Drawing Is/Not Building by Simon Twose

Drawing Is/Not Building

Roland Snooks Sarah Treadwell Simon Twose

Published by the Adam Art Gallery Te Pātaka Toi at Victoria University

A publication documenting an exhibition at Adam Art Gallery Te Pātaka Toi,

of Wellington, to document the exhibition: Drawing Is/Not Building:

focused on drawing in the practices of three architect/researchers—Roland

Roland Snooks, Sarah Treadwell, Simon Twose, 25 April – 28 June 2015.

Snooks, Sarah Treadwell and Simon Twose—with contributions from a range

Edited by: Christina Barton, Sarah Treadwell and Simon Twose Design: Alice Bonifant Photography: Shaun Waugh (unless otherwise stated)

of practitioners canvassing the state of architectural drawing now. Edited by Christina Barton, Sarah Treadwell and Simon Twose

Printed by: Milne Print Edition: 300 ISBN 978-1-877309-35-9 First published in February 2016 Cover: Detail of Sarah Treadwell’s Oceanic Foundations: Rising Water 1 © 2016 Adam Art Gallery Te Pātaka Toi, the architects and the authors. All rights reserved. Except for reasonable purposes of fair review, no part may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means without the prior written consent of the publishers. All works reproduced with kind permission of the architects, artists, or copyright holders. This publication is supported by the Adam Art Gallery Programme Development Fund, a resource built from donations to enhance the work of the Gallery, and with funds from the School of Architecture and Planning, National Institute of Creative Arts and Industries, University of Auckland and the Faculty of Architecture and Design, Victoria University of Wellington. The Adam Art Gallery Te Pātaka Toi is the university art gallery at Victoria University of Wellington, Wellington, New Zealand. Director: Christina Barton Curator: Stephen Cleland Exhibition Officer: Andy Cummins Collection Officer: Sophie Thorn Gallery Administrator: Ann Gale Adam Art Gallery Gate 3, Kelburn Parade Victoria University of Wellington PO Box 600 Wellington 6140 New Zealand + 64 4 463 6835 adamartgallery@vuw.ac.nz www.adamartgallery.org.nz

Adam Art Gallery Te Pātaka Toi, 2016

Contents

Documentation and Essays

17 Drawings/17 Practitioners

54 Cornelia Parker’s Measuring Niagara

Director’s foreword Christina Barton

Preface Leon van Schaik

Roland Snooks

1:1 Instructions for Carbon Filament

Laminar Bodies from the

with a Teaspoon, 1997

Winding on Bamboo Formwork

AgentBody Prototype series, 2015

Eu Jin Chua

Jules Moloney

In Formation: Curating Emergent Design

56 Drawing the Irrational Section Cut:

Introduction

Behaviours in Algorithmic Scripting and

Moral Institute of Higher Fiction

Simon Twose

Robotic Fabrication

Hélène Frichot

Brent Allpress 28 Sarah Treadwell Oceanic Drawings 2014–15 36 Mapping the Relationship: Direct and Oblique Levels of Representation in Sarah Treadwell’s Oceanic Foundations: Rising Water Paul James 40 Simon Twose Concrete Drawing 2015 48 Wall Drawing Sarah Treadwell

58 Déjà vu: Restaging Resnais’s

60 The Waiting Drawing Susan Hedges 62 Stone as Drawing: Drawing Stone Ross Jenner 64 Moving within Movement Jondi Keane 66 ‘A Letter to the Builder’ Christopher Kelly 68 Len Lye’s Animations Kate Linzey 70 Downtown Athletic Building Joanna Merwood-Salisbury

Cut and Colour—Establishing Orographic Drawing Procedures

Last Year at Marienbad Penelope Haralambidou

Drawing an Ideogram Leon van Schaik

Katrina Simon 78

A Maelstrom Practice Michael Spooner

80 Demolition: The Afterdrawing of Architecture Teresa Stoppani 82 Drawing Is/Not Building: Question Mark Jo Van Den Berghe 84 Diagram for make believe: imagining a new park for New Lynn Kath Waghorn 86 Abstract Architectural Drawing Michael Young

