Drafting Room Disasters, Part Two...Spray Fix & Spray Mount

Reminiscing about tape dots the other day started me thinking about other drafting room disasters in the days of hand drawing and architectural offices where pretty much everyone actually drew as part of their daily routine. Except for the spec writers. While tape dots mostly provided opportunities for drawing wounds of the self-inflicted variety, spray fix and spray mount really opened up the playing field for team efforts in trashing a drawing while also leaving the field open to the occasionally spectacular solo effort. Weirdly enough, the origins of almost all spray fix and spray mount disasters lay either in their flammability or the near identical appearance and labeling of the cans. Or both.
 

When pencils and vellum ruled the roost in most drafting rooms, aerosol cans of spray fixative next to a drawing board were a fairly common sight. Spray fixative has a lot of uses but was typically applied very lightly to finished pencil drawings on drafting vellum and tracing paper to prevent smearing and fuzzing of line work. The most popular brands were (and are) Krylon and ChartPak. For architects and draftsmen who still do many drawings by hand, spray fix remains a very useful and relatively safe tool. It's cousin (or bastard step-child, depending on what just happened to you) was spray mount, an aerosol can of supposedly low-tack adhesive primarily used to mount drawings, photographs and, more commonly, blueline prints to sheets of foam core board, usually with varying degrees of success. The "low-tack" qualities of spray mount varied from brand to brand and even can to can but the incredible flammability of spray mount and spray fix were rarely in question and often amply demonstrated. This at a time when you could smoke at your drawing board. Of course, at this same time, you could also smoke in restaurants, in bars, on airplanes, in taxis and, believe it or not, hospitals and elevators. Sometimes even in a hospital elevator.
 

There was one time when I was working in a drafting room where I had to quickly mount several blueline  prints to foam core board using spray mount. With larger prints and the usually futile attempts at a bubble or wrinkle free application of print to foam core, this was usually a two person job. But not for the ambitious or the lazy. You would put down a pretty heavy coat of spray mount on the foam core and then let it rest for a minute before applying the print, mainly to avoid bleed throughs. Sounds simple enough, right? So after applying a very liberal coating to a 2' x 3' piece of foam core, I took it out of the print room and put it on my drawing board to rest before applying the blueline print. As I went back to the print room to hose down another piece of foam core, out of the corner of my eye I saw one of the partners heading into the drafting room. A partner who also happened to be a heavy smoker, the kind that could smoke, talk, eat, drink, draw and criticize all at once and never touch the cigarette. Since I was mounting these drawings for him and he was heading towards my drawing board, paying closer attention might have been a good   idea.                                                                                                                                         

Right about the same time that I crossed the print room threshold I heard this "whump" noise followed by a "whoosh". You know, the same noises you hear when you throw a match from ten feet away on a barbeque grill that you doused with way, way too much charcoal fluid. Like maybe a whole can. This was all accompanied by a disturbingly intense flash of orange light. Well. The partner, with the ever present cigarette dangling from his mouth, had stopped by my board to see how his mounting was coming. Anyone who's ever smoked knows that what often falls off your cigarette isn't just ash, it's red hot little embers. And that's exactly what happened here. Basically, he dropped a tiny piece of burning coal onto a piece of paper covered styrofoam saturated with the aerosol equivalent of gasoline, producing predictable and momentarily horrifying results. After a second or two the partner, minus his eyebrows (fortunately he had already lost most of his hair), had the presence of mind to yank the burning foam core to the floor and start stomping on it while in the shadow of a "to scale" mushroom cloud we had both helped to create. But the best was still to come. Anyone who has ever seen styrofoam burning knows that, when on fire, it sticks like napalm. Especially when you stomp on it. Who knows, maybe styrofoam and napalm share the same DNA since they are both petroleum based products. Ultimately, I didn't know what was funnier; his missing eyebrows, our burning brogans or the fact everyone else just kept on drawing. The absence of a modern sprinkler system probably helped in this case, but at least we got the fire out before OSHA showed up.

