16-12-13 // BOARD CONTRIBUTED TO THE PUBLICATION “ARCHITECT’S NOTEBOOK – THE TREASURE HOUSE OF IDEA”

With this publication entitled “Architect’s Notebook – The Treasure House of Idea” the South Korea-based publishing house “DAMDI Publishing” tried to figure out what is drawn inside an architect’s Notebook. According to them, architects use notebooks as their treasure chests of ideas. They wanted to look into what those intimate sketches and writings mean to the architect, and how they are used for a project.

The following interview with Bernd Upmeyer appears in the contribution:

DAMDI: What is a sketchbook to you? (What does it mean to you?)
Bernd Upmeyer: A sketchbook actually means very little to me. I am not using one. The only time I ever used a sketchbook was during my first year of studying architecture, when my teacher forced us to use one. But I abandoned it very quickly, because I did not believe in its value. In fact, I considered it counterproductive and something that blocks transparency and the exchange of ideas during design processes within teams. In notebooks information becomes very secret, hidden and private. When I hear sentences such as “Architects use notebooks as their treasure chests of ideas”, I think of architects of the 20th century such as Louis Kahn, who was known for making numerous trips to Europe during his career in the United States, sketching and writing down everything he saw in a sketch- or notebook, probably because he did not have pocket-sized cameras or smartphones yet. That is why sketchbooks appear to me today as something outdated and old-fashioned, something like a Friendship book in a time when everybody has a profile on Facebook, something like using a sketch as an architectural representation when we have renderings…

…read the entire interview in Publications.