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04- 2020 – ARCH+ issue 238: Architectural Ethnography

What does it mean when architects once again increasingly turn toward the lifeworld in an ethnographically descriptive manner? To indicate that this is a critical approach, it shall here be provisionally called reflexive ethnography. Reflexive means developing an awareness of the power imbalance between observers and those being observed, of the Other within us. It is a method with which we open up the world to ourselves through drawing, in order to uncover our own entanglements in the most diverse regimes and networks, or the potentials and ambitions of a societal situation.

Club Colombia, Jan Rothuizen

My interest in making drawings of cities originally emerged from the frustration of working as a solitary artist in my studio. After years of working in isolation, I realized that I felt, thought, and saw much more when I was outside of my studio, walking through cities. Therefore, I decided to start sharing graphic stories about my day-to-day experiences. I began by simply recording my walks in text, photos, and sketches, and from there I gradually developed an approach to drawing that combines text and images in a way that pays equal attention to both. My drawings mostly consist of detailed graphic and written stories of the places I visit. They are like the windows through which I observe the everyday. I see my role as an artist like that of a prompter, providing the viewer with brief commentaries and annotations about the people and things I encounter. After reading Jonathan Raban’s book Soft City (1974), I realized that my method of exploration parallels his way of presenting London as the threshold between the real, the imaginary and the personal experience of the author. The format of my drawings is non-linear, in the sense that the drawings do not have a predetermined reading order. It is up to the observer to decide where to start or in which direction to read. More recently, I have used a combination of drawings, photos, videos and animations in a freely navigable digital interface as a way of experimenting with open-ended graphic stories.

The project Club Colombia is one of such stories. I am currently developing it as a book and as an interactive online film project based on my visits to Colombia. One of my first drawings for Club Colombia is an annotated map of my walks through downtown Bogotá, during which I take notes about everything that catches my attention around me. In a second phase, I went on choosing a number of specific locations that I found the most appropriate entry points to tell a series of stories about Colombia’s past, present and future. While I was in Medellín, for example, I made a perspective drawing of the square in front of the Iglesia Vera Cruz, right in the middle of one of the busiest commercial areas in the city. The choice of using a perspective view, rather than a plan, like in Bogotá, was based on the fieldwork information that I had gathered there and on the form of the narrative I wanted to adopt for this specific scene. By using a single perspective, I could place the viewer right in the middle of this busy square, whereas the montage into a panorama allowed me to unravel its features in greater detail. Back in Bogotá, I visited a family living in an apartment block built for refugees. I sketched the floor plan of the flat and took detailed notes about their furniture and about the objects that defined their domestic space. I later drew a close-up of the bedroom of Juan José, a thirteen years old boy, in which I included sketches of all his belongings (a poster on the wall, two tennis rackets, a trolley used as a bed- side table etc.), as well as small written notes that reveal information about his personal life story. The close-up of the room is placed side-by-side an aerial view of the entire housing block in its urban context, with an explosion of the apartment where Juan José lives with his family. These jumps in scale and detail allow the viewer to grasp a rough, yet dense idea of what the world of a thirteen-years-old is like in the refugee’s accommodations, while maintaining a level of abstraction that is not possible to achieve with photographs.

On the field my senses are my most valuable instruments. Yi-Fu Tuan, the father of so-called humanistic geography, has argued that the notion of place is the reflection of one’s subjective perspective and of one’s social background: my own methodology is closely aligned to this approach. When I visit a place, I remain alert to inwardly directed sensations, like the fear of heights or claustrophobia. I am also aware of social differences that affect my experience. For instance, when I walk through downtown Bogotá or Medellín, I stand out as a “gringo,” whereas in more affluent areas I am hardly aware of my European background or of my skin color. When I go on a field visit, I prefer to go out on my own, so I am more open to experience my surroundings, as opposed to being in a group. Furthermore, I often try to be actively involved, engaging with people or showing them examples of my drawings in order to informally obtain local knowledge that I then use to draw my stories.

I don’t draw much on location. Therefore, in an attempt to come to grips with the barrage of impressions, I write down everything I see, feel and think. Besides this, I take snapshots with my phone or camera, which I can refer to when making the drawings. I sometimes print out small format maps of the area so I can position my notes in space. This way, when I work on a drawing, I am aware of the smallest details, as for instance that at 15:18 a man crossed that specific street talking on his phone. I like to add such dry facts to the drawing and to play with the hierarchy of information to reflect the vast variety of sources that I encounter during my visits. As a result, my notes shift continuously between the personal, the general, the trivial and the matter-of-fact. After a lot of pencil sketches on a big 50×65 cm paper sheet, and once everything is in place, I trace the drawing in ink with a dip pen, often adding things to it that I had not thought of earlier.

I like to think of this method of receiving information back from the experiences of walking through the city as a kind of “echolocation.” When I walk around with my sketchbook, overwhelmed with impressions like during my first walks through Bogotá, I make myself the drawing’s focal point in the same way as bats do when they navigate their surroundings. This form of taking notes later helps me to navigate through my own drawings. Filtered in this process of recalling, the information that comes back to me is fixed on paper to produce an image of the places I visit that is accurate yet entirely subjective.