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Title : Do buildings have a personality?
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Do buildings have a personality?

[Guest post by Richard Aitken in Melbourne, Australia]

 I trained as an architect, so sketching buildings is my main pre-occupation. My training was all straight lines, right angles, and accurate perspective. Yet so often, a sketch embodying these ideals can be a trifle lifeless—more photograph than creative act. So in the past few months I’ve been exploring the idea of inanimate personality. 

For these drawings, I used Inktober to snap back into a daily sketching routine.

I’m not a quick sketcher. I like to interact with my subject, watching and waiting. Like a good author, I try to spend some time in dialogue, to get the best story or find the most telling aspect. I love looking for quirks. Are those walls slightly out of alignment? Is that column at a slightly raking angle? Have those foundations sunk slightly, causing floors to dip and sway? These are the chinks that allow an inanimate personality to be revealed.

My first experiment investigating a building’s personality was in Portugal. I’m not a big fan of graffiti on historic buildings, so I tried to give this wonderful structure (above) in Lisboa’s Rua Carlos Testa some decency and pride, without disguising its age or condition.

Portuguese buildings are loaded with personality. Vila Real de Santo António sits at the very south-east corner of Portugal, facing south to the Mediterranean Sea and east to the River Guardiana (which constitutes the Portuguese–Spanish border). This exuberant building seemed at odds with the formality of VRSA’s eighteenth-century grid plan so I channeled the nautical influence of old-time ships as I sketched.

Back home, I continued my exploration in Melbourne. I’ve been looking for vulnerable buildings to record their character and the part they play in giving my suburb its character—before it’s too late. Sadly land prices have now overtaken house values in many parts of Australia’s capital cities, and a whole era of modest residential architecture is under grave threat. Sometimes with sketching it is best to err on the side of caution and above I sparingly used monochrome to complement the simplicity of the enveloping corrugated iron roof gleaming in the sun as well as to help suggest some depth to the curtilage.

This early twentieth century house was once a small suburban maternity hospital but its proximity to a shopping centre has sounded the death knell, and it was demolished for medium density residential apartments before Inktober had even ended. I tried to invest it with the melancholy wistfulness of a life well lived yet sadly cut short.

Sketching has the advantage over conventional photography of being able to incorporate multiple vantage points in one sketch, such as showing three sides of a building; an interpretative technique I used to suggest that this house resembles an ark of private memories.

Simplification of buildings does not necessarily mean leaving out their setting, and I often find a satisfactory solution using free lines that hint at driveways, fences, and footpaths without them being a distraction to the psychological drama of the main subject. Often—as here—this line is a third voice, turning a dialogue into a conversation.

There is something at once scary yet deeply satisfying in using ink directly onto paper without any pencil guidelines. It’s a high-wire act without the safety net. It’s just eye, hand, and nib. I’ve enjoyed meeting these personable friends. These buildings speak to me. I see them on my daily walk, and now thanks to Inktober, I recorded them as well.

Richard Aitken is a historian, author, and curator based in Melbourne, Australia. His most recent book is "Planting Dreams: shaping Australian gardens" (NewSouth, 2016). He is notoriously shy of social media, but blogs occasionally as ‘roygbiv’ on the USk Portugal website.

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