching me draw. Other times they cluster around because they want to see what I am drawing, as in this photograph of me showing my sketches to young school kids in a rural village on the Ayerwaddy River in Myanmar. (Figure below).

My sketching technique is to use black ink pens on the site and then add watercolor later that evening in the hotel. The sketches are all of places that I think are exceptional and make a unique statement about the relationship between humans, animals, and environments. All have a relationship with the landscape that I found very interesting, meaningful, and beautiful.

  

Dewey Thorbeck, FAIA, FAAR