Telling Stories: The power of drawing to change our cities

Posted 27.08.2020

One of the advantages of drawing is the way it allows the imagination to bubble over. From thoughtless doodles to whimsical fantasies, drawings have an unconstrained quality that, in an architectural context, can have a profound impact on our surroundings. This is certainly the case with Studio Weave, who use ‘stories’ which combine fairy-tale-style narratives and lyrical drawings in the concept development phase of their projects.

Weave’s Lullaby Factory for Great Ormond Street Hospital demonstrates the ways in which this practise of telling stories through drawing and text can actively inform and affect a final project. The lullaby factory focuses on a difficult, narrow external space in which hospital windows look directly onto the brickwork façade of another building. The concept drawings reimagine this dingy space as magical and mysterious, constructing a narrative about a factory producing lullabies for ‘sleepies’.

These drawings borrow from children’s book illustration, Victorian industrial diagrams and the tentative pencil drawings of children themselves. They conjure a magical world in which lullabies are collected, tuned and refined before whizzing through pipes and tubes to be dispensed via trumpets into the ears of sleepy children.

Studio Weave’s approach encapsulates the way in which today’s practices are responding to briefs in highly creative and playful ways. Although they clearly relate to the site, seen is isolation with their oversized trumpets, swirling lullabies and mysterious industrial flotsam the drawings seem to depict structures which can exist only in the imagination. Far away are the everyday surroundings of the city, and in particular an uninspiring gap between two hospital buildings.

However, the project’s realisation makes it clear that the whimsy, lyricism and make-believe qualities of Weave’s concept drawings have been translated directly to the build environment.

Sculptural curves, surprising changes in scale and an apparent ability to defy gravity mirror the lack of concern for the constraints of physics and utility in the drawings. A sound installation by Jessica Curry completes the realisation of the Lullaby Factory.

The beauty of drawing lies in its invitation to throw caution to the wind, experiment, reimagine and invent alternative futures for the buildings and cities in which we live. The Lullaby Factory indicates that the freedom associated with drawing can and should inform architectural practise, spilling over into the built environment, improving it, fostering innovation and adding a welcome note of the impossible. This is what makes curating The Architecture Drawing Prize such an exciting prospect, and I am looking forward to an insight into the imaginations of this year’s entrants.

For more information on Sir John Soane’s Museum visit soane.org
For more information on Studio Weave and the Lullaby Factory visit studioweave.com/projects/lullaby-factory

This post forms part of our series on The Architecture Drawing Prize: an open drawing competition curated by Make, WAF and Sir John Soane’s Museum to highlight the importance of drawing in architecture. Entries for 2020 close 2 October.