“Farewell to Robin Evans”
by Wendy Kohn
Harvard Design Magazine
Spring, 1994
Robin Evans was my teacher last Fall in Piper Auditorium, for an hour and fifteen minutes every Wednesday and Friday. And whenever I think of him, it is at the bottom of those steps, leaning slightly against the podium, his face slightly lit from below, and his gentle voice alternately booming and mumbling somewhere in the region of the microphone. Robin’s lectures, like his physical presence, seemed excruciatingly poised between perfect, simple truth, and utter abstraction.
A year ago, when I asked another student what Robin Evans would be teaching this term, I was told, “It doesn’t matter. Take it.” And still I’m not entirely sure what was the title of the course I took for four months. But I have some idea of what it was about.
In class, and in a seminar packed stiflingly into Room 322, Robin lectured to us about things like Imagination, Pictures, Vision; about Alberti’s “Prince of Rays,” and about Euclid’s consternation over why parallel lines appear to converge. “How are drawings and buildings related?” Robin would ask rhetorically to a rapt class. As architecture students we were fascinated, since here seemed to be some sort of apostle, ready to answer just those questions we most wanted answered.
Here are some of the explanations Robin gave us:
On intellectual history,
He argued that Hegelian “zeitgeist” theories of culture are “silly.” Why? Because “ideas,” Robin pointed out, “exist in puddles.”
On semiotics,
Robin said “Language predisposes us to extremes, like black and white. This is normal, ” he said. “What’s radical are the things in the middle.”
On mechanical reproduction,
Robin noted that photographing a building is, as he put it, “like creeping up behind it, while its naked.”
On architectural representation,
He said, “Presentation drawings are neither received from, nor transmitted to a building, but are pulled into a sort of cul-de-sac, somewhere between the beginning and the end of the process.”
Finally, about design,
He urged us to remember that “As much can happen in a drawing as out of it.”
Robin spoke to us about things that were so inherent in architecture that they seemed to be the essence of what we were really trying to do in every other class, lecture, and hour spent at our desks. The miracle of Robin as a teacher was the way he unfailingly put his finger on exactly what was essential. In other words, until Robin happened to bring it up, I didn’t know that what I really wondered was exactly how a drawing affects the thing that is drawn.
And these things he spoke about, that were so relevant to architecture—somehow they encompassed the world. When Robin talked about invention, wasn’t he really talking about birth? When he focused on the fascinating dead-ends in the development of an idea, the “cul-de-sacs” which other scholars ignored, wasn’t he really talking to us about mortality? When he pointed out what he named “the mutable relation between ideas and objects,” didn’t this sound like the thing we’d noticed about life itself?
Robin asked the questions that I will be trying to answer, with his help, for the rest of my life. It will be so much harder for all of us to do this without him.
by Wendy Kohn
Harvard Design Magazine
Spring, 1994
Robin Evans was my teacher last Fall in Piper Auditorium, for an hour and fifteen minutes every Wednesday and Friday. And whenever I think of him, it is at the bottom of those steps, leaning slightly against the podium, his face slightly lit from below, and his gentle voice alternately booming and mumbling somewhere in the region of the microphone. Robin’s lectures, like his physical presence, seemed excruciatingly poised between perfect, simple truth, and utter abstraction.
A year ago, when I asked another student what Robin Evans would be teaching this term, I was told, “It doesn’t matter. Take it.” And still I’m not entirely sure what was the title of the course I took for four months. But I have some idea of what it was about.
In class, and in a seminar packed stiflingly into Room 322, Robin lectured to us about things like Imagination, Pictures, Vision; about Alberti’s “Prince of Rays,” and about Euclid’s consternation over why parallel lines appear to converge. “How are drawings and buildings related?” Robin would ask rhetorically to a rapt class. As architecture students we were fascinated, since here seemed to be some sort of apostle, ready to answer just those questions we most wanted answered.
Here are some of the explanations Robin gave us:
On intellectual history,
He argued that Hegelian “zeitgeist” theories of culture are “silly.” Why? Because “ideas,” Robin pointed out, “exist in puddles.”
On semiotics,
Robin said “Language predisposes us to extremes, like black and white. This is normal, ” he said. “What’s radical are the things in the middle.”
On mechanical reproduction,
Robin noted that photographing a building is, as he put it, “like creeping up behind it, while its naked.”
On architectural representation,
He said, “Presentation drawings are neither received from, nor transmitted to a building, but are pulled into a sort of cul-de-sac, somewhere between the beginning and the end of the process.”
Finally, about design,
He urged us to remember that “As much can happen in a drawing as out of it.”
Robin spoke to us about things that were so inherent in architecture that they seemed to be the essence of what we were really trying to do in every other class, lecture, and hour spent at our desks. The miracle of Robin as a teacher was the way he unfailingly put his finger on exactly what was essential. In other words, until Robin happened to bring it up, I didn’t know that what I really wondered was exactly how a drawing affects the thing that is drawn.
And these things he spoke about, that were so relevant to architecture—somehow they encompassed the world. When Robin talked about invention, wasn’t he really talking about birth? When he focused on the fascinating dead-ends in the development of an idea, the “cul-de-sacs” which other scholars ignored, wasn’t he really talking to us about mortality? When he pointed out what he named “the mutable relation between ideas and objects,” didn’t this sound like the thing we’d noticed about life itself?
Robin asked the questions that I will be trying to answer, with his help, for the rest of my life. It will be so much harder for all of us to do this without him.