Drawing On: Journal of Architectural Research by Design
Drawing On provides a platform for developing topics associated with or addressed through design-led research into architecture. Design-led research involves multiple modes and means to fully elaborate its thinking. The journal adds to the conventional format of a peer-reviewed journal an additional space of presentation intended to show design-research material in their native formats (including video, audio, animation, photography, paintings, drawings, documentation of models, designed texts, etc.). Full submissions can be viewed through the Drawing On website.
Drawing is quite unlike the image; it is not a finished thing, nor a singular moment, but something that develops and grows over time. It has a life cycle, it is a palimpsestuous record of the process of turning tacit knowledge and intuition into explicit form. Neither whole nor complete, the drawing process offers the creator an opportunity for reflection and criticality, rather than endless speculative cogitation. It is curious to observe that once ‘completed’ secondary and subsequent re-viewings and (re)readings of the work can challenge the original intention(s) and meaning(s) of the drawing. Often these serendipitous insights occur as a consequence of the perspectival shift from the position of Draw-or (author/drawer’s) to Read-or (reader/author –referencing the role of the reader in the construction of meaning) or are the result of unintended, metaleptic exchanges between layers of meaning or compositional elements within the drawing, in essence a process of palingenesis, that provokes a renewed criticality. In this manner, the drawing (verb/gerund) gains some independence from the hand of the drawer, and whilst not autonomous the drawing becomes a critical ally rather than a subjective, subservient creation. This in turn empowers the Draw-or, offering the opportunity for the development of an architectural logic based on a critical creative process of continuous, reflexive, (re)reading, of various inputs and influences, rather than a purely subjective set of sensibilities. Born from a growing frustration with the (self-)imposed limitations of conventional architectural design practices, my own The (He)rose Garden, a subset of works within my emerging Magnum Opus Filigreed Gods – Diaphanous Bodies and Sacred Vessels, explores the mutability of meaning through a re-associative practice of pentimento as a form of artistic agent provocateur that prompts a deliberate dislocation of the trained architectural self. Read the full article online at: https://drawingon.org/Issue-04-05-Allies-and-Allibies
Copyright (c) 2025 Peter Baldwin (Author) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Adjective Constructions is a speculative drawing project and a creative re-appropriation of the distance that has defined our decade-long remote collaboration across North America. Each resulting drawing – or ‘adjective construction’ – explores the question of what it means to draw together remotely, by enlisting architectural tools to push, probe, and mine the tension between the visceral materiality of the close-at-hand and its projection across the distance between us. In this paper we reflect on the process that underpins our drawing practice, one that is rooted in dialogue (between us, with the work, and with our tools). This practice foregrounds the emergent and generative capacity of play – as described by Miguel Sicart and theorised by Hans-Georg Gadamer – as the primary motive for the work. Following Gadamer’s understanding of play as essential to a dialectic approach to uncovering understanding, this paper eschews a definitive explanation of our drawing process, and instead sets up a conversation between this process and three thought-worlds which reach across disciplines and animate our designerly imagination: poet and Greek scholar Anne Carson’s presentation of the ‘adjective’ as a seemingly superfluous appendage, but one that can anchor a work in specificity; landscape architect Cornelia Hahn Oberlander’s instructions for adventure playgrounds; and garden designer Henk Gerritsen’s dialectical approach to (un)natural gardening and whim topiary. While each of these practices share meaningful resonances with our own process, they are not presented as direct metaphorical correspondents. They are brought together to set up a constellation of thought-worlds and sensibilities that vibrate and cross-pollinate into expanded possibilities, while maintaining the work’s ambiguity and openness, creating opportunities for further interpretations, subsequent re-appropriations, more play. Read the full article online at: https://drawingon.org/Issue-04-06-Adjective-Constructions
Copyright (c) 2025 Anca Matyiku, Chad Connery (Author) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
An autoethnographic account of a mundane moment in a small café in Newcastle captures experiences, observations and qualities in text. A conscious effort is made not to overlook or filter the minutiae of the setting and events, to focus on the familiar spaces and everyday experiences we typically disregard due to their ordinariness. My concern with the ordinary builds on a lineage of influential Japanese figures who extract meaning from similar, seemingly trivial urban encounters in the city: artist and architectural scholar Wajirō Kon; the Street Observation Society (ROJO), with architectural historian Terunobu Fujimori and artist Genpei Akasegawa; and Atelier Bow-Wow's founding partners, Yoshiharu Tsukamoto and Momoyo Kaijima. This essay explores these figures and their approaches to the city as exemplified in their surveys, moving from Kon's “modernology,” to ROJO's search for “Thomassons,” and Atelier Bow-Wow's guidebooks. Collectively, these surveys – covering different phenomena from the 1920s to the 2000s – show how a consistent observational gaze was preserved and ultimately led to the discovery of singularities that might normally be dismissed or go unnoticed. Extending this observational gaze, I will revisit this lineage of ordinary observation through Gilles Deleuze's figure of the “child-player,” who encounters the world with a radical openness, curiosity and freedom from prejudgment. This Deleuzian re-reading argues that the discoveries of Kon, ROJO and Atelier Bow-Wow constitute a creative practice that begins with the act of noticing and evolves through drawing as a form of interpretive representation. This interpretative form transcends the original goal of documentation suggested by the urban survey. Instead, drawing recreates the original act of discovery, and re-enacts observed phenomena, imbuing them with new meanings. Read the full article online at: https://drawingon.org/Issue-04-02-Cracks-Chairs-and-Child-Players
