Sanda Iliescu reflects on the value of tactility and sensory-rich experiences through the Black Box Project

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Left: Drawing of objects inside a Black Box by student in Lessons in Making, Architecture 1020 (ca. 2014). Right: Drawing of textures experienced inside a Black Box by student in Lessons in Making, Architecture 1020 (ca. 2014).

This semester, Professor of Architecture and Art Sanda Iliescu partnered with Associate Dean of Student Affairs Cindy Kiefer on the "Creativity and Relaxation: Public Art and Mental Well-Being" initiative, an invitation to the A-School community to pause, de-stress, and reconnect with their senses through creative engagement.

The initiative builds upon "The Black Box Project" — an exercise Iliescu has developed and adapted over years in her longstanding course title Lessons in Making. We invited Iliescu to reflect on the project—which encourages moments of stillness, sensory exploration, and emotional grounding. 

The following text shared by Iliescu, and accompanied by drawings by students, describes the project's origins and its value to students, faculty, and staff alike in a digitally-pervasive age. 

The Black Box Project
A Reflection by Professor Sanda Iliescu

For all the practical value they offer us in our lives, computers and smartphones also take away something very significant: the delight we may take in our physical world that only comes when we use all our senses. When we look at an image on a computer or smartphone, we no longer take pleasure in enjoying the sounds, textures, and scents of the world around us. Even our sense of sight is impoverished: the number of colors we see on even the best computer screens represents a tiny fraction of the vast number of colors we can perceive in nature.
 

I believe making and experiencing art can be an antidote to our depleted digital experiences because artmaking is an inherently tactile, sensory-rich activity.
 

As we make a painting, drawing, or collage, we listen to the tapping of the brush on the stretched canvas, we feel the pressure of the pencil and the texture of the paper, we sense the lightness or heaviness of materials, we see colors that are infinitely richer and more nuanced than those emitted by a digital screen.

The Black Box project that I assign my students is one way in which I have tried to help them realize the importance of our sense perceptions. The idea for the project came to me about twenty years ago when I saw a sculpture by Romanian-born sculptor Constantin Brancusi at the Philadelphia Museum of Art: his evocatively titled Sculpture for the Blind, an exquisitely smooth marble ovoid form resembling an egg. As with all museum artifacts, visitors were not allowed to touch the sculpture, but I remember when I saw Sculpture for the Blind feeling an intense desire to do so: to let my fingers meander over the lovely, curved surface; to sense its smoothness; to feel the cold touch of marble. After my museum visit I researched Brancusi’s work and was surprised to discover that the artist had a very novel idea for how to present the sculpture. According to French writer, collector, and art dealer Henri-Pierre Roché, the sculpture was first exhibited in 1917 at the Society of Independent Artists in New York, “enclosed in a bag with two sleeve-holes for hands to pass through” and touch the unseen form within. Sculpture for the Blind was to be experienced as a blind person would experience a work of art.  It was to be touched, but not seen.

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Left: Drawing of a lightbulb inside a Black Box by student in Lessons in Making, Architecture 1020 (ca. 2014). Right: Drawing of a bowl inside a Black Box by student in Lessons in Making, Architecture 1020 (ca. 2014).

Inspired by Brancusi’s work, I designed and constructed my own “black boxes” for my students: opaque cubic containers, painted black and fitted with sleeves though which they could pass their hands to touch the unseen objects within. Inside the boxes I placed objects with different forms and made of different materials: wood spoons, metal teapots, concrete cubes, porcelain cups, pebbles and twigs. I asked students in my design foundation class, Lessons in Making (Architecture 1020), to use the black boxes and, after carefully experiencing the objects within, to draw what their hands “saw.”

The resulting drawing were quite interesting. 
 

Unable to see, students became meticulous detectives, patiently uncovering clues. They touched contours; felt textures and temperatures; assessed relative weights; measured dimensions with palms and fingers; tested musical possibilities. 

Some students noted their discoveries by writing on the drawing paper, the way detectives jot down observations and hypotheses. After this initial layer of writing, students drew the objects’ forms, first very faintly which resembled barely visible ghosts across a dominant field of words. Words were written, partially erased and re-written again. The drawing became a “palimpsest” of text layers. (In medieval history “palimpsest” describes a document that has been inscribed several times, previous texts having been imperfectly erased and remaining still partly visible. The Greek “palimpsestos” combines “palin” (again) and “psen” (to rub or rub out). As the students became more certain of the objects’ characteristics—the shapes, proportions, and textures—they began to draw with darker and darker lines, and their drawings became rich surfaces with great variations in tone and line weight.  

