htc.Workshop November 21, 2008, 2-5pm

Sarah Teasley, Northwestern University

The Drawing as Object: Technical Drawing and Ideology in Modern Japan

In 1908, the Japanese Ministry of Education began requiring elementary schools to teach Western-style drafting for woodworking, from simple boxes and placards to more complicated Japanese- and European-style bookshelves and chairs. The drawing and interpretation of Western-style construction drawings (seizu) was already part of the curriculum in furniture-making and architectural technology programs at Japanese technical schools, and major trade publishers circulated textbooks to extend design literacy to workers already on the job. Furthermore, as in other industrialized or industrializing nations, general drawing education had already been identified as a vehicle for modernization for several decades. However, the new policy of teaching furniture drawing specifically to all students demonstrates that for the Ministry, not only the analytical and representational skills embodied by construction drawings, including the ability to translate between idea and object and between two and three dimensions, but also the very practice of furniture construction itself were somehow key to national modernization through the education of its constituents.

In this paper, I ask why the investment in drawing, and why drawing for wooden furniture fabrication specifically? What was it about the ability to read a drawing as outlining a method of practice, or to record that method of practice as line on a flat surface, that so entranced the men at the Ministry of Education? And what might it mean for drawing as a practice and object to effect change in the physical environment, not only by offering a model for the creation of three-dimensional objects, but by changing the actual interaction of users and producers with them, by mediating and acting on the visual and the tactile, the two- and three-dimensional, the act and the result, the completed object and the representation of the sequence of its completing? Could it have been the immediacy of this role that so captivated the architects of Japan’s modernization process in the early twentieth century that they made it part to the modernization of the nation itself? And what might this analysis tell us about the relationship between drawing and object, and about the role of a drawing, and of the act of drawing, as object itself?

Inspired in part by the work of Bruno Latour, this paper recasts Japanese modernity as a heterogeneous node within global economic, political, technological and social networks, and considers the various and related roles of (the) furniture construction drawing as a technology acting within the network itself.