Copyright (c) 2025 Nergis Kalli (Author) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
By re-appropriating Chinese writing—an image-based tradition—as a cosmotechnical practice, this paper re-envisions the relationship between media, technics, and representation, beyond the rationalistic and technocratic mindset that dominates modern technology. Responding to Heidegger’s critique of form-based Western philosophy, I engage with the poetic notion of xiang (image, 象) to explore Yuk Hui’s speculative concept of cosmotechnics and support a search for an alternative understanding of technology. I argue that contemporary digital media operates through a limited notion of the image, reducing it to data processing of the known, the sensible, and the calculable, whereas traditional Chinese thought on the image opens towards the unknown through an interplay of presence-absence. As a means of testing this argument, the design research project documented in part here – engaging with LiDAR scanning, 3D printing, and clay modelling – explores Hui’s thinking by speculating on a possible practice of cosmotechnics. Through material practices of tracing, moulding, and sketching, it reconnects digital and physical gestures, challenging the disembodied nature of contemporary media. The paper suggests that writing and technics are deeply intertwined with cosmic and bodily realities. By situating digital technology within a broader aesthetic and philosophical framework, it seeks to disrupt the logic of mono-technologism and open new pathways for technological futures informed by cosmotechnical plurality. Read the full article online at: https://drawingon.org/Issue-04-03-Re-appropriating-Image-Xiang
Copyright (c) 2025 Leo Xian (Author) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
“Could it be that theory in and of architecture could take up residence in territories that are perforce ill-defined and indeterminate?” David Leatherbarrow, “Foreword,” in The Contested Territory of Architectural Theory, edited by Elie G. Haddad (Routledge, 2023), xxii. This essay charts the implementation of an affective drawing practice, with the aim of registering and gaining greater insight into the premise that a dialogue, or ‘correspondence’, exists between building and occupant. Working within the domains of intuition, unknowing and affect these works employ analogue and digital strategies – drawings-on-glass, writing, scanning, projecting, and filmic sketches – to determine the ineffable, abstract qualities and traces of previous occupancies that could be crucial to the locus of a specific place. Through these studies, we begin to re-witness echoes of actions and habitual patterns of movement around and through a former joinery workshop. The act of casually cleaning a paintbrush is revealed by paint on the timber-lapped walls, a gentle curve deeply worn into a stone threshold sculpted over time shows where so many feet have passed. The transient daylight, and the enfolding darkness of night, are subtlety registered and find potential in the abstract marks of architectural representations. Speculative enquiries begin to unfold, and in so doing they reveal unchartered territories and unforeseen possibilities, proposing new perceptions of being and meaning within this utilitarian and modest space. Read the full article online at: https://drawingon.org/Issue-04-01-Affective-Drawing
Copyright (c) 2025 Rebecca Disney (Author) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Contemporary perceptions of the figure of the fighting-cock are shaped by a human-built avian architectural history saturated with masculine gender identities and perceived as conflicting with prevailing social norms. The fighting-cock appears in literature and art as a symbol of masculine valour, a surrogate human, or an avatar enacting a form of animality deemed socially unacceptable. This perception differs markedly from other social human–animal interactions and constructions, which accept – or consciously ignore – other gendered uses of animals. Hens, for instance, are an accepted part of our landscape and rendered largely passive, their bodies consumed, literally and visually. And yet the fighting-cock is a human construct, shaped by the manipulation of a territorial instinct, raised in isolation and conditioned to fight. His body is placed within a purpose-built architectural space of action – the cockpit – connecting prosthetic violence to architectural spectacle. This project argues that the fighting-cock’s material and mythological presence calls for a re-imagining. Through a critique prompted by an invitation to design and share an object, the figure of the fighting-cock becomes a site through which to challenge gendered animal architectures and imagine more-than-human futures. Read the full article online at: https://drawingon.org/Issue-04-04-Battle-Birds
Copyright (c) 2025 Natalie Lis (Author) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