88 End Word—Drawing on My Mind Neil Spiller 92 Contributors

Director’s foreword

Adam Art Gallery Te Pātaka Toi was an ideal venue to host the exhibition Drawing Is/Not Building. Designed by Athfield Architects, the Gallery is a complex, multi-levelled space that combines existing and new built components to richly textured effect. The installations of works by Roland Snooks, Sarah Treadwell and Simon Twose, each occupied these spaces in ways that played off their surroundings, proving their contention that drawing is a material practice not constrained to the two-dimensional domain of paper or computer screen. It was a special pleasure to experience the Gallery in this way, and it is an added satisfaction to see thinking about architectural drawing extended in this publication. We are especially grateful to Simon Twose, who suggested the exhibition to us, and who worked so hard to realise it, at the same time as install his own very ambitious component. It was a privilege to work also with Sarah Treadwell and Roland Snooks, whose thinking and practice so ably exemplified Simon’s thesis. We are grateful to the students and staff of the Faculty of Architecture and Design who assisted in the assembly of Roland Snooks’s complex AgentBody Prototype. The opportunity to gain first-hand experience and enjoy access to Roland’s thinking and technical know-how is a particularly valuable outcome for this university art gallery. We are grateful too, to all the writers who feature in this publication, many of whom also contributed to the public programmes accompanying the exhibition. This exhibition and publication would not have eventuated without the support of Victoria University of Wellington’s Faculty of Architecture and Design, RMIT University, Melbourne, and the School of Architecture and Planning, National Institute of Creative Arts and Industries at The University of Auckland. In addition, we thank Joanna Merwood-Salisbury, Robin Skinner, Elizabeth Ann Aitken Rose, John Pusateri, Thomas Ryan, David Clegg, Holly Ewens, Nova Paul, Louise Stevenson, and the Adam Art Gallery volunteers. Christina Barton 7

Preface

In 1975 RoseLee Goldberg (then at the Royal College of Art in London) and Bernard Tschumi (then at the Architectural Association also in London) conceived the project ‘A Space: A Thousand Words’.1 In her preface RoseLee wrote: ‘There have been several exhibitions over the past few years in both the United States and in Italy, which have made public recent discussions on architecture and design. These attempted to show not only the special sensibilities of the time, but also the critical and political preoccupations which lay behind the various productions.’ She continued, describing the purpose of this new project as expressing: ‘the conflicts between design as an end in itself and conceptual preoccupations …’. Twenty-eight people were invited to present a drawing of a space and a thousand words, the latter to be a companion text that would be, as Bernard Tschumi put it in his preface: ‘… as (the) captions (that) once accompanied the architectural drawings or the paintings of the past in a complementary dialogue, words and images superimpose their reciprocal dreams…’. His hope was that: ‘distinction between the talk about space and the creation of space vanishes, as well as any primacy of either the visual or the verbal. Dilemmas like buildings or non-buildings, concepts or precepts, mental space or physical space disappear.’ Studying the component parts of this publication I was irresistibly drawn to this earlier catalogue (the contents of which were exhibited first in London and later in New York) not only because it evoked Proustian memories of my own past life (my text included ‘Penny Lane is in my eyes and in my ears…’), but because I was struck by the way in which Drawing Is/Not Building seeks out a similar multitude of voices (24 each if I exclude the main protagonists). Towering through Drawing Is/Not Building are the three peaks of the works that have been on exhibition, and the essays about these works—the strikingly polar works of Roland Snooks (critiqued by Brent Allpress), of Sarah Treadwell (discussed by Paul James) and of Simon Twose (garlanded by an essay by Sarah Treadwell). These are peaks of achievement in their very different ways, startlingly present even as printed here, and every image raising questions about what it 8

Leon van Schaik, Ideogram, 2015, pen on paper © Leon van Schaik

is to draw. Draw out, draw up, draw down, draw on … as the protagonists have

drawing. The slippages between languages is inferred by the historic origins of

realised, there are many positions at stake.

the names of the writers, Frichot and Stoppani, face off against a welter of Irish:

Rather than leave these as loose ends, floating challengingly but randomly, this publication includes musings from practitioners and theorists, each on ‘a

Kelly, Molony, and non-specific Anglo: Hedges, Spooner… But, as I said, I am not going to mention everyone; yours to browse and to gaze at.

drawing, a thousand words’ basis. These voices float into the arena that the

I will finish with those who show a drawing that is entirely about the

exhibition created, trailing preoccupations with other ventures. They all appear,

making of a building. These suggest to me, perhaps, we should eschew build/

as many express in their notes, as fragments from other projects ‘on the go’

building as a verb altogether, and go to precisely what is being made and how.

somewhere else in the world. So they blow like wisps of stage fog, drifting

As Jo Van Den Berghe writes: ‘I was trying to understand the wall (-to-be)

through the space created by Roland’s three dimensional, free-standing weaving

through drawing my way into it.’ My parentheses. I made another ideogram as

of strokes derived from an algorithmic script; Simon’s seemingly concrete but

I tried to find my way into writing this preface. Centre stage I put three cones,

papery floor model and Sarah’s wall mounted black drawings and prints.

