Fieldwork
Exercises
General Guidelines
These exercises develop the field methods at the center of the course. Each one hybridizes measurement and drawing. Each one returns representations and data you can carry into the studio.
Work in metric. Every sketch you make in the field carries a dimension and a benchmark. Where you draw by eye, add the annotations that turn the sketch into a record. The metric reference is your field companion. Use it until you build a metric spatial intuition.
Your phone is an instrument and should not be a distraction.
It records photography and video.
It scans with lidar and photogrammetry.
It can record field notes via voice or text.
It can record environmental sound.
It can take measurement and record location.
It does not take the place of your pencil, pen, and sketchbook. The two tools answer different questions and you will need both. The pencil requires observation and craft in the moment to record relation and structure. The phone captures the environment but often requires post processing. Together they make a record that neither alone could make.
Field exercises are designed for three hours on site, and the studio exercise for two to three hours. In Charlottesville, exercises are assigned on Tuesday in class and due the following Monday at 2200. In Italy, each exercise belongs to its week and is due Sunday at 2200. All times are local.
Submit each exercise to Canvas as you complete it. Scan your analog work on a flatbed scanner when you return to Charlottesville, color correct it, and submit a final version. Label every drawing with the exercise number and your name.
Part 1 · Charlottesville
The first three exercises test and build a series of methods before you depart. They do not require the project site or the lagoon. They require attention and criticality, and they can be done at the school, at home, or anywhere in the city.
Calibration
3 hours on site.
Before you measure anything, your body must know what a meter is. This exercise builds that intuition in two moves, first through the body, then through the scale of the places you will draw.
Part 1 · The body as measure. Measure yourself first. Your pace, the length of your stride. Your hand span, the width of your palm, the reach of your arm. Your height. Your foot. Record each in meters and centimeters, and carry those numbers in your sketchbook. Then use the body to measure the places around you. A room. A corridor. A stair. A doorway. A sidewalk. A courtyard. Walk the distance and count the paces. Span the width with your hand. Compare your body's estimate to the tape measure, and record the error. The error is the point. It tells you how reliably your body can hold a dimension.
Part 2 · Scale references. Now move from the body to the site. Draw Torcello at scale, and set it against three places you already know, the National Mall in Washington, Central Park in New York, a city block from the city you know best. Or take a building or a landscape project you admire and place it into the island to see how much of Torcello it would occupy. Draw Venice the same way, set against three references of your own. Draw the lagoon the same way, set against a city footprint or a natural feature you can hold in your mind. These are drawings at scale, not sketches. Frame them in whatever way helps you see. The point is to learn metric drawing scale and to build a reference for the physical scale of Torcello.
Deliverable. Several sketchbook pages or prints. Your body measurements, a measured plan or section of a space you know, and the scale drawings that set Torcello, Venice, and the lagoon in comparison to the references you chose.
Recording
3 hours on site.
This exercise makes you fluent in your tools. You will record the same element in at least three ways, and learn what each way captures and what it misses.
Part 1 · The tools. Test everything. The phone camera, still and moving. The panoramic mode. The lidar scan. The measuring tape. The sketchbook and pencil. Find a single site element that rewards close attention. A tree. A stair. A wall. A bench. A doorway. Record it with each tool, one after the other, and note what each tool does well and what it does badly. The camera flattens. The scan gives distance. The tape gives precision. The hand gives structure.
Part 2 · A systematic protocol. Choose one element and record it completely. A measured plan and a measured section, every dimension and benchmark written in. A photograph with a scale reference in the frame, a tape or a ruler or your own hand. A lidar scan that you can export and open in modeling software. A short video that moves through the element the way a body would, or sits still and records small changes. Then lay the records side by side and compare them. Where do they agree. Where do they disagree. What does the drawing know that the scan does not.
Part 3 · Comfort through repetition. Repeat the protocol on at least two more elements until the sequence feels natural. You are not looking for novelty. You are looking for a method you can use reliably, because in the field you will need to work fast, think deeply and use a method that won't slow you down.
Deliverable. The recording of your primary element, the comparison sheet, and the repeated and evolving protocols from at least two other elements.
Processing and Curating
2-3 hours.
The field recording is not finished when you close the sketchbook. It is finished when it has been brought into the studio, read, and connected to your design process. This exercise asks you to process what you gathered and to curate it into a coherent record.
Part 1 · Bring it in. Take the scans, photographs, and drawings from Exercise 02 and bring them into the studio. Import the lidar scan and the photographs into Rhino or into a point cloud viewer. Align your measured drawings against the digital captures. Where the drawing and the scan diverge, find the reason. The scan is not more true than the drawing. Each one distorts in its own way, and the difference between them is information.