This article revisits, re-appropriates and re-presents ideas first devised during co-teaching in 1996 and 1997, published in the proceedings of a symposium on L’Enseignant, L’Etudiant et le Projet Architectural, Laboratoire de Recherché en Architecture, ENSAIS, 1998, developed again and presented at the VI Conference on European Culture, Pamplona, October, 2000, and explored in even greater detail at the European Forum of Philosophy – Provocations Lecture Series, London School of Economics, 2008. At a moment of change in both architectural practice and education, when the positivism of AI and the rise of BIM as a tool for design development appear set to become dominant in schools of architecture, the re-presentation of this article intends to capture and make apparent a cycling of architectural thought and concerns. At the beginnings of this nascent third ‘digital turn’ our attention is drawn, once again, to the ‘dynamism of.... process[es] of enquiry’ fundamental to architectural education, to the ‘dynamics of recurrence’ in design practice, and to the capacity of re- appropriation for ‘making new realities’. These processes are recommended to cut through all techniques of representation, analogue and digital. Read the full article online at: https://drawingon.org/Issue-04-PL-Re-Appropriating-Representation
Copyright (c) 2024 Dorian Wiszniewski, Christopher Pierce (Author) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
This article discusses the oeuvre of the Italian architect and engraver, G.B. Piranesi (1720-1778), and in particular the Campo Marzio. Conceptualizing its architectural and urban idea, it addresses architects, urban designers, architecture historians and theorists. They will (re)discover the singular ichnographia Campi Martii, a large map engraved by Piranesi of ancient imperial Rome, in a trans-historical perspective and in the light of recent theory. The article consists of a prelude and ten paragraphs, grouped in three parts. The illustrations, indispensable to grasp Piranesi’s ‘elusive’ vision, and a source of wonder in themselves, are selected in synchrony with the argument of the pensile city. Relevant scholarship is briefly reviewed and further relayed to the footnotes. The prelude introduces the Campo Marzio, which, above all other possible considerations, must be seen as a work of art. Then, two paragraphs introduce the main themes of the article: the concept of the pensile city and the interest of the problem it poses, then and now, which is the ‘scaping’ of landscape in the city. The second part consists of three paragraphs developing various related themes, concerning the relations of words and objects, of architecture and infrastructure, and of figure and ground. The third part delves conceptual aspects of the pensile city from their inscription in the ichnographia, in three paragraphs that analyse the flightline and the fugue, the correlation of plan and perspective, specifically in the Carceri and the Vedute di Roma, and the rare kind of graphic realism. The last two paragraphs propose a conclusion. The first resumes Piranesi’s polemical position and poetical practice. The second is a note on history and theory, stating the pensile city is topical today, precisely as utopia. Read the full article online at: https://drawingon.org/Issue-04-PL-Citta-Pensile
Copyright (c) 2020 Gijs Wallis de Vries (Author) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
The Accumulation of Cyclical Operations examines how site-specific performances can activate engagement with the spatial politics of contested Australian landscapes. It describes a series of iterative performances situated in contested spatial contexts, each centred on the semiotic potential of pianos as cultural artefacts of European origins. Emerging from the iterative project work are a series of three operations: Spatial Inversions, Instrumentalising and Spatial Tuning. Synthesised as a concluding performance within Melbourne’s decommissioned H.M. Pentridge Prison, the research offers this combined set of operations as a methodological contribution to the field of critical spatial practice, with capacity to activate new spatio-political formations and to critically engage in the spatial politics of contested landscapes. Read the full article online at: https://drawingon.org/Issue-03-09-Cyclical-Operations
Copyright (c) 2020 Campbell Drake (Author) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
‘The City as a School’ describes an urban pedagogy, an approach to design teaching and research that leaves the exclusivity of the school as a space apart, and the safety of a discrete studio-based project behind, to immerse students and teachers in the contingent space of the city. It describes two exemplars of this urban pedagogy, developed at the University of Auckland; the Lab and the Event Studio. These exemplars explore the city as an assemblage, and inquiry as a performative form of pedagogy that embraces the uncertainty that such an understanding of the city-as- assemblage brings forth. Four emerging ideas are explored: hybrid research forums, shared uncertainty, material politics and fragile democratisation. Borrowed from the field of urban studies—specifically from the work of Ignatio Farías and Anders Blok—these four ideas determine the dimensions in which urban pedagogy takes place. Considering design research teaching and learning as a kind of social labour set within these determined dimensions re-contours the subjectivity of teachers, students and communities as collaborators in design research projects and, we propose, prepares students for contemporary and future forms of expanded architectural practice. Read the full article online at: https://drawingon.org/Issue-03-08-The-City-as-a-School
Copyright (c) 2020 Kathy Waghorn, Nick Sargent (Author) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
