Architectural drawing is a means to an end. But to what end does it arrive at? Does the end manifest in the building as referred to by Kahn’s quote: “The painter sketches to paint, the sculptor draws to carve, the architect draws to build”? Or, does the end culminate in the form of an unique idea, vision, critique, utopia or allegory, like those depicted in Piranesi or Boullee’s works? Alternatively, could the drawing be an autonomous object that exists for its own right as in Libeskind’s Chamber Works as argued by Robin Evans? What about architectural drawings drawn by students of architecture, those that are conducive to learning? This paper discusses a pedagogical experiment generated from a series of collaborative drawings, whose end goal is to seek a new agency to drawing: a didactic process interested in the visuality of the productive observation rather than the optical effect of the graphical realism.
In Architecture Enters the Age of Post-Digital Drawing, Sam Jacobs lamented that the culture of digital rendering has killed, (almost) a critical architectural act: the facility to speculate through drawing. He asserts the high fidelity digital rendering packages has transformed the architectural drawings as the body-double of photography, by presenting the audience with a realistic image of the building-to-be and indirectly creating a deepfake representation of the world at large. Similarly, Alberto Pérez-Gómez questioned the role of computer graphics as merely a tool of systematic representation, degenerating into a banal mannerism in a sea of homogeneity. The fait accompli is what has stimulated the reemergence to the act of drawing in the era of the post-digital.
Building upon David Gersten’s notion of What a drawing does, while contributing to the discourse of post-digital representation, this paper examines a collaborative drawing method between multiple authors working at the same space time. An experiment whose goal is a simultaneous move towards ‘seeing’ and ‘showing’. The process not only enables the drawings to show something that is a “formed image or idea that we then project upon the world; but also provides an exploratory search that extends far and beyond to become the sites of imaginative exploration. A place of receptive action and listening to the world”.
The episodes of drawing research encourage the students to observe and reimagine a subject of enquiry through a process of interactivity. Beyond showing what has been observed, the drawing is a negotiated act: relational and contingent upon the actions of those contributing authors. It has a playful ethos akin to the Surrealist game the Exquisite Corpse. “Participatory Drawing of a City” is one example amongst the series, premised on the collective construction and aspiration of an imaginary city. Starting from the streets it draws upon the city’s characteristics from what it was; what it is; to what it could be. Others within the series are examined in the paper as well to demonstrate its breadth. The drawing folds, blends, propagates and extrapolates history, theory and fiction into a series of 10-meter long exquisite scrolls.