Part 2 · Annotate and interpret. Return to your drawings with the digital record beside you. Add the annotations you could not add in the field. Correct the dimensions. Add the benchmarks. Then begin to interpret. Overlay the scan on the drawing. Trace a pattern you did not see while you were drawing it. Ask what the record is telling you, and write that question on the sheet.
Part 3 · Curate. Assemble the work into a single coherent record, a spread or a series of sheets that makes an argument. Choose what matters and leave out what does not. A curated record is not a folder of everything. It is a claim about what the elements are, made through what you chose to show.
Deliverable. A curated series of sheets or a spread that combines drawing, dimension, scan, and annotation into one argument about the elements.
Part 2 · Italy
Six exercises, one for each week of the residency except the final week in Vicenza, which is given to the studio workshop. Each joins measurement and drawing. Each returns data that can be carried into Rhino and into the studio.
The River
3 hours on site.
The rivers made the lagoon. The Bacchiglione, the Adige and the Sile carried water and sediment toward the sea, and Venice spent six centuries diverting them away. Before you read the lagoon, read the rivers that feed it. This exercise works across the river cities of the week, Vicenza and Verona and Treviso, measuring how water is controlled where it runs as a river rather than as a tide.
Part 1 · Modulating structures. Find the structures that direct and transform the flow. The weirs, the sluices, the channelized banks, the confluences where one river joins another. Draw them in plan and in section, and dimension them. Where the water surface changes elevation, find the detail that makes the change happen and record how much it falls.
Part 2 · Textures and evidence. Along the bank, collect samples of textural difference that tell you about the water. The range of stone and sediment sizes across a point bar. The vegetation that grows at one water level and not another. The surface of the water itself, smooth where it runs deep and broken where it runs fast. Measure what you collect. The size of the stone, the height of the vegetation line, the speed you estimate by timing a floating object across a known distance.
Part 3 · Urban adjacencies. Choose two moments where the city meets the river and record how it allows or refuses that meeting. Draw a section across the city, down to the water, and back up the far side, with dimensions and benchmarks. Use the phone as you go. Scan the bank, photograph the details, and take the video that will let you return to the moment later.
Deliverable. Measured sections of the modulating structures, the texture evidence with dimensions, two city-river-city sections, and the phone captures to accompany them.
The Source
3 hours on site.
The rivers you read last week begin here. The Alps are the headwaters of the lagoon, where snowmelt and rain gather, cut channels, and start sediment on its long way to the sea. This exercise reads the mountains where the water begins, through topography and hydrology. It is a field exercise and a quick one. Draw on site and submit your field drawings. No post-processing.
Part 1 · The landform. Read the shape of the valley. Draw the ridge, the slope and the floor in section, dimensioned and benchmarked. Mark the angle of the slope. Mark the change in elevation. Read the way the ground falls from peak to river. You are learning to read the form the water moves through.
Part 2 · The water. Find the water in the landscape. The river. The stream. The meltwater channel. The spring. Draw where the water gathers and where it runs. Follow it a little. Mark the channel and the bank. Mark the gravel. Find where the water cuts and where it deposits. Measure what you can. The width of the stream. The drop of the channel. The size of the stones it carries.
Part 3 · The connection. Draw the path from the mountains to the plain as a single diagram. Where the water starts. How it gathers. What it carries down. This is the link between the source and the lagoon, drawn as a section or a notation you can carry back.
Deliverable. The field drawings, submitted as they are. No post-processing necessary. The section of the landform, the water drawings and the mountain-to-plain diagram.
Torcello
3 hours on site.
Torcello is the first Venice, the place the lagoon began, now reduced to a basilica, a bell tower, two restaurants, and fourteen residents. It is the studio's site and the course's center. This exercise reads the island through time, and it does so slowly, because the things that matter on Torcello do not reveal themselves to a quick look.
Part 1 · A meditation. Sit still. Put the sketchbook and the phone away and observe from a fixed point for fifteen minutes. Sense the environment without mediation. The movement. The sound. The wind in the grass. Notice the rhythms and the punctuations, and let yourself begin to differentiate what you are sensing. Repeat the sitting if it helps. This is not wasted time. It is the method.
Part 2 · Structuring. From your fixed point, draw a plan and a section that describe the structure of the space, the edges, the architecture, the planting, the ground. Draw them proportionally, with dimensions and benchmarks, so that they document the physical facts of the place.
Part 3 · Notation. Below each drawing, make a timeline of thirty minutes, ticked at each minute. Set a timer and observe again, recording what you see and hear and smell onto the timeline. Develop a notation that distinguishes a person walking from the wind in tall grass, that separates the punctuations from the rhythms. Then redraw the plan and the section in that notation, layering time onto space. Allow the technique to evolve. When it works, begin to layer in history, the events that shaped what you observe, and to project forward, toward what is coming into being.
Deliverable. The plan and section with dimensions, the thirty-minute timeline, and the redrawn plan and section in your notation of time.
The Fabric
3 hours on site.
Venice is a city assembled from a lagoon. Its fabric is the record of that assembly, stone and brick and timber joined against water, and the detail is where the whole tale is told. This exercise reads the city through its details, the small joins that carry the large logic.
Part 1 · Part to whole. Find details that tell the tale of a space. The joint where a wall meets the water. The threshold where stone meets stone. The corner where three materials come together. Choose a few that speak to the whole, and understand how the detail and the entirety explain each other. Draw them with care, and dimension what you draw.
Part 2 · Measure the detail. Dimension the detail completely. The thickness of the stone, the width of the joint, the height of the step above the water. Record the benchmark that locates it against the tide. A detail without a dimension is a picture. A detail with a dimension is a specification, and it is the specification that lets you understand how the thing was built and how it holds.
Part 3 · Detail to territory. Relate the detail to the lagoon. Istrian stone that resists salt. Brick laid against rising water. Timber driven into mud. Each material is a decision about the water that surrounds it. Represent the connection, and photograph or scan the detail so that you can carry it back to the studio.
Deliverable. The measured details, each dimensioned and benchmarked, with a written account of what each detail tells about the lagoon, and the phone captures.
The Water
3 hours on site.
Water is the medium of the city, and most of the time we look past it to the stone. This exercise reverses that. It reads space through the water, the water that flows through the city and beneath it, the water that is collected and conveyed and cleaned by the constructed ground.
Part 1 · Spatial organization. Choose a campiello, a campo, or a garden, and diagram its spatial organization. The axes, the enclosure, the layers, the planted form. Draw the place as it is built.
Part 2 · The structure of water. Now re-see the same space through the lens of water. Where does the surface water go when it rains. Where is it collected, where is it conveyed, where does it meet the lagoon. How is the well fed, how does the cistern work, how does the ground shed the tide. Be experimental. Draw the water, not the stone. It may be a mess, but it will be a mess where you learned something, and it will train your eye to see the water that the city is built on.
Part 3 · Measure the water. Where you can, measure it. The level of the canal against the benchmark. The tide mark on the wall. The depth of the well. The gradient of the pavement that sheds the rain. Add these annotations to the drawing.
Deliverable. The spatial diagram, the redrawing through water, and the measured water levels and gradients.
Torcello Again
3 hours on site.
You return to Torcello with the whole semester of methods behind you. This exercise synthesizes them on the site itself, and it asks you to turn from reading the place toward acting on it.
Part 1 · Editing. Draw the site on specific terms that matter to you as a designer. Try it at several scales. Re-draw one small area, shifting the focus each time. What you draw becomes the raw material you work with. If you cannot find a single focus, try several and let the strongest emerge.
Part 2 · Movement. Draw movement through the site. A path, a sequence, the way a body arrives and orients and departs. Use any method from the semester or invent your own.
Part 3 · Speculation. Integrate speculative marks into the drawing. A line placed. A screen. A threshold. See what a single mark does to the place, and begin to think about where the key elements of a proposal might land. Being on site is how you test that, so draw the speculation on site, not in the studio.
Deliverable. The edited drawings at multiple scales, the movement study, and the speculative marks, all dimensioned and annotated.
Part 3 · Return to Charlottesville
The Dossier and Final Review
Weeks 12 through 16 · Charlottesville
The dossier is due on the last day of classes, Tuesday December 8, at 2200. The exhibition is due at the final review, December 14 or 15, where the fieldwork is pinned up and displayed.
Back in Charlottesville you curate the semester's fieldwork into a dossier and prepare the final review exhibition. This is not a new project. It is the argument the semester has been building.
The dossier gathers the media you have produced. The analog drawings, the photographs, the video, the lidar scans, the photogrammetry, the models in Rhino. It does not include everything. It selects, and it curates, and it makes a claim about what you learned in the field and how that learning shapes your work in the studio.
Develop the dossier in two registers. The first is the record, the field drawings and measurements that document the territory. The second is the translation, the annotations and interpretations and Rhino models that turn the record into design knowledge. Both belong in the dossier.
The final review presents the dossier alongside the studio work. Prepare the fieldwork as an exhibition, not a stack. Pin the drawings, screen the video, project the models. Let the field be legible as the ground your studio propositions stand on. We will discuss this in more detail in Charlottesville.
Deliverable. A research dossier that curates the semester's fieldwork, and the field material prepared for the final review exhibition.