Talking with hands

A decade ago, a small group of architects, professors at the Polytechnic University of Catalonia, landed in Russian territory to teach postgraduate courses in architecture. Among the students were graduates from different specialties, not only in architecture, but also in sociology, politics and economics. The course, entitled Building the City Now, was conceived as a laboratory of ideas open to different specialties, with the city as the setting and field of study.

It was a time of a certain openness of the government of Vladimir Putin and Saint Petersburg, a city known as the Venice of the North, founded in 1703 by Tsar Peter the Great with the intention of being “a window to Europe”, was the place chosen for the adventure.

The weight of the history of what was Leningrad until the fall of the “Iron Curtain”, the harsh climate, but above all the language, with a Cyrillic alphabet of a discouraging initial opacity, undoubtedly weighed on that team of young teachers, among whom not one spoke a single word of Russian.

The language they established for communication was English, despite the difficulties of understanding of many Russian students who probably still suffered from the years of isolation from the West.

However, in a few weeks, verbal or written communication between teachers and students ceased to be a problem. They soon discovered that drawing, probably the most universal language in our world and the most common tool among architecture and design professionals in general, would be the main system of communication and relationship.

In the same way that a person with difficulties in perception in one of their senses ends up developing the rest more, in this case, the difficulties in expressing themselves orally or in writing in a language that was not their own exponentially enhanced the use of drawing and graphic expression in general.

Accidentally, what is desirable to happen in many architecture project classes happened, and that is that students draw more. In other words: that they find through drawing a way of expressing themselves and representing their ideas.

“It seems that, given the choice, people prefer to let our hands speak, taking for granted that an image is worth a thousand words”

What is truly remarkable in this case is that drawing was used indiscriminately by all the students, whether they were architects or not. We could say that, once the initial fear of those not accustomed to using it was overcome, drawing ceased to be the exclusive heritage of architects and became a communication tool for all people. In some way, an innate ability to express oneself graphically was awakened, which makes us wonder what came first in our evolution as humans, oral language or drawing.

As the Finnish architect Juhani Pallasmaa explains in his book The Thinking Hand, there are theories that consider the gestures of the body, and in particular of the hands, as the first evolutionary phase towards written and spoken language. When drawing, he adds, we are actually touching and feeling the objects we want to represent.

Drawing allows us to analyze and learn about the world. Santiago Ramón y Cajal’s discoveries in the field of neuroscience are well known, for which he received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1906. A work that basically consisted of tracing and drawing obsessively on enlarged microscope samples of nervous tissues, recognizing systems and connections, which were revealed before his eyes while he reviewed them with a fountain pen. The importance of these drawings was so great that Ramón y Cajal’s legacy transcended his own discipline, since he invented methods of developing and staining that revolutionized photographic representation techniques.

In architecture and other arts related to design, drawing, in addition to a convention for representing an object or a building, is a tool for prospecting and knowledge. It is, as Pallasmaa states, the value of uncertainty, a communication with ourselves in search of something that we do not know in advance. Drawing a parallel with spoken language, tentative drawing would be a babbling that allows sender and receiver to use imprecise language to find a point of agreement.

It is common that, in the discussion of an architectural project, clients end up taking the pencil out of our hands to explain to us what they are unable to convey in words. It seems that, given the choice, people prefer to let their hands do the talking, taking for granted that a picture is worth a thousand words.