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The Black Boxes have no privileged viewpoint. Consequently, many drawings are not singular depictions, but accumulations of details and partial “views” imagined from different angles.  Overlapping fragments fill the page. 
 

The drawing is a layered record (like writing) of a temporal experience. 

Repeated cross-sections describe overlapping “views.” The same outline is echoed, each new take a bit more detailed. This incessant repetition belies the “Black Box” process: students touch the same contour many times before gaining even rudimentary “insight.” Drawings often have the look of sketchbook pages, of personal studies. Some are cleanly and logically organized, while others convey an atmosphere of murkiness that suggests the obscurity of the Black Boxes.

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While drawing the same contour many times over students touch the paper in different ways: lines are smudged, rubbed, scratched, marked with various hand pressures. Repeated drawing sometimes leads to the selection of a characteristic, essential representation for each object. This may be a plan view or a distorted “bird’s eye” perspective. Gaining insight through touch is a process that remains perpetually unfinished (colors, for instance, are forever unreachable).  
 

Drawing itself becomes an open-ended, unfinished process. 

After much scoring and rubbing, some students might re-affirm the overall shape by erasing. This deliberate carving out of drawing deposits renders the object at once bold and ghostly flat. In contrast, some objects take on a fantastical, invented specificity, for instance a teapot with many spouts or a lightbulb that resembles a bottle. The Black Boxes lead to a wide variety in the temperament of drawings. Because they can’t see their subjects, students become at once more thoughtful and more instinctive. They “touch” the drawing surface in a wide range of unique ways. Some objects are drawn in aggressive, bold ways, while others have a delicate touch: precise, patient observations are represented with sensitive, controlled lines.

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Very recently, in the fall semester of 2025, I used the black boxes in a slightly different way. In an effort to promote creativity, relaxation, and mental well-being at the Architecture school—and in collaboration with Cindy Kiefer, the Associate Dean of Student Affairs at the Architecture School, and Leia Morrissey, an undergraduate student in the Architecture Department—I installed the boxes in the main lobby of Campbell Hall and invited students to take a break from their busy day by picking up a pen or pencil and make a drawing of an object in one of the boxes. My hope was that the Black Boxes would give students a chance to relax, have an interesting tactile experience, and draw without worrying what the finished drawing would look like. Leia Morrissey and I composed a poem that was posted alongside the boxes.  It read:

We invite you
To take a moment and relax,
To touch the objects inside the Black Boxes,
To imagine what these objects might look like,

To imagine their forms and colors,
To imagine what the spaces around them might look like,
To make a drawing of what your hands see.
 

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In the Black Boxes we placed objects made of wood such as spoons, bowls, playing blocks, fragments of tree bark, dreidels, and statuettes. Over a period of 43 days (from October 1 to November 12) over one hundred people visited the Black Boxes and made drawings. These drawings are clearer, crisper, and less complicated than their predecessors (which were made during the context of an architecture class). They are also far more playful and joyful. There are no layers and no palimpsests, since the drawing instructions did not include the prompt to create expressive drawings that suggest the dark interior of the boxes or the artist’s experience. While vivid and almost child-like in their simplicity, these new drawings are remarkably accurate in the depictions of shapes, proportions, and geometric relationships. They are also more concise and bolder.

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I was tempted to think that all these surprising drawing qualities reflect a sense of mindfulness and relaxation. But this may be the case for some artists and not others. 
 

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While many artists felt they were peaceful while making the drawings, one confided in me that they were rather afraid of the boxes: there was something looming about them….Not knowing where one reaches with one’s hand can be unnerving: what if there is a bug or snake or something that can hurt in those black boxes? Other artists told me they felt a sense of excitement, and that they found the process of touching and drawing captivating. “I lost myself in those strange black boxes,” one student commented.

Ultimately, the black boxes have a dual poetic function: they provide a new way to draw that can lead to exciting and surprising drawings, and they allow for a very different and unique experience: they tell us what it’s like to be blind, to feel one’s way in the world without one’s vision.