That cans of spray mount and cans of spray fixative often looked and were labeled almost exactly the same (see photos above) always baffled me. This could really lead to problems. The necessity of spray fix as an essential drafting tool made a lot of sense given the instability of graphite as a drawing medium. It was usually applied as the final touch to a linework intensive drawing before running it through a diazo (ammonia based) blueline machine. Blueline machines had two sets of glass rollers, kind of like those cheap fluorescent light bulbs. You ran your drawing (laid over the print paper) through the first set for exposure, then ran the print paper only through the second set for developing. Imagine feeding a dollar bill into a coin changer or vending machine, except in this case your dollar bill is three feet wide. Blueprint machines were probably the single greatest source of drawing destruction in any office I ever worked for. Big, stinky, ammonia fueled destroyers of drawings that smelled like a diaper pail om a hot day. But add in a drawing mistakenly drenched with spray mount, as opposed to spray fix, and you can probably see where this is going.

At this same office with the now eyebrow-less partner, there was an older gentlemen who had taken me under his wing. By older I mean really old. His career as an architect had begun when FDR was president so he had a lot of talent and knowledge to pass on and that I was all too grateful to receive. Architectural drawing was both our shared passion and language so I would go out of my way to reciprocate in passing on to him the latest drafting room innovations. Like spray fix. At first my friend didn't "hold with it", usually with a muttered comment or two about "Rube Goldberg inventions". One day, after completing a particulary time and graphite intensive sheet of wall sections, I was surprised to hear my friend ask to borrow my can of spray fix. Without looking up from whatever I was doing I grabbed the can and tossed it over my shoulder. My drawing board was right in front of his, proximity being helpful in mentoring. Since I had seen his drawing develop over several days I also threw in "There's a lot of lead on that drawing. Better give it a really good soak." If only I had given him spray fix.

What I had given him was my nearly identical can of spray mount which he proceeded to apply very liberally all over his beautiful and about to be blueprinted drawing. He literally may have just used a paint roller dipped in model airplane glue. Since you always handled a finished drawing by the edges when printing, the coming disaster was not immediately apparent. My friend went into the print room and fed his drawing into the blueprint machine. And literally nothing came out. Courtesy of wayward tape dots, this was not an uncommon occurance but was usually accompanied by sound effects like the loud crumpling of paper (your drawing)and really colorful swear words. Never by, as in this case, complete silence. This time, what happened was my friend had fed into the print machine a drawing that was basically coated in glue which then proceeded to permanently laminate itself to one of the glass rollers inside the print machine. Nice, nice. Not only did a really beautiful drawing disappear in less than 5 seconds, so did the 40 or so hours it took to create it. I know this because that's how many hours of overtime (unpaid) it took me to do my friend's drawing over again, which seemed like an appropriate punishment at the time.

You would think that this might have led to an outright ban on spray mount in this particular drafting room, but it didn't. It did, however, lead to a few new rules and improvements, such as an outright ban on smoking in the office and, of course, a new blueprint machine. Even better was the installation of an automatic emergency defibrilator in the drafting room. Whether this was done as a reflection on the average age of the partners and their work force or in anticipation of future disasters (or both), I never really knew since it was quite awhile before either would speak to me beyond the occasional monosyllabic grunt. My older friend did remain my friend and his recounting this story later became a featured routine at office Christmas parties. But even now, everytime I pick up a can of spray fix, I think of my friend and smile.

Small Projects, Part Two...Breaking the "Fourth Wall"

My previous post on drawing small projects focused primarily on larger scale scale elevations and quick perspectives as "stand alone" images. Part of that "stand alone" quality is both deliberate and compositional in nature and part of it is the graphic limitations of Google Blogger in presenting drawings online. It was also a reflection of the purpose of the drawings, primarily the initial exploration of design concepts and the use of these drawings as a more effective presentation tool than purely digital images. Small projects also provide many opportunites for the use of composite drawings as a presentation tool.

