The Waiting Drawing

Definition

The waiting drawing is Susan Hedges's name for the transitional drawing: a drawing that marks time rather than solves a problem. "The waiting drawing offers a sense of marking time, an instant of concentrated activity, perhaps with whatever drawing instrument and surface is ready at hand. A seized drawn moment is an attempt to possess time"; it "is seen not as an answer, but rather, as a marking of time." It has two aspects. As event: "the transitional drawing is made up of differences in weight, interval, and motion, moments of intense activity, of getting something down and seizing the moment. Drawing as waiting or expectation is a projection into the future" — the drawing made while waiting, in waiting, as waiting. As process: the waiting drawing "may reside in the long process of thinking, making, breaking, and remaking, [where] time figures as both contemplative and instantaneous," so that "making the drawing becomes a way of seeing time; a spatializing of time."

The concept is built on Marco Frascari's theory of slow architectural drawing: drawing as "a slow process of architectural sapience based on the ideas of lingering, savoring, and touching… based on the 'adagio' time and common places, proverbs, or rules of thumb," against which "architectural drawings are islands of slowness within the stormy sea of the pseudo-fastness of the building industry." Against the convention that "plans, sections, and elevations are horizontal-vertical slices in a moment of time, a representation of space rather than time," the waiting drawing poses the question "what of the attempt to draw time, what of the gradual changes to space through the design process and possible future occupations?"

Its canonical instance is "Sheet No. 24 Details of Ladies' Waiting Room" of the Auckland Railway Station (August 1927, 1010 × 640 linen) — one of seventy-eight linen drawings, singling out "the waiting drawn detail in the now obsolete Auckland Railway Station." The sheet is double: it "holds to norms and conventions, recording a finished room" (running dimensions, tolerances, materials — "Every stroke counts; every screw has to be in the right place"), yet "simultaneously shows complexity, incompleteness, and a promise of structured waiting," and "can also be seen as a decorative surface that exudes an atmosphere that the viewer of the drawings is meant to experience… Drawings are atmosphere simulators, and even the most abstract lines produce sensuous, unpredictable effects" (after Mark Wigley's "the surface wraps the atmosphere"). The waiting drawing is thus record and atmosphere-carrier, answer and suspension: "The waiting drawing intertwines, connects, and pulls taut. It undoes and reconnects the different strands, a marker for something that was emerging, something provisionally knitted together that has permitted us to undo and redo in order to forestall premature closure."

Key Thinkers

• Susan Hedges — the concept's author: the waiting drawing as transitional drawing, "a marking of time," modeled through Sheet No. 24 of the Auckland Railway Station's ladies' waiting room.
• Marco Frascari — the theoretical ground (via "Lines as Architectural Thinking" (2009), Eleven Exercises in the Art of Architectural Drawing (2011), and "Plans" (1988)): slow, labor-intensive drawing as "islands of slowness"; the plan "torn to pieces by history… as an incomprehensible collage of forgotten memories… as pure decoration" (not yet paged — see log).
• Mark Wigley — the atmospheric register (via "The Architecture of Atmosphere," Daidalos 68, 1998): "the surface wraps the atmosphere: the outer visible layer of an invisible climate"; the ground for Hedges's claim that drawings are atmosphere simulators (not yet paged — see log).

Related Concepts

• representation — the concept the waiting drawing complicates: the plan/section/elevation as "a representation of space rather than time," and the attempt to draw time instead; drawings that construct interiors (Rice, via Hollis) here also time them.
• waiting-room — the twin concept: the room and the drawing share the transitional condition ("transitional space and transitional drawing"); the waiting detail as "a drawing performed in order to possess time."
• temporality — the drawing's medium: "Making the drawing becomes a way of seeing time; a spatializing of time"; Kwinter's modernist time that "meshes inextricably" with phenomena against the clock's "thin duration."
• atmosphere — the drawing's affective load: "Drawings are atmosphere simulators, and even the most abstract lines produce sensuous, unpredictable effects" — atmosphere carried by the most conventional of working drawings.
• interior-architecture — the discipline's graphic evidence: the interior known through its drawn detail ("the waiting drawn detail"), the working drawing as the interior's memory and prediction ("a paneled interior of recurrence, an experience of time, and a prediction of time on itself").
• history — the historiographic claim: the chapter's historical knowledge is "an ongoing reconstruction in the present located somewhere between fact and fiction" — drawing history from a single sheet.
• obsolescence — the drawing's afterlife: the room "transient, subject to fashion and impermanent materials, to short lives with frequent renovation," the drawing outliving the room it records — "the waiting line representing a surface that has remained still while the neighboring interiors have shifted."
• Orthographic Projection — the system the waiting drawing exceeds: the plan/section/elevation complex whose still-life requirement ("the form being recorded hold still, as if being drawn for a still life") is what makes the attempt to draw time necessary — and which Weinthal, from the documentation side, proposes to evolve by deriving movement's rules "from the documentation of movement first."

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• The waiting room: Transitional space and transitional drawing (Hedges 2018) — the source that names the concept: the seized drawn moment, Frascari's slow drawing, the plan as space-slice vs. the attempt to draw time, Sheet No. 24 as record and atmosphere simulator, and the closing forestallment of "premature closure."
• A pirouette on the orthographic hinge (Weinthal 2018) — the documentation-side twin: Weinthal states the same limit from inside the construction-document world — orthographic drawings "keep the space clean and objective rather than muddy with the ephemeral shoes of people walking through it" — and answers with movement-documentation rather than drawing-as-waiting: the pirouette's plan-dot, Pavlova's stage-light, Callaghan & Palmer's space-shapes and dark-technique tracings ("the precursors to current motion capture technology"), with the programme that movement "may have to be distilled down to a set of rules… derived from the documentation of movement first." Where Hedges's drawing marks time by hand ("a seized drawn moment is an attempt to possess time"), Weinthal's instruments record movement — the two answers to the same question Hedges poses ("What of the attempt to draw time…?") and Weinthal operationalizes. See orthographic-projection, light-tracing, space-shape, representation.
• source-notes/smith-2018-design-studio-phenomenology

Open Questions

• Can a drawing "wait" — or does the waiting drawing only exist retrospectively, once the drawer names the moment seized? Is the waiting drawing a genre or a reading practice applied to any drawing?
• If plans are "horizontal-vertical slices in a moment of time," what would a successful drawing of time look like — the sequence of redrawn sheets (seventy-eight of them), the overdrawn detail, the annotated original ("original with annotations")?
• Sheet No. 24 is a convention-bound working drawing that also "exudes an atmosphere." Is atmosphere-simulation a property of all working drawings (the most abstract lines produce effects) or of this sheet's ornate particularity (Wedgwood ceiling, silver chandeliers)?
• Frascari's slowness ("islands of slowness… within the stormy sea of the pseudo-fastness of the building industry") was articulated against late-industrial construction speed. What is the waiting drawing in a parametric/digital pipeline — does the slow line survive the script, or does waiting migrate to the render, the simulation, the realtime model?
• The chapter treats the drawing as history ("an ongoing reconstruction… between fact and fiction"). Can a drawing be an archive of waiting — does Sheet No. 24 record the room, or the hours of waiting embedded in its making?