Artefakte des Entwerfens: Skizzieren, Zeichnen, Skripten, Modellieren (Universitätsverlag der TU Berlin), 2020
Draw of a Drawing is a transcription of the installation Kaleidoscopic City (a survey of Edinburg... more Draw of a Drawing is a transcription of the installation Kaleidoscopic City (a survey of Edinburgh focused on the transitory elements of the urban). As such it marks the moment that the elements of the survey are projected upon a single surface. Understanding drawing as not only a representational artefact but as a distinct intertextual spatiality, it performs this material situation by expanding into 3D space. This move uncovers the process of drawing as a situated experience; where reading and writing the drawing are understood as immersive forms of inhabitation, and the interiority of architecture’s own codes of signification is revealed in a productive exchange with external notions of agency and convention.
Its dual expression as the enclosed space of a box and a continuous surface exemplifies the relationship between the spatial and the ‘superficial’ while the wood registers the negotiations that take place between sign and surface by reassigning signification to the effect of inscription. Draw of a Drawing thus not only re-presents but also enacts the gesture of drawing, considering architectural signification as a process of (re)configuring a space that is not other, but continuous to the locality of its physical instantiation.
Draw of a Drawing is therefore also a record of representational transactions. What has come to comprise it has been carried across a variety of localities or sites. From the city to the gallery, and to the interior of a wooden box, these re-sitings can be understood as a series of reterritorialisations, where the object of representation is not merely displaced but constantly recalibrated by the agency of new space(s). These ‘situations’ both material and immaterial are always enabled by a surface. Indexical, verbal and figural marks, are situated in the drawing but also place the drawing itself within a frame of ‘language’ while both the material expression of the box and the techniques of fabrication involved are equally formative of the final result.
As re-sitings become re-sightings, and even looking is performed as a surface-effect, the physical attachment to the site of installation facilitates the enactment of the drawing’s performativity. Installation thus takes on the form of drawing in space: of drawing out from the surface the space of representation in a choreography of manipulation.
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Limited number of free e-prints available here: https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/9CWHEY5WKQYCED6F8EJS/full?target=10.1080/20507828.2019.1633504
Journal Issues
The rapid global transition to a distanced and remote mode of education on the one hand has created inevitable challenges in executing conventional practice using foreign media. Most notably, this has largely removed the situated representational practices of drawing and making from architectural studio teaching, placing a significant reliance on the use of verbal language, while accelerating the shift to solely digital outputs. It has also called into question the preparedness of educators and learners in adopting alternative forms of educations and brought heightened attention to the affective dimensions of effective learning, adding transparency to the hidden aspects of curriculum delivery, such as how assessment is appropriated and approached by educators and learners alike. Lastly, it has challenged the importance of place and space in architectural education not only as sites of embodied knowledge production but also as the very subject matter of the discipline, in a society where architectural space implodes to the extreme interiority of isolation. The relevance of problems, issues and methodologies explored within architectural briefs and curricula, design values and the expectations of both the society and professional bodies from architectural graduates are in this context put into question.
Although there may be an expected temporality to this situation, it is also inevitable that changes in educational practice that have emerged from this crisis will have longer term implications for architectural pedagogy. This displacement after all aligns, to a degree, with pressures that have already been present: the shrinking of the space of architectural education due to the rising numbers of students; the shift to the virtual spaces of digitisation; the systemisation of assessment formulas. If, as a result of this pandemic, we can expect that previously speculative pedagogies will be further implemented into practice, what are the catalyst pedagogies, particular to architecture that might resist and condition this change? And, furthermore, how might these adapt to or appropriate such conditions and what are the threshold concepts that might emerge in the new era of architectural education?
This special issue of Charrette, calls for scholarly contributions re-evaluating architectural education and pedagogies within a global scale, sharing critical responses and novel experiences of architectural education practice, drawing from the COVID-19 pandemic’s impact on higher education. These can arguably be considered as the foundation of a group of catalyst pedagogies, portraying the image of flexibility and adaptability in the changing landscape of architectural education.