Composite architectural drawings have a fairly simple definition. They combine multiple drawings (plan / elevation / section or plan / perspective) into a single composition. While primarily used as a design presentation device, good compositional skills can and should inform the production of working drawings, digital or otherwise. But that's a story for later. Maybe.

Composite hand drawings have a rich history in architectural presentations, especially in a pre-Bauhaus context. The most famous and influential examples that leap immediately to mind are the drawings that Marion Mahony-Griffin did for Frank Lloyd Wright's Wasmuth Portfolio. These are some of the finest architectural drawings of the 20th century with Mahony-Griffin's combination of plans and perspectives into single composite images being especially beautiful and effective. The relentlessly axial, formal nature of Wright's plans and elevations lent themselves well to the Beaux-Arts presentation method of composite drawings. But it was Mahony-Griffin's preference for perspective in lieu of elevation and her superior drafting and entourage skills that really set the Wasmuth drawings apart and made them so influential.

The drawings I am showing here are by no means Wasmuth-worthy, but then again, so little is these days. The beauty of small, historically themed projects is that their limited scope often allows exploration of drawing techniques (like hand-drawn composite images) that larger, more contemporary projects (or your office) may not support. This project is a small pool house addition to a large venacular residence on Nantucket Island. I had the benefit of already drawn AutoCAD plans and existing condition photographs to draw over in composing and executing the drawings. The most effective component of these drawings is the use of perspective instead of elevation to convey the exterior design concepts. Perspectives, from a client or critic's point of view, trump elevations everytime.

The original size of these composite drawings as drawn and presented to the client were 24" x 36" with the plans drawn at 1/8" scale. The perspectives are compositionally treated as overlay images on the drawing with implied paper edges, tears and curling graphically represented as part of the image border. They are drawn in ink on white tracing paper and rendered on both sides with Prismacolor pencils and ChartPak-AD markers. Three separate schemes were presented, the small scale of the project helping make this level of study and rendering possible. For presentation purposes, the drawings were printed at full size and the perspectives were also printed as larger images at 11 x 17. Borders on inset images are not always necessary, as controlled fade outs with landscape, color and good linework also can work well in over-all drawing composition and technique.

Small, traditional projects like this lend themselves well to highly personalized drafting styles. As with most traditionally oriented projects, good material representation through drawing begins with the quality of line work. Bad line work is often most glaringly obvious in plans and elevations, the most commonly used of architectural drawing types. When perspective drawings are used in presentations, an emphasis on quality in mere "orthographic" drawing is often diminished or completely ignored. Graphically insensitive and rigid IT-generated pen maps have a lot to do with this, but unimaginative, "task only" oriented CAD managers / operators do as well. Good hand drawing in architecture, especially orthograhic drawings like plans and elevations, is fundamentally an exercise in abstract representation and depends on quality line work and good composition. While this is inherently true in perspective drawing, it really becomes apparent in successful composite architectural drawings.

There is an expression actors frequently use called "breaking the fourth wall", where they address the audience or the camera directly, sometimes as part of the script, sometimes not. Composite architectural drawings that utilize perspective frequently embrace this same basic concept. As a communication tool, the superiority of perspective imagery to merely orthographic drawings is obvious. The use of perspective as part of a composite drawing breaks the "fourth wall" of an orthographically generated script and provides a much greater degree of understanding on the part of the audience, in this case your client, colleague or critic. A good composite drawing can be a purely orthographic drawing exercise with the immediate juxtaposition of plans to elevations heightening the understanding of both. They can also be very supportive of and reinforce design elements like formal or axial symmetry. But small projects allow you to immediately explore and develop compositional drawing techniques you can then apply to your larger projects, traditional or otherwise. Composite drawings can still be accomplished through purely digital means. However, developing an understanding of compositional drawing by hand will improve the quality of your presentations, digital or otherwise.