There is a kind of survey that no instrument can perform, and the studio has come to rely on it. It is done on foot, at dawn, before the site has warmed and before the client is present, and it is done with a notebook and nothing else.
I — The ridge
The Central Valley reads differently from a ridgeline. Fog gathers in the folds and burns off unevenly. Roads that seem central in a map turn out to sit below the eye. The house one thinks one is going to draw is almost never the house one draws after the walk.
“The site is not what the survey records. The site is what the walk remembers.”
