ABOUT TEAM STUDENTS BRIEFS ADMISSION
DRAWINGS ABOUT DRAWINGS
Representation in Architecture (or Architecture as Representation)
Winter Term 2023/24
The aim of this exercise is to develop a post-digital approach to what drawing might mean or what it might do for architecture— to reassert the architectural drawing not as a window onto the world but as a way of making the world, and to reclaim the drawing as a primary site where an architectural idea is staged.
What does it mean to engage with history and precedent in a contemporary way? As designers, we should not only consider what we design, but how we design. And that ‘how’ includes developing attitudes towards representation. One could even argue that a history of architecture is really a history of drawings, as it is the most common way that architects express themselves. Therefore, the history of architecture is as much a history of drawings as it is of buildings.
Systems+Things
Throughout the workshop, a new mode of working was introduced: classifying drawings into systems and things and creating drawings through reassembling them.
Analysing the drawing systems led to an understanding of how they actually work. Looking closely at the various things, redrawing them or even taking them apart, the elements that actually make up the drawing were revealed. Putting the newly discovered things together according to the rules indicated by the systems created new drawings. By simply following these design rules, the drawings did not pursue a specific goal. Nevertheless, they were legible: as a plan, a landscape, a spatial programme or even a narrative.
The Drawings About Drawings project was intended as a device to explore the potential for new relationships forming hybrids across the usual categories, definitions, and certainties — between histories, categories, and authors. Through re-drawing yet unimagined architectural; possibilities were created. Drawings that suggest architectural ideas that might offer new directions and approaches. Architecture is represented — through drawing, through form, through the buildings that it creates.