Access to full issue via the URL
Book Chapters
Its dual expression as the enclosed space of a box and a continuous surface exemplifies the relationship between the spatial and the ‘superficial’ while the wood registers the negotiations that take place between sign and surface by reassigning signification to the effect of inscription. Draw of a Drawing thus not only re-presents but also enacts the gesture of drawing, considering architectural signification as a process of (re)configuring a space that is not other, but continuous to the locality of its physical instantiation.
Draw of a Drawing is therefore also a record of representational transactions. What has come to comprise it has been carried across a variety of localities or sites. From the city to the gallery, and to the interior of a wooden box, these re-sitings can be understood as a series of reterritorialisations, where the object of representation is not merely displaced but constantly recalibrated by the agency of new space(s). These ‘situations’ both material and immaterial are always enabled by a surface. Indexical, verbal and figural marks, are situated in the drawing but also place the drawing itself within a frame of ‘language’ while both the material expression of the box and the techniques of fabrication involved are equally formative of the final result.
As re-sitings become re-sightings, and even looking is performed as a surface-effect, the physical attachment to the site of installation facilitates the enactment of the drawing’s performativity. Installation thus takes on the form of drawing in space: of drawing out from the surface the space of representation in a choreography of manipulation.
This paper looks at the transcriptive operations that take place between real space and the space of the architectural drawing as an opportunity to rethink and expand the limits of architectural representation in order to embrace the complex negotiations and interactions that occur in the city. This emphasis on the infraordinary (Perec) reveals the users and their non-human counterparts as the markers of différance (Derrida) within the text of the city, bringing individual experience to the centre of this reading. In the textual city the users configure space both physically and perceptively. This paper is further concerned with the transcription of this condition into another form of writing and particularly with the transference of the effect of various agencies from one to the next.The locus of the reading is transposed from the city to the drawing that forms a new site of investigation, yet the characters remain the same.
The drawing as ‘writing’ involves a series of ‘readings’. As the architect faces the duality of being a ‘reader’ and an ‘author’, the transition from the actual to the virtual cannot be considered as being merely a transcription from experience to sign. Moreover, the author’s intentions are not just liable to the intentions of an external reader but to internal agencies such as the material procedures involved and the autonomy of the signs in use. The drawing becomes an operator in the narrative of space while the architect himself acquires the status of the ‘character’. Drawing from Roland Barthes’ opposition between the text and the literary work, this paper will conclude that the textual nature of the city should already presuppose the nature of the drawing as a site of interpretative readings, a process itself temporal and kinetic, capable of revealing the possibility of new realities.
The architectural virtual reframes the discussion of architecture’s digital turn, placing emphasis on drawing’s ability to operate between the abstraction of representation and embodied physical experience. The text reframes the supposed contradiction between systems of mediation such as language and the immediacy of experience to address and clarify the relationship between architectural drawing as a systematic language, and the digital claim to virtualisation as an effect of simulation, considering the architectural virtual through the idea of utopic texts as a spatial plays that entails a mode of situated experience (Marin 1984). Drawing from post-structuralist discourse, this research situates architectural drawing in the context of utopic visions within and beyond architecture through an understanding of language as a spatial condition of subjectivity rather than a purely referential representation (Derrida 1997; Lefebvre 1991).
Tracing the relationship between language and experience from the introduction of digital virtuality in William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984), to the architectural utopias of the 1960s as drawn by Italian architectural group Superstudio, the chapter argues, that in both analogue and digital realms of design, architecture always emerges through a mediation that calls into question not only the media at hand, but also the very definition of architecture’s own claim upon the virtual before the real/built.
The works presented in this paper and the exchanges between art and architecture that they reveal, are framed by an inquiry into the origins of drawing. The tale of ‘The Origin of Drawing’ as discussed by Robin Evans (1995) and Stan Allen (2009) is examined to address questions of performance that put focus on drawing as a space of action, activated only at the participation of the viewer. The tale of Aristipp’s “happy landing,” used by Vitruvius to trace architecture’s origins in geometry (Oechslin 1981), highlights the agency of drawing on the experience of the real spaces it relates to.
On unravelling a discussion on installation and land art as forms of drawing in space, the chapter foregrounds the question of the ‘space of drawing,’ as a particular mode of spatiality that involves both physical and conceptual spaces. Miwon Kwon’s discussion of site-specificity in installation-art (1997), provides grounds for the understanding of this space through a definition of drawing’s multiple ‘site-specificities’. Drawing parallels between the architectural site and the situation of drawing, the text redefines drawing as a space in itself that enables the production of new experiences for the viewer/reader, through attachments to multiple real and conceptual spaces.
