Curated by Jeremy Ficca, Carnegie Mellon University Amy Kulper
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Curated by Jeremy Ficca, Carnegie Mellon University Amy Kulper, Rhode Island School of Design Grace La, Harvard University Graduate School of Design “Architects are bound to treat as real that which exists only in an imagined future, and to specify “Thus, the architectural drawing the ways in which the foreseen things can be as end work can function made to exist. In doing so they must predict in any of three ways: as an the future nature of an artifact and that it will innovative design tool, as the work as expected. In other words, the drawing articulation of a new directions, process is a cosmopoesis that can help to invent or as a creation of consummate better futures and make potential worlds.” artistic merit. Put simply, a Marco Frascari, From Models to Drawings (2007) perfect act of architecture achieves all three at once.” “The best way to appreciate the merits and Jeffrey Kipnis, Perfect Acts consequences of being digital is to reflect on of Architecture (2001) the difference between bits and atoms.” Nicholas Negroponte, Being Digital (1996) “Designers—a category of imaginative world-makers that includes but is not “Anything that can be bits will limited to architects—make be. Any process that can be drawings and representations, disintermediated will be. That is old the goal of which is to wish news. What is new about vaporization or instruct a new thing into is its unexpected consequences existence. They draw toward that move far beyond media.” the world. Drawings establish Nicholas Negroponte, Vaporized (2015) a relationship to the world. Just like language they can whisper and shout, contradict “Paul Klee once said, “I their authors, make promises, take the line for a walk.” describe, denote, and instruct.” Drawing is a universal, formal Susan C. Piedmont Palladino, language. It’s the hieroglyphs How Drawings Work (2019) of communication. For me, drawing is like talking – it can formulate an idea, explain “My own suspicion of the enormous generative a thing or a possibility. It’s part played by architectural drawing stems from a important for me to translate brief period of teaching in an art college. Bringing my thinking process into an with me the conviction that architecture and the image, and drawing often visual arts were too closely allied, I was soon pursues its own course while struck by what seemed at the time the particular the brain just follows for a disadvantage under which architects labour, never while, then suddenly you hit working directly with the object of their thought, on an idea, and it sprouts always working at it through some intervening from the pen. You can call medium, almost always the drawing, while it a creative shortcut.” painters and sculptors, who might spend time on preliminary sketches and maquettes, all ended Madelon Vriesendorp, up working on the thing itself which, naturally, Augmentations (2016) absorbed most of their attention and effort.” Robin Evans, Translations from Drawing to Building (1997) “… whether executed manually or digitally, in two dimensions or three, architectural “Unlike documents in print, drawings reveal aspects of thae built digital notations can change world that normally escape attention.” anytime, and every reader of David Leatherbarrow, Showing What a digital file can, technically, Otherwise Hides Itself (1998) write on it or rewrite on it at will: in the digital domain every “What is the verb of “architecture”? That consumer can be a producer.” depends on who you ask. A professional Mario Carpo, The Second architect will tell you that architects design. Digital Turn (2017) Architects design buildings. They might have a hand in building them, but first and foremost, “Evidently it is not enough to regard the they design them. Yet the verb of digital surface as a taken-for-granted backdrop for structure for programmers and information the lines that are inscribed upon it. For just architect designers is “architecting”: designing as the history of writing belongs within the a system, working holistically from parts to history of notation, and the history of notation wholes, operating from above, setting in place within the history of the line, so there can be foundations from below. From the perspective no history of the line that is not also about the of digital designers and programmers, what changing relations between lines and surfaces.” architects do is analogous to what designers Tim Ingold, The Life of Lines (2011) and programmers do in their most complicated and intricate work. The way designers and programmers use the term speaks to the idea “The idea of a ‘creative of what an architect does, to the complexity of architecture,’ of an their work, and to the expertise that architects experimentational architectural Curated by claim. In essence, they architect architectures.” aesthetic that privileges the Jeremy Ficca, Amy Kulper, Grace La drawing as an expressive tool, Molly Wright Steenson, Architectural emerged less than a century Intelligence (2017) ago. Aside from the utopian The architectural drawing is multivalent. It can be as gestural and “What is digital architecture? Is drawings of the eighteenth it legitimate to apply the term century – the visionary incomplete as a sketch, or as well wrought and detailed as a rendering. to any design made with the expressions of Boullée or It can express building tectonics and construction logics in one context, assistance of the computer, Ledoux and the unlikely prisons aesthetic qualities in another. It can be a vehicle for exploration, or an or should it be reserved to of Piranesi - drawing found its productions that put to real use true expressive value when instrument of execution. Nowhere is the multivalence of the architectural the capacity of the machine to space was liberated and it drawing more pronounced than in the contemporary context of digital be more than a drawing tool?” could become a free domain, culture. In a moment in which Photoshop layers supplant layers of trace an open field. The various Antoine Picon, Digital Culture movements of the modern and pixels duel with graphite, the roles of the architectural drawing are in Architecture (2010) avant-garde sought to make simultaneously contested, questioned, and clarified. Drawing Attention the drawing an instrument dwells in the current paradox of the architectural drawing. The exhibition “To a large extent it has turned out that the both critical and creative.” gathers contemporary architectural drawings from a range of international usefulness of computer drawings is precisely their Laura Allen and Luke structured nature, and that this structured nature Caspar Pearson, Drawing practices and the academy. The assembled drawings are diverse in their is precisely the difficulty in making them ... The Futures (2016) content, but even more varied in their engagement of digital techniques drawing itself has properties quite independent of the properties of the object it is describing.” and methodologies. Drawing Attention examines the roles of architectural George Stiny, Talking about drawings in this moment of radical disciplinary and cultural change. Seeing and Doing (2008) The drawings assembled in this exhibition provide a compelling snapshot of global architectural drawing practices and the plethora of analog, digital, and hybrid representational methods they employ. DRAWING ATTENTION RAISES THESE QUESTIONS, ISSUES, AND PROVOCATIONS: DRAWINGTABLES Alvin Boyarsky, Chairman of the the chaotic and exuberant unfolding Architectural Association in London of a meal over time – to Tate’s allusion – Has the pull of digital image culture strengthened between 1971 and 1990, compared the to the messy productivity of the or depleted the efficacy of the architectural drawing? education of an architect to a “well-laid design studio, the potential of the table,” and by extension, this collection architectural drawing to address a – If the conceit of the ‘postdigital’ resides in its recognition of architectural drawings constitutes range of issues and operations, and to that contemporary culture is always already digital, a well-laid table of representational evoke a limitless design imaginary is liberating discourse and practice from the strictures of possibility in contemporary digital apparent. If Boyarsky’s well-laid table analog/digital dualism, how does this effect the operations culture. Bracketed between two well- encouraged students of architecture and audiences of the architectural drawing? laid tables – Sarah Wigglesworth’s The to sample from a varied menu of Disorder of the Dining Table (1997) theoretical design investigations, then – What territories and possibilities does digital culture and James Michael Tate’s Inhabiting this exhibition sets the table with five open up for the architectural drawing, and how have Abstraction #2 (2019) – this collection themes under which contemporary the roles of analog drawing transformed as a result? articulates the diverse attitudes and architectural drawings operate: drawing operations of the architectural drawing omniscience; drawing environments; today. Between Wigglesworth’s drawing as instrument; drawing as – Digital culture posits a productive tension for architectural evocation of the ephemeral – traces of world-making; and drawing limits. drawing between the agency of drawing and the agency of the image. How is this manifested in the drawings in this exhibition? Sarah Wigglesworth The Disorder of the Dining Table [Image 2: The Meal] 1997 “Faced with a blank sheet of paper and a couple