Elizabeth zoom video series#

Not investigating a site with my students is hard, sketching with them on site, commenting their drawings on site, touching the stones, measuring, discovering together. Deprivation provokes painfully creative compensational acts. However, the longing might help shape the imagining.Īpparently, Hawksmoor never left England, he visited art and architecture in books, just like Morandi, who barely left his studio but devoured art images in only black and white, getting exceptionally sensitive to shades and luminance. Sharing architectural encounters can never be substituted by anything else.Ī glass of Guinness at Locke’s Bar or Tom Collins can never be substituted by anything else. Miss the tactile experience of wet stone, horizontal rain and gentle dialects. Miss my students, colleagues, friends, strangers… Such relief not to travel, to escape planes, airports, underground trains, conveyer belts, escalators and buses – spaces with, as sole fixed point, the mobile phone, or – at best – a good book or some Bach in the earphones. Such a surprise it is there – it has always been there. It feels as if I have known her for centuries, the encounter corresponding to the same self-evident and immediate attraction as to Sumerian Mastabas or wildflowers. I would ‘visit’ her office in Genoa, see her wonderful textiles, her chairs and designs.įor conveying architecture and enlightening her surrounding, Torzo is exceptional. Thus started a conversation online and by email, followed by mutually guest reviewing our students’ work, giving lectures and exchanging thoughts, drawings, encouragement and inspiration. It turned out that she, in parallel, had developed an interest in mine, in the Central Pavilion, a celebration of the architectural drawing, called Line, Light, Locus. Strangely, that is also true for a new, very special architecture friend – deeply special indeed – with whom I feel a very particular affinity, inexplicable and irresistible.īut I do not think we would have ‘met’ unless the first encounter was physical – with the work.įrancesca Torzo’s exhibition in the Arsenal at the 2018 Venice Biennale swept me off my feet. Now: no travelling at all for one year. I have not yet met my current students, we have only ‘met’ on the screen. Peace, imagination, abstinence – and surprise.īefore Covid-19, I left Stockholm almost every week, for 14 years, to see my students in the west of Ireland. The spring light is merciless.Įvery moment without the screen is precious. The studio needs a good cleaning out of stuff to liberate space for drawing and bricolage. I have run out of seeds and fat for the birds.

Next week I will get some goat’s parchment or vellum… In this episode, Elizabeth Hatz discusses her personal experience of the pandemic and its consequences for her teaching studios at the School of Architecture, University of Limerick (SAUL), and KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm.

Elizabeth zoom video series#

This is the twelfth in a series of texts edited by Fabrizio Gallanti on the challenges in the new world of online architectural teaching and, particularly, on the changing role of drawings in presentations and reviews.