Within this field of congested visualities, this chapter considers architectural drawing as a device of looking, a kind of visual device that is capable of offering a unified field of inter-textual visibility in lieu of a universal vision. Drawing is considered here as a kind of visual ‘prosthesis’ that brings things into visibility by proposing alternate spatializations. Henri Bergson’s kaleidoscopic analogy for human perception offers a starting point for the understanding of the urban field as equally conditioned by a plurality of conventions, images and impressions. The (re)presentation of this field through architectural drawing emerges itself as a kaleidoscopic process of knowledge (Benjamin, Didi-Huberman).
Challenging architectural drawing conventions in relation to urban representation, the chapter critically considers the modalities of visual perception that have emerged since modernity in the context of an increasingly saturated ‘visuality’ (Foster 1988). This is further explored through the installation/drawing ‘Kaleidoscopic City’, a drawing of an area in Edinburgh.
The increasing shift from physical experience to visually consumed impressions¬¬ of spaces can be traced back to the explorations and technological advancements of early modernity that brought to the fore the interrelation between space and time. In this context it can be considered as derived not by the digital mediations and manifestations of spaces but rather by a wider visual culture which can be, through Gilles Deleuze’s writing on cinema (Deleuze, 1983, 1985), as well as Jonathan Beller’s concept of the ‘Cinematic Mode of Production’ considered as ‘cinematic’ (Beller, 2002). As both Deleuze and Beller suggest, the cinematic does not simply entail the production of imagery but also the consequent production of consciousness and perception as ideology, challenging thus the interrelation between notions of reality, language and virtuality. This paper will look into the ways that the effects of virtuality that emerge in, and are operative for, the performativity of drawing as a ‘space of representation’ (Dorrian and Hawker, 2002) are contested by the effects of virtuality produced out of the cinematic, as the former seem to facilitate while the latter seem to bypass the production of spatial concepts.
In light of the range of representational, recording, image and form producing possibilities offered by digital media – described by Beller as successors of the cinematic – this paper considers the current ‘digital turn’ of architecture as the architectural counterpart of the representational experimentations of modernist artists. This turn is situated in relation to the Cartographic and Geographic turns of architecture and architectural representation, as introduced respectively by Mark Dorrian (2005) and David Gissen (2008). In these latter turns, the pressure initially exerted upon architectural practice by the so-called crisis of representation, drawn out of the philosophical and political debates of the 1960s (Tschumi, 1996) is considered through opposing strategies of representation and simulation.
The chapter finally argues that what is at stake in the digital not-yet-turn but challenge of architecture, is neither the skeuomorphic imitation of drawing’s analogue techniques, nor the production of iconic imagery, but rather the ‘domestication’ (Ingraham, 1998) of the medium as a new field of performance for architectural thinking-through-drawing through the (re)consideration of convention as a ground capable of facilitating both semiotic integrity and performance.
Thesis
Limited number of free e-prints available here: https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/9CWHEY5WKQYCED6F8EJS/full?target=10.1080/20507828.2019.1633504
The rapid global transition to a distanced and remote mode of education on the one hand has created inevitable challenges in executing conventional practice using foreign media. Most notably, this has largely removed the situated representational practices of drawing and making from architectural studio teaching, placing a significant reliance on the use of verbal language, while accelerating the shift to solely digital outputs. It has also called into question the preparedness of educators and learners in adopting alternative forms of educations and brought heightened attention to the affective dimensions of effective learning, adding transparency to the hidden aspects of curriculum delivery, such as how assessment is appropriated and approached by educators and learners alike. Lastly, it has challenged the importance of place and space in architectural education not only as sites of embodied knowledge production but also as the very subject matter of the discipline, in a society where architectural space implodes to the extreme interiority of isolation. The relevance of problems, issues and methodologies explored within architectural briefs and curricula, design values and the expectations of both the society and professional bodies from architectural graduates are in this context put into question.
