Raymond Lucas is a reader in architecture at Manchester School of Architecture, where he is the Director of Humanities. He has a background in architecture and a PhD in Social Anthropology. He currently teaches at Manchester School of Architecture, including a unit on ‘Graphic Anthropology’ where he asks students to combine graphic representation methods with anthropological theories to deepen their engagement with site and context. Parts of this work have been supported by the ERC Project ‘Knowing from the Inside’ and the Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation.
“This work describes elements of the Sanja Matsuri festival in Asakusa, Tokyo. The research is focused on the architectural manifestations of this event through everyday appropriations and occupations of urban space; organisational infrastructure, temporary buildings and decoration of repurposed spaces; and the physicality of carrying heavy mobile pieces of architecture. The series is a fragment of ‘A Graphic Anthropology of Sanja Matsuri’ as featured in ‘Architecture, Festival and the City’* and ‘Anthropology for Architects’**. The work makes use of architectural drawing conventions such as axonometric and oblique as well as watercolour studies and notations. The series extends to over 120 items to date, drawn from 2015 to 2020 and including Laban notations, sensory notations, architectural drawings and watercolours.
The use of different drawing conventions allows alternative aspects of each scene to be understood. Architectural drawings describe forms and materials whilst colour and texture comes to life in watercolour or illustration marker. Each drawing is a meditation on the scene that enters into a conversation with the more conventionally understood academic discourse.”
*Browne, Jemma, Christian Frost, and Ray Lucas, eds. (2018). Architecture, Festival and the City. Routledge.
**Lucas, R. (2020). Anthropology for Architects: Social Relations and the Built Environment. Bloomsbury Publishing.
illustratinganthropology.com 