Architectural Drawing & Representation I

Drawings come before, and after, buildings. Architectural drawings have been known to take on an array of roles: as instructions for defining spatial and material relationships across scales; as tools for researching and investigating existing realities; as simulations and speculative futuring devices; as vehicles for evidencing, coordinating actions, or telling stories (and so on). Like Ursula LeGuin’s “carrier bag” in A Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, drawings can be considered containers of worlds and cultural tools of meaning-making.

The very status of the drawing — and its relationships to image, model, subject, building, and material world — is up for continual interrogation. Today’s digitally produced drawings may not even be called a drawing in the traditional sense. Various modeling, sensing, mapping, indexing, and documentary media intervene the scene of drawing, compounding its possibilities and blurring representational boundaries. While architectural drawings rely on common conventions to establish graphical legibility, what drawings make visible — and how they establish these priorities of seeing — can be challenged, subverted, and recalibrated.

By grounding architecture (and its representations) in material conditions rather than in an aesthetic vacuum, students are invited to read the medium as the message — where form and content are co-constitutive. What a drawing depicts is intimately related to how it is constructed.

ADR1 leans into drawing and making as a fundamentally relational act. A drawing is not just a simple re-presentation or translation. A drawing is a construction; an act of mediation. Drawings and models put things in touch, they mobilize ideas and bring certain relations in or out of focus. As discursive, intellectually rigorous devices, architectural representation bridges connections between material and information, between drawing and building, between abstraction and reality. They help us negotiate various (and often conflicting) interests, contexts, and information sources, and allow designers to articulate ideas in a rapidly changing environment with precision, care, and imagination.

ADR1 combines the foundations of architectural drawing with observational and experimental approaches, and as such, hopes to expand, reform and reframe the function of architectural drawings within the discipline. Through the semester we will use tools to make drawings, but we will also realize the potential of drawings themselves as tools to be learned from. Our drawings will serve a multitude of roles, not only as aesthetic objects but as new types of tools; tools to document, observe, expose, investigate, analyze, project, nurture, and design.

More than a technical course, ADR1 leverages architectural representation to cultivate a relational drawing practice and attune the work of architecture toward “planetary” sensibilities.