Although there may be an expected temporality to this situation, it is also inevitable that changes in educational practice that have emerged from this crisis will have longer term implications for architectural pedagogy. This displacement after all aligns, to a degree, with pressures that have already been present: the shrinking of the space of architectural education due to the rising numbers of students; the shift to the virtual spaces of digitisation; the systemisation of assessment formulas. If, as a result of this pandemic, we can expect that previously speculative pedagogies will be further implemented into practice, what are the catalyst pedagogies, particular to architecture that might resist and condition this change? And, furthermore, how might these adapt to or appropriate such conditions and what are the threshold concepts that might emerge in the new era of architectural education?
This special issue of Charrette, calls for scholarly contributions re-evaluating architectural education and pedagogies within a global scale, sharing critical responses and novel experiences of architectural education practice, drawing from the COVID-19 pandemic’s impact on higher education. These can arguably be considered as the foundation of a group of catalyst pedagogies, portraying the image of flexibility and adaptability in the changing landscape of architectural education.
Access to full issue via the URL
Its dual expression as the enclosed space of a box and a continuous surface exemplifies the relationship between the spatial and the ‘superficial’ while the wood registers the negotiations that take place between sign and surface by reassigning signification to the effect of inscription. Draw of a Drawing thus not only re-presents but also enacts the gesture of drawing, considering architectural signification as a process of (re)configuring a space that is not other, but continuous to the locality of its physical instantiation.
Draw of a Drawing is therefore also a record of representational transactions. What has come to comprise it has been carried across a variety of localities or sites. From the city to the gallery, and to the interior of a wooden box, these re-sitings can be understood as a series of reterritorialisations, where the object of representation is not merely displaced but constantly recalibrated by the agency of new space(s). These ‘situations’ both material and immaterial are always enabled by a surface. Indexical, verbal and figural marks, are situated in the drawing but also place the drawing itself within a frame of ‘language’ while both the material expression of the box and the techniques of fabrication involved are equally formative of the final result.
As re-sitings become re-sightings, and even looking is performed as a surface-effect, the physical attachment to the site of installation facilitates the enactment of the drawing’s performativity. Installation thus takes on the form of drawing in space: of drawing out from the surface the space of representation in a choreography of manipulation.
This paper looks at the transcriptive operations that take place between real space and the space of the architectural drawing as an opportunity to rethink and expand the limits of architectural representation in order to embrace the complex negotiations and interactions that occur in the city. This emphasis on the infraordinary (Perec) reveals the users and their non-human counterparts as the markers of différance (Derrida) within the text of the city, bringing individual experience to the centre of this reading. In the textual city the users configure space both physically and perceptively. This paper is further concerned with the transcription of this condition into another form of writing and particularly with the transference of the effect of various agencies from one to the next.The locus of the reading is transposed from the city to the drawing that forms a new site of investigation, yet the characters remain the same.
The drawing as ‘writing’ involves a series of ‘readings’. As the architect faces the duality of being a ‘reader’ and an ‘author’, the transition from the actual to the virtual cannot be considered as being merely a transcription from experience to sign. Moreover, the author’s intentions are not just liable to the intentions of an external reader but to internal agencies such as the material procedures involved and the autonomy of the signs in use. The drawing becomes an operator in the narrative of space while the architect himself acquires the status of the ‘character’. Drawing from Roland Barthes’ opposition between the text and the literary work, this paper will conclude that the textual nature of the city should already presuppose the nature of the drawing as a site of interpretative readings, a process itself temporal and kinetic, capable of revealing the possibility of new realities.
The architectural virtual reframes the discussion of architecture’s digital turn, placing emphasis on drawing’s ability to operate between the abstraction of representation and embodied physical experience. The text reframes the supposed contradiction between systems of mediation such as language and the immediacy of experience to address and clarify the relationship between architectural drawing as a systematic language, and the digital claim to virtualisation as an effect of simulation, considering the architectural virtual through the idea of utopic texts as a spatial plays that entails a mode of situated experience (Marin 1984). Drawing from post-structuralist discourse, this research situates architectural drawing in the context of utopic visions within and beyond architecture through an understanding of language as a spatial condition of subjectivity rather than a purely referential representation (Derrida 1997; Lefebvre 1991).
