On Drawing

While drawings obviously have a key role in design, they need to be tools to assist and develop the understanding of design, rather than as immutable instructions defining fully the fabrication of a full scale piece. Drawings can take on a different status in a reimagined and reconfigured design process. These drawings are of the are loose, open ended sort, and a correlative part of the process of construction – not fixed before hand and bereft of the real discoveries that take place during fabrication. The conventional architectural drawing idealises construction, and typically uses a strange kind of scaled code to represent an idealised set of relationships where uncertainties and contingencies are impossible. Jonathan Hill, in the ‘Illegal Architect’ talks of how the drawing is used as a control mechanism by architects to eliminate the possibilities of contingencies creeping in. He talks of the ‘artistic creation of an individual in command of a drawing who designs a building in a studio’. While at best drawing is a process that encourages thinking, to the point that at best drawing is thinking – for me it is more exciting when construction is thus, and alongside this, the ‘drawing’ happens in real time, real scale, and in three dimensions.

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