THTR/ENGR 197: Leonardo da Vinci’s inherent connection to both art and engineering was at the heart of his practice. This course brings engineering and theatre arts design together through engineering analysis, artistic exploration, and hands-on design and building to experience his intellectual curiosity, his inspirational humanity, and his tremendous technical knowledge.
Notebooks:
To promote thinking like Leonardo, we kept notebooks as part of the class. There were three types of entries:
Drawing Exercises focused on honing our ability to understand what we saw and draw it, utilizing the principle of sapere vedere – knowing what to see.
Engineering Analyses blended visual and graphic explorations of simple engineering problems, both static and dynamic.
Notebook Assignments were the most numerous. These weekly assignments each surrounded a topic that Leonardo had a particular interest in. For each topic, we could either explore an invention of our own (The Archer’s Sextant above falls under the topic of Machines) or observe and copy one of Leonardo’s many sketches pertaining to the topic (the Grotesque to the right is an exercise in Theatrical expression).
Note: Pictures without captions are my copies of Leonardo’s sketches.
AIDEN GALBRAITH 