Tracing the relationship between language and experience from the introduction of digital virtuality in William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984), to the architectural utopias of the 1960s as drawn by Italian architectural group Superstudio, the chapter argues, that in both analogue and digital realms of design, architecture always emerges through a mediation that calls into question not only the media at hand, but also the very definition of architecture’s own claim upon the virtual before the real/built.
The works presented in this paper and the exchanges between art and architecture that they reveal, are framed by an inquiry into the origins of drawing. The tale of ‘The Origin of Drawing’ as discussed by Robin Evans (1995) and Stan Allen (2009) is examined to address questions of performance that put focus on drawing as a space of action, activated only at the participation of the viewer. The tale of Aristipp’s “happy landing,” used by Vitruvius to trace architecture’s origins in geometry (Oechslin 1981), highlights the agency of drawing on the experience of the real spaces it relates to.
On unravelling a discussion on installation and land art as forms of drawing in space, the chapter foregrounds the question of the ‘space of drawing,’ as a particular mode of spatiality that involves both physical and conceptual spaces. Miwon Kwon’s discussion of site-specificity in installation-art (1997), provides grounds for the understanding of this space through a definition of drawing’s multiple ‘site-specificities’. Drawing parallels between the architectural site and the situation of drawing, the text redefines drawing as a space in itself that enables the production of new experiences for the viewer/reader, through attachments to multiple real and conceptual spaces.
Within this field of congested visualities, this chapter considers architectural drawing as a device of looking, a kind of visual device that is capable of offering a unified field of inter-textual visibility in lieu of a universal vision. Drawing is considered here as a kind of visual ‘prosthesis’ that brings things into visibility by proposing alternate spatializations. Henri Bergson’s kaleidoscopic analogy for human perception offers a starting point for the understanding of the urban field as equally conditioned by a plurality of conventions, images and impressions. The (re)presentation of this field through architectural drawing emerges itself as a kaleidoscopic process of knowledge (Benjamin, Didi-Huberman).
Challenging architectural drawing conventions in relation to urban representation, the chapter critically considers the modalities of visual perception that have emerged since modernity in the context of an increasingly saturated ‘visuality’ (Foster 1988). This is further explored through the installation/drawing ‘Kaleidoscopic City’, a drawing of an area in Edinburgh.
The increasing shift from physical experience to visually consumed impressions¬¬ of spaces can be traced back to the explorations and technological advancements of early modernity that brought to the fore the interrelation between space and time. In this context it can be considered as derived not by the digital mediations and manifestations of spaces but rather by a wider visual culture which can be, through Gilles Deleuze’s writing on cinema (Deleuze, 1983, 1985), as well as Jonathan Beller’s concept of the ‘Cinematic Mode of Production’ considered as ‘cinematic’ (Beller, 2002). As both Deleuze and Beller suggest, the cinematic does not simply entail the production of imagery but also the consequent production of consciousness and perception as ideology, challenging thus the interrelation between notions of reality, language and virtuality. This paper will look into the ways that the effects of virtuality that emerge in, and are operative for, the performativity of drawing as a ‘space of representation’ (Dorrian and Hawker, 2002) are contested by the effects of virtuality produced out of the cinematic, as the former seem to facilitate while the latter seem to bypass the production of spatial concepts.
In light of the range of representational, recording, image and form producing possibilities offered by digital media – described by Beller as successors of the cinematic – this paper considers the current ‘digital turn’ of architecture as the architectural counterpart of the representational experimentations of modernist artists. This turn is situated in relation to the Cartographic and Geographic turns of architecture and architectural representation, as introduced respectively by Mark Dorrian (2005) and David Gissen (2008). In these latter turns, the pressure initially exerted upon architectural practice by the so-called crisis of representation, drawn out of the philosophical and political debates of the 1960s (Tschumi, 1996) is considered through opposing strategies of representation and simulation.
The chapter finally argues that what is at stake in the digital not-yet-turn but challenge of architecture, is neither the skeuomorphic imitation of drawing’s analogue techniques, nor the production of iconic imagery, but rather the ‘domestication’ (Ingraham, 1998) of the medium as a new field of performance for architectural thinking-through-drawing through the (re)consideration of convention as a ground capable of facilitating both semiotic integrity and performance.