The work presented here narrates the creative and design research methodologies of Grandeza (in collaboration with Miguel Rodriguez-Casellas, alias Bajeza), an architectural collective that operates between the fields of spatial practice, design, cultural production and pedagogical exploration. These methodologies are described by analysing the material, discursive and representational qualities of two of their latest artworks: The Plant (2017) and Valparaiso Post-Liberal (2017). Both installations are discussed here as one-to-one scale architecture models that stage, perform, debate and challenge new geographies of violence. Grandeza’s research and creative practice detects, denounces and challenges the transformative violence that late-capitalist practices apply over subjects, spaces and ecologies. As a collective, they started collaborating in Madrid in 2011, where they graduated together as Masters in Architecture at the Polytechnic School of Architecture (ETSAM). Since then, they have developed a cross-disciplinary practice based on collaborations with architects, collectives, artists and institutions in Madrid, Berlin and Sydney. Their work has been exhibited and published in Germany (Bauhaus Dessau in 2014); USA (1st Chicago Architecture Biennial in 2015); Australia (Mildura Arts Centre in 2016, Wagga Wagga Art Gallery in 2017, and in 2018 at the Bank Art Museum Moree, Tin Sheds Gallery, and Australian Design Centre); Chile (XX Chilean Biennial of Architecture and Urbanism in 2017); Spain (Madrid and Santander, at the XIV Spanish Biennial of Architecture and Urbanism in 2018); and Italy (XXII Milano Triennale, in 2019). Since mid-2017, the Grandeza members have been collaborating with Miguel Rodriguez-Casellas (alias Bajeza) thus forming the architectural ménage à quatre Grandeza/Bajeza. They share a commitment to linking pedagogy, research, critical thinking, and creative practice as complementary tools for political emancipation. Their most recent project, Teatro Della Terra Alienata, was the Australian pavilion at the XXII Triennale di Milano, which received the Golden Bee Award for the best national pavilion. Read the full article online at: https://drawingon.org/Issue-03-07-New-Geographies-of-Violence
Copyright (c) 2019 Jorge Valiente Oriol, Amaia Sanchez-Velasco, Gonzalo Valiente (Author) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Unreasonable Creatures: Architecture & (Bad) Behaviour presents an investigation into the epistemological processes of (an) architectural practice; both a practice (a firm) and practice (a way of working). It presents these processes not by explication, but by a staging of one of the key concerns with which that practice engages, the unreasonable; that which cannot be reduced to reason. This presentation operates through two similar but distinct modes: an openly navigable Prezi (online), and a matrix of projects arranged in the form of a document; both might be thought of as maps. In the former, the extended plane of the Prezi interface offers a surface through which the work can be navigated. The lack of orientation (signage) here is deliberate, encouraging a wandering through image and text fragments, allowing an unpicking through zooming, panning and scanning of moments within the field; the pre- formatted presentation sequence provides just one staged ‘passage’ through this field. The latter, the matrix, stages a similar wandering, but is aware of the limits of digital zoom and resolution; it presents material in a manner that intentionally equates text and image and explores their respective (il)legibilities. Both underlying ‘maps’ (field and matrix) are composed of extracts from the author’s PhD thesis, earlier texts, and project images. Their arrangement is based on the interplay of these different modes as visual content, accepting that parts of the text act as supplementary fallout. The text passages within do not constitute a continuous text to be read as a whole, but rather stage intersections and oppositions between the modes of image and text. The overlap of discarded, cut and edited texts reveals (visually) those phrases, thoughts, insights that persist. Pieces are identified, relationships traced, and connections made by a revelation through overlapping and juxtaposing imagings. Visuality (imaging) leads reasoning. This revelation through forms of visuality enacts one of the core concerns developed through the projects documented within, namely: how to provoke the emergence of novel types of space through the staged opposition between conditions, be it the architectural object and its ground, cognition and analytic synthesis in the design act, or—as in this case—between text and image. In these oppositions there is a necessary engagement with ‘unreasonable’ thought or behaviours. The projects contained within develop an approach to architectural design in which these oppositions (confrontations) and the unreasonable are understood as constructive pathways towards developing the performative potential of design, to inform the site- related production of architectural character and space. Read the full article online at: https://drawingon.org/Issue-03-06-Unreasonable-Creatures
Copyright (c) 2019 Urs Bette (Author) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
The legacy of a temperate hegemony continues to influence how the tropical is perceived: largely as an exotic paradise or pestilence-ridden landscape. Architectural discourse has long deemed the equator a condition to be tempered; an atmospheric problem that requires a temperate fix. Contemporary architectural responses that centre on performance and efficiency improvements continue to purvey these prejudices as a foundation of their discourse, or, simply, to import temperate strategies as an atmospheric replacement to the equatorial. The work documented here investigates a theory of spatial depth and climatic gradient as key to developing buildings for the rapidly densifying urban equator. Through various architectural strategies—loosely categorized as deep envelopes—the core ingredients of space, material depth, and solidity are employed to produce architectural and atmospheric calibrations specific to the hot and wet equatorial city. Four architectural precedents traced from the 1930’s to the 1970’s demonstrate a range of architectural approaches that inform the author’s contemporary design practice. The knowledge gained through the precedents is then realised through four contemporary projects based in Singapore. In doing so, the work presented here seeks to expand the discourse on equatorial architecture, by returning agency to architectural practice via expressive and atmospheric formal languages and techniques relevant to the hot and wet equator. Read the full article online at: https://drawingon.org/Issue-03-05-Hot-and-Wet
