For Cooper Union architecture students, drawing still matters
Teaching and learning are curious things. Sometimes they’re as straightforward as an arithmetic lesson on a blackboard in a second-grade classroom. But sometimes they’re as subtle, as hard to define, as Tim Evans’s smiling and writing himself a note on the back of his hand — “Nuanced gray” was all it said — while Sue Ferguson Gussow praised the “sweet spot” in a drawing he had done of some chunks of jackhammered concrete he found on Third Avenue.
“The kind of gray that’s here, the kind of white-black-gray discussion that’s going on here,” Professor Gussow was saying, “has a sense of boldness and whisper at the same time.” Another student — Arnold Wu, wearing a cobalt-blue wool hat shaped like a Hershey’s Kiss — jumped up beside Mr. Evans and pointed to another part of his drawing. “But here,” Mr. Wu said with a grin, “it just pops!”
The drawing was one of several Mr. Evans had tacked to the wall of a big, bright gallery in Cooper Union’s main building here, and Ms. Gussow and some 15 other students in her advanced drawing seminar were seated in a scatterplot of folding chairs they had dragged over to face it. “In here I was just drawing trajectories and forces,” Mr. Evans explained. “And in these two, where I was actually drawing from life, there was a point where I departed from reality.”
Two students who had slipped out to the Mud Coffee truck on Astor Place came back in, crinkling paper bags, as Ms. Gussow stood up and pulled her chair over to the next group of drawings, by Tomashi Jackson. The students followed with their chairs. “So now let’s step back and look at this major work,” Ms. Gussow said when the noise died down, “this magnum opus up on the wall.”
Ms. Gussow’s drawing seminar for Cooper Union’s architecture students — offered only once a year since she took emerita status in 2003 — is a Friday ritual that is part critique, part art-history lesson, and part group-therapy session. Many of the drawings are good, and much of the conversation is so eloquent that you could add line breaks and pass it off as poetry. Ms. Gussow expects hard work from the class, but the atmosphere is casual. “People drift in when they drift in, and class goes on all day long,” Ms. Gussow had said beforehand. “It isn’t over till it’s over. Sometimes it isn’t even over then, and I catch up with them on Saturday or whenever I’m in the building next.” The seminar has had a waiting list for years.
Ms. Gussow — a small, cheerful woman in a broad-brimmed black hat, with her eyeglasses on a cord around her neck — is hardly a commanding presence on the order of, say, Vincent Scully, the Yale University architecture-history professor whose lectures are legendary. But her reputation among architecture students here is every bit the equal of Mr. Scully’s in New Haven. “She carefully pulls out the nugget of what is good and builds on that,” Mr. Wu said later. “She almost tricks you into thinking that you’ve always had this skill.”
A surprising thing is that the skill Ms. Gussow teaches Cooper Union’s upper-level architecture students is freehand drawing. It has nothing to do — at least not directly — with depicting buildings, for which architects now have sophisticated software. But drawing remains important, said Kayt Brumder, another of Ms. Gussow’s students, because not being able to sketch ideas would be “like not having a language.”
Mr. Wu agreed. “Everything I think of goes into my notebook as a sketch,” he said. In an architecture firm, he added, “anything that needs to be discussed needs to be drawn, and the person making the drawing has the reins on the ideas. You’d be surprised how many architects don’t know how to draw.”
At the same time, though, students see the seminar as a course apart from what they normally do. “It’s liberating,” Mr. Evans said. “Doing a hard-line drawing, you tense up.” Ms. Brumder put it a little differently: “It’s therapeutic — it aligns your hand and your mind.”
“I promise to teach them nothing useful,” Professor Gussow said during a lunch break at Village Mingala, a favorite Burmese restaurant half a block from Cooper Union. “I don’t want it to be adjunct to the design studio. I want it to be entirely on its own — to open a window, a door, into their own internal space.”
Ms. Gussow is a Brooklyn native and a graduate of Cooper Union’s art school, where she taught for four years. She was lured to the architecture school in 1974 by John Hejduk, the visionary architect who was then two years into what became a 28-year tenure as the school’s dean. “John Hejduk was in love with drawing — he would draw and draw and draw,” said Ms. Gussow. “There was a course in drawing in the architecture school, but Hejduk felt it was tightening students up.” Mr. Hejduk mentioned to the painter Robert Slutzky that he was looking for someone to teach figure drawing to first-year students, Ms. Gussow recalled, “and Bob said, ‘That’s Sue Gussow.’”
“I totally fell in love with the architecture students,” she said. “They think in a more analytic way about what they do, and I tend to think in a very analytical way about drawing.” Within a few years Mr. Hejduk secured a full-time appointment for Ms. Gussow, and her courses have been fixtures since. Mr. Hejduk died in 2000, but last year Ms. Gussow dedicated a book to him. It’s called Architects Draw, and it contains exercises she used in the first-year drawing course over the years, as well as beautiful drawings by former students. “I felt it was really important to get that book out there, to give shape to what I spent all those years doing, and also because John Hejduk had always wanted me to do a book,” she said.
But her book doesn’t quite capture the easy, thoughtful dynamic of the seminar. Back in class, Ms. Gussow was a gentle and encouraging guide. She told one woman to look up a particular Degas drawing to see how he rendered jockeys’ silks in a racetrack scene, and in several cases she told students to leave well enough alone with one drawing or another. “Otherwise you’re gonna blow it — it’s just going to turn to mud,” she told a student. “Every drawing, every painting, is really about the next painting anyhow.”
The seminar students don’t have drawing exercises, instead choosing to draw whatever they want to explore in detail — rocks, a baby’s hands, male nudes, elderly people. Class is as much as anything an exercise in talking about drawing. Liz Feder, who spent the entire semester drawing gloves, said that what she had been trying to capture was “the stretch of when the material is first put on” and “the space between two memories of a hand.” Ms. Gussow and the other students looked intently at the wall full of frolicking gloves — gloves that seemed to tumble, float, dance, leap, and dive — and asked a handful of questions. Ms. Gussow allowed that an ocher wash in one of the drawings “works with gray scale very nicely.” But she added: “My philosophy about color, especially for people who draw well, is that color is dangerous, because color can kill a drawing. Color is so gorgeous that you’ve got to be careful with it.”
“Once you get an idea of how to talk about drawing, you can really talk about anything,” Mr. Evans said later, at a table in the Mud Coffee shop on East 9th Street, adding that Ms. Gussow is “an excellent process critic.” Mr. Wu chimed in: “The way that the course is structured is almost like a writing class — different people make suggestions about voice, grammar, content.”
Mr. Evans and Mr. Wu, along with Ms. Brumder, are among Ms. Gussow’s repeat customers. “We’ve all taken it twice, and it’s not like it’s a different class,” Ms. Brumder said. “She’ll draw out of you a passion — it totally drives your inspiration for other classes.”
“The beauty of Gussow,” Mr. Wu said. “is that she can make a master out of anyone with even the slightest skill.”
“It’s a mental game,” Ms. Brumder interrupted. “It’s encouragement.”
“It’s like you’re fighting with yourself,” said Mr. Wu, “and Gussow’s standing by your side.”
http://chronicle.com Section: The Faculty Volume 55, Issue 23, Page A12