Consequential Deliberations

Peter Magyar

Peter Magyar's drawings in the volume entitled Consequential Deliberations are poetic, insightful, meditative and captivating. The deliberate lines of the drawings represent a form of research through design and design through research.

As manifestations of Dr. Magyar's design thinking, the drawings explore a tectonic approach to such projects as the The Peak, Hong Kong design competition. Combining research and design, the drawings intertwine discovery and ritual. Aspects of discovery show in how he employs the drawings to study what he is designing. These drawings act similar to x-rays as he draws what is seen in the context of what is not seen. The technique makes use of the ability of the action of drawing to help Dr. Magyar to see inside and outside at the same time. Here the material interface between the exterior expression and the interior spatial qualities creates an interstice of great importance. The drawings reveal construction methods overlaid with considered precedents and volumes both solid and void. They evoke historic construction methods at the same time they reconfigure form into a notion of space. The discovery emerges through the making as each drawing ponders questions such as – what am I made of? The ritual qualities of the drawings show in the consistent care and deliberation of the slow lines. It is as if each line is telling a story of edge, texture or connection. The ritual of stripping layers and seeing beneath must assist Dr. Magyar to perceive the buildings from all dimensions and all perspectives at the same time. In this way, his drawings act to sufficiently understand three-dimensional space on a two dimensional surface. The meditative analysis also gives Dr. Magyar the time to view the progress and anticipate the validity of the next move. In the context of design as research, the lines `discover' things not found in any other modes of inquiry. Conversely, the use of research to help the design process is evident in how materiality and history inform the design decisions.

The insightful drawings are both exact and allusive at the same time. If the drawings could speak they would tell a story of efficiency and economy. The minimal lines precisely define what they are attempting to articulate. Even though completely freehand, these drawings do not display any extraneous or wasteful energy, instead they describe poignantly what they are meant to tell. The focus of the message is so strong that the drawings outline the edges of what is important. In other words, unlike an artist's gesture drawing that defines the form with internal weighty-ness, the edges formed by single lines articulate what it means to be a corner – what it means to turn, fold or define solid in contrast to void. This incredible focus itself is an act of defining.

With such focus, Peter Magyar's drawings can be viewed as poetic. By poetic, these drawings are not without structure, but they also embody the allusions and references that connect them to the future and past, and the actual and the intangible. Poems require the word play and cadence creating structure but they succeed as metaphorical and referential.

The referential qualities of Dr. Magyar's drawings provide musings for the intellect. The origin of muse, as inspiration, emerges from the nine Muses in Greek mythology. Their legacy provides ideas and associations to think beyond the obvious, and when applied to drawing, they inform the route of the next line. The action of making, (not unlike traditional definitions of magic) in Dr. Magyar's drawings, reinforces the lines as a medium of change and also a medium for thinking about the experience of architecture. In this way, his drawings describe the act of construction as well as communicating less tangible ideas. He is imagining the building process as he draws, and at the same time he is referencing the memories and allusions of architectural space. Richard Wollheim writes, in his book On Art and the Mind, that it is possible to unite making and seeing. "Now my suggestion is that in so far as we see a drawing as a representation, instead of as a configuration of lines and strokes, the incongruity between what we draw and what we see disappears." (1974) By `seeing' Wollheim means vision, but it may be possible to extend this concept to imagination and visual comprehension. The method Dr. Magyar employs causes these to evoke construction at the same time they reference.

And this is why Peter Magyar's drawings captivate us so completely.

Kendra Schank Smith, Ph.D., FRAIC
Professor
Department of Architectural Science
Ryerson University