Copyright (c) 2019 Erik L'Heureux (Author) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
The Finding Byaduk creative residency is an exploratory process aimed at producing speculations into the phenomenology of digital data representations of a landscape, and the design of interfaces and expressions to embody said representations. Part of this process is inspired by design ethnography, and the consideration of how its methodologies articulate a picture of the site in question. The creative brief centred around a thought experiment on ‘affective telepresence’, finding means to remotely convey the qualities of a place using environmental sensors, digital connected technologies, and the design of embodied expressions and/or interactions. Finding Byaduk: Field Notes covers the formative and supporting phases of this project, focusing on capturing ethnographic observations of the town, and connecting these to the eventual production of artefacts as a response to the written, visual and audio recordings of Byaduk. I would like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land of the Gunditjmara peoples on which this project took place, and pay my respects to the Elders past, present and future. Read the full article online at: https://drawingon.org/Issue-03-04-Finding-Byaduk
Copyright (c) 2019 Chuan Khoo (Author) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Everyday Life calls attention to the movements and resulting interactions that develop from the habitual patterns of daily life; those movements that, through their regularity, become invisible. In this practice-led work, airflows within and around a pair of dancers were visualised as these dancers enacted a series of improvised everyday movements. The visualisations drew attention to air as a sensitised and complex three-dimensional field of influence that bristles with potential. Presented as twinned imagings, two types of footage contrast alternative approaches to the visualisation of air, and as the figures move within the imagings we focus not on their movement or their absent bodies, but on the wake of their passage made visible as restless whorls and lineations. Architectural space is shown to be agitated—stirred and concocted by the body—where inhabitants actively generate ‘architecture’ through their movement and reframe architectural design as a participatory endeavour where all bodies, simply by virtue of their movement in the medium of air, are actively generating form. Everyday Life raises multiple questions, all brought together in a non- linear relationship of varied parts. In resisting a polarised framework of question and answer, this work instead aims to open the possibility of a grafted practice that might prick the architectural conscience and, perhaps, expand it. Read the full article online at: https://drawingon.org/Issue-03-03-Utterances-of-Everyday-Life
Copyright (c) 2019 Ainslie Murray (Author) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Canyon is an experimental design process that extends ideation through drawing via a novel hybrid of hand sketches, soundscapes and virtual reality (VR). The inspiration for the project is the dynamic undersea landscape of Kaikōura Canyon, Aotearoa, New Zealand. The experiment draws atmospheric qualities from the unseen topography and vast body of water of the canyon, recently jolted by huge forces in the 2016 Kaikōura earthquake. The ominous scale and power of this submarine landscape is distilled through multi-modal architectural drawing, merging presences within drawing with those in landscape. The early phases of the Canyon project located a mixed media installation in the Palazzo Bembo for the XVI Venice Biennale. This paper reflects on the capacity for drawing to observe and record intangible presences, augmented by the affordance of VR and spatial soundscapes. Canyon also opens up a critique of the traditional view of landscape and its relation to architecture. It alludes to alternative ways in which landscape and architecture might intersect, drawing instead from landscape’s intangible, scalar and material presence. The unseen marine canyon landscape is used as a virtual poetic site to provoke and test drawing and experiential techniques; drawing is expanded as a hybrid medium, able to research architectural presences through multiple platforms. Read the full article online at: https://drawingon.org/Issue-03-02-Canyon
Copyright (c) 2019 Simon Twose, Jules Moloney, Lawrence Harvey (Author) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
If there is one drawing indispensable to the description and production of architecture it is the plan. As it slices through space and substance, it allows us to describe and communicate the partis, construction and circulation of a building, all with the benefit of a bird’s-eye, or God-like elevated view that confirms our architectural authority over the design. As the preeminent tool to conceive and construct architecture, the plan has evolved highly codified techniques of representation, including the superimposition of transparent layers of drawings to show alternative arrangements, additional storeys, reflected surfaces or site conditions. Superimposition thus allows an extrusion from two- into three-dimensions. This paper explores how this tactic of superimposition can also operate as an extrusion into the fourth dimension of time, to reveal insights into the histories of both drawings and buildings. Three projects support this premise, described in intertwining, parallel texts of theory and practice, and in an accompanying gallery of images. Contextualised against Eisenman’s defining use of ‘superpositioning’, and Rossi’s analogical collages, the projects align with contemporary drawing-thinking practices of polyvalency and indeterminism. They develop a practice of using archival plans as a primary source for research and creative speculation. The resulting works explore three concepts: the conventions and possible future of analogue architectural representation; the use of the archive for speculative practices; and the use of speculative practices to construct new knowledge. Read the full article online at: https://drawingon.org/Issue-03-01-Megalomaniacal-Plans
Copyright (c) 2019 Rachel Hurst (Author) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Introduction: Architecture Design Research
Read online at: https://drawingon.org/Issue-03-IN-Introduction
Copyright (c) 2019 Dorian Wiszniewski, Chris French (Author) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
This paper retraces the explorations engaged in by the Minim friar Jean-François Niceron (1613-1646). His treatise, La Perspective curieuse, recounts his search for anamorphic images and suggests the pursuit of ‘delight in seeing the possibilities beyond the expected’ that these images offer. Anamorphic representations are deformed images, whereby the point of view is displaced in space. As a result, the resolution of the image is only possible through the adjustment of the body, the re-positioning of the body near that unique secondary vantage point. Based on the capacity of anamorphic representations to disclose a space for wonder manifested only in the physical encounter with the image, the following text presents a workshop undertaken with PhD students where we re-enacted Niceron’s drawing instructions to explore the significance of ‘reaching toward a meaning not yet known’ that he envisioned. Through the workshop, the act of delineating a surface became a way to occupy and inhabit the space. The text is presented in the format of a script to allow readers to follow the events that happened during the workshop, but also to encourage rehearsal and to invite the event to be played again. The script, as well as Niceron’s drawing instructions, are meant to be read, played and repeated, in the same way the movement by a body is a prerequisite for uncovering the meaning of the anamorphic image. These re-enactments do not only possess the potential to bring the past into the present, but they also—by the act of imagining a past-in- the-present—project our understanding of history into possible futures. Read the full article online at: https://drawingon.org/Issue-02-07-Delineating-Surfaces
Copyright (c) 2018 Thi Phuong-Trâm Nguyen (Author) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Parallel Projections investigates two types of post- industrial site: the architectural and the agricultural; it conflates (projections of and into) spaces as means of making visceral our intellectual comprehension of the relationships between materiality, surface, place and history. Parallel Projections is not meant for specific places but for specific kinds of spaces: defunct industrial buildings, abandoned urban edifices, and mechanized natural landscapes. The authors, living in places (Iowa and Ohio) that have both been radically altered by scalar economic shifts, adapt alien (guest) project components to their native (host) contexts. Both types of spaces, host and guest, as spaces of urban and rural abandonment, share surfaces that are compelling palimpsests. These surfaces are encrusted with nearly-obliterated histories, emptied by changes in production methods and habits of occupation and revealed by ghost texts. In opposition to the idea that these sites should be whitewashed and redrawn, the authors see them as grounds for new layers that can receive projections of phenomena from other post- industrial sites and as repositories for material evidence that deepens, rather than erases, the evidence of their pasts. Read the full article online at: https://drawingon.org/Issue-02-06-Parallel-Projections
Copyright (c) 2018 Peter Goché, Samantha Krukowski (Author) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
If an installation is charged with immersing an audience simultaneously in the alternative worlds to which it gestures, what role might the materiality of the installation play in the transposition of time and space implicit in such an immersion? The vehicle for an investigation into this affective materiality is a reflective case study of ‘the Vessel’ and its making. Presented, originally, as part of a PhD by Project at RMIT, Melbourne, The Vessel allowed the telling of a story of my architectural practice, Ark. Having been exposed to the Dutch Rationalism of the late 1990’s and early 2000’s, and subsequently immersed in the formalism of the AADRL, Ark was eventually returned to New Zealand and the particular lineage of modernist tectonics from which it stems. Through the apparatus of The Vessel. The research showed how Ark brought these different approaches to architectural making together to the effect of creating new architectural works. The article focuses on The Vessel itself through the lens of materiality. Doing so relocates The Vessel to new territory where it can open new, alternative design research opportunities. Read the full article online at: https://drawingon.org/Issue-02-05-Material-Openings
Copyright (c) 2018 Michael Davis (Author) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Anexact but Rigorous offers an analytical redrawing of the plans of a series of recent projects by Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa. It describes generative geometrical operations common to these projects and, in turn, articulates a set of recurring formal families that characterises their work. Far from being ‘doodles’, these formal families constitute rigorously defined boundaries: they install themselves into space as closed, regional subsets of extended territorial surfaces that are incarnated in both the surface of the paper and the surface of the land. This closer inspection of Sejima and Nishizawa’s practices of territorial drawing reveals an underlying tension between Euclidean and non-Euclidean sensibilities, which, tapping into Derrida’s re-reading of Edmund Husserl’s The Origin of Geometry, can best be described as ‘anexact’. On the one hand, drawing is used to delimitate a region of the physical territory with extreme exactitude. On the other hand, the same delimitating operation articulates continuous closed curves, which in turn describe boundaries whose shapes cannot be defined through abstract, idealised geometries (i.e. circles, arcs or squares). With this productive tension in mind, the textual component of this contribution interrogates the development, intentions and outcomes of the aforementioned operations, using the theoretical writings of Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky (primarily concerning the nature of line and its spatial value) as its main supporting scaffold. In addition to this, the proposed contribution will speculate on the possibility of a hybrid practice of drawing that situates itself between the Euclidean and the non-Euclidean. In this speculation, Sejima and Nishizawa’s geometrical constructs are discussed through Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of ‘territory’, positing them as modes of spatial demarcation that are simultaneously anexact and rigorous. Read the full article online at: https://drawingon.org/Issue-02-04-Anexact-but-Rigorous
Copyright (c) 2018 Miguel Paredes Maldonado (Author) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Black Contemporary is an experiential archive whereby ongoing investigations are conducted in an effort to expand knowledge specific to the study of atmospheric logics and the Midwestern agricultural landscape. The archive is located two miles south of Ames, Iowa. Using experiential perceptions as spatial conditioners, current studio projects focus on the act of making and curating a series of Surface Works within a dormant seed-drying facility constructed in 1979. Based on a series of modulated experimental actions, the foundational body of work provides a material/ visual reflection on the contemporary social configuration of the post-industrial landscape of Iowa. This work might best be understood as a peculiar deposit of site-adjusted installations and experimental drawings that indicate the presence of, and makes clearly recognizable, its context as referent, rather than as a source or setting. Each work is driven by the nascent possibility of a persistent desire to intercourse with existing material surroundings pursuant to a philosophical position that leverages perceptual notions of chiaroscuro in the practice of understanding and generating a set of spatial valence within the material culture of a post-industrial site. Surface Works addresses the aesthetic experience generated by a set of spatial apparatus (installation and experimental drawing) with a relative capacity to draw out, unite, react or interact with the latent dimensions of our inherited landscape. Read the full article online at: https://drawingon.org/Issue-02-03-Surfaceworks
Copyright (c) 2018 Peter Goché (Author) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
This paper, and its accompanying suite of drawings and montages, approaches surface through Aldo Rossi’s notion of the analogical city. It does so in three ways: firstly, as the surface of the city, secondly as the surface of the drawing, and third as the analogical surface of thought between city and drawing. The first surface emphasises plan-based representation centred on an analytical gaze looking from above or outside to the city as a whole. The second is a quasi-perspectival and frontal surface with the analytical gaze looking at the city from the inside. The third surface is the conceptual hinge between those two positions. Through these three readings of surface I will discuss analogical strategies of formal, representational and disciplinary critique (including critique of scale, situation, form, space, figure and ground). I will discuss how the process of the critical removal of form creates an analogical space for projective possibility, and how the accumulation of form amounts to an erasure of form in Rossi’s work. The accompanying drawings and montages operate specifically in dialogue with Rossi’s analogical city, but function more broadly as a move toward developing the formal knowledge of architecture as a cultural and critical project. Read the full article online at: https://drawingon.org/Issue-02-02-The-Analogical-Surface
Copyright (c) 2018 Cameron McEwan (Author) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Drawing, as both an object and an action, involves an entanglement of an author, the surface of their work and the space that the work occupies (both the space of production and the space of presentation). However, this entanglement between the drawer and the drawing is problematised by the mechanisation of the drawing process. If drawings are produced by machines, how does this relationship change? What new drawings emerge? What part does an author play in the drawing and how much are they implicated in the drawing that is produced? This article explores this question through the design-led research project Exquisite Drawing Machines, which involves making machines that make drawings. This research is conducted by playing the surrealist game of the exquisite corpse with fifteen spring-wound drawing machines. One of the difficulties that arises from this research is how to mediate the role of the drawn surfaces of the exquisite corpses, the installation of the Exquisite Drawing Machines as objects-in-themselves, and the temporal-spatial event of play. I will explicate the relationship of these three modes and examine how these drawing machines and other strategies of automatism might surface qualities of the unexpected in the production of drawings. Read the full article online at: https://drawingon.org/Issue-02-01-Exhibitionist-Drawing-Machines
Copyright (c) 2018 Timothy Burke (Author) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Read online at: https://drawingon.org/Issue-02-PR-Things-Between-Things
Copyright (c) 2018 Chris French, Piotr Lesniak (Author) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
This article documents a discussion held in April 2015 on the occasion of Alexander Brodsky’s visit to the Edinburgh School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture as George Simpson Visiting Professor. It is presented here as a prelude to Issue 02 of Drawing On, exploring the related themes of Surface & Installation. Brodsky, who has been described as Russia’s greatest living architect, is renowned for his remarkable drawings, installations and architectural projects. Mark Dorrian holds the Forbes Chair in Architecture and Richard Anderson is Lecturer in Architectural History at the University of Edinburgh. Read the full article online at: https://drawingon.org/Issue-02-PL-Space-Drawing
Copyright (c) 2016 Mark Dorrian, Richard Anderson (Author) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Everyone thinks. However, because thinking is a given faculty of human beings it is frequently assumed that what it means to think is clear; and this assumption leads to little attention being paid to the training of thinking itself. Consequently, thinking becomes just something we use to do other things. Gilles Deleuze suggests that this condition results from a long and problematic philosophical legacy; and that such a view of thinking as a given severely limits the real possibilities of thinking – both in terms how thinking is conceived and how it is practiced. In this article I outline the aforementioned legacy and speculate on ways to proceed from Deleuze’s provocation to think thinking directly, with the key processes of “forgetting” and “questioning” as points of focus. The result is a discussion of the efficacy of certain manners of thinking illustrated through reflections on both my own practice and examples from the design studio. Read the full article online at: https://drawingon.org/Issue-01-10-Thinking-Design
Copyright (c) 2015 Randall Teal (Author) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Seductive, famous and published to the point of saturation, the 8 House in Copenhagen, designed by Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG) and completed in 2010, is a paradigmatic example of an architecture that is oriented towards the reproduction of its own image and thus of its own “project.” From the initial marketing video and press photography to amateur post-occupancy photographs shared online, we trace the ways in which a seemingly simple project (“happiness”) begins to sprawl, positioning its users as fans, and thus as co-producers of a pre-determined narrative. Temporarily inhabiting the positions of visitor and critic, we explore the risks and potentials of giving oneself up to an architectural project, mining that experience in order to arrive at a proposal for the development of a “projective critique.” Ultimately, we conclude, an architecture that requires unconditional surrender (however pleasurable) is incompatible with positive societal transformation. In place of happiness, we therefore suggest the development of an architectural project of hope. Read the full article online at: https://drawingon.org/Issue-01-09-Yes-Boss
Copyright (c) 2015 Helen Runting, Fredrik Torrison (Author) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
This paper describes a project entitled Points of Departure, which forms part of a practice-led research investigation into how existing urban space might be both read and written using fiction, narrative and physical interventions. Through key artists and writers such as Poe, Greenaway, Carter, and Piranesi, and a description of an interrogative design process on Cockatoo Island in Sydney, this paper offers insights into how re-mappings, narrative insinuations and operative instruments might harness forces instead of producing forms. The project work was undertaken as both a creative exploration and a pedagogic experiment: five students undertaking an intensive design studio conducted initial exploratory work, my interpretations of which provided the narrative basis for the project. Through these implied fictions, coupled with my own cartographic explorations, I generated “portraits” of the Island (conflating myth and place), which in turn generated briefs for full size instruments made by the students. Finally, responding to these instruments, I created a series of architectural vehicles. The processes employed in the project and described here did not aim to negate the existing spatial structures of Cockatoo Island but rather acted as an aleatoric, dissonant shifting of parameters to create dynamic relationships between place and its constituents. These imperfect reflections of place created a fluid field of multiple representations, an indeterminate space that prompted novel points of departure for spatial experiences. At the same time they invited an active individual response – a ‘wandering’. This wandering, in which reality is discursive and space and ritual are imperfectly conflated, provokes personal interpretations of space. These disconnected moments of understanding, this paper suggests, offer speculative re-interpretations acting on urban territories in pursuit of spatial openness, generative processes, and ultimately the means by which we can actively perform and participate in the city. Read the full article online at: https://drawingon.org/Issue-01-08-Points-of-Departure
Copyright (c) 2015 Thomas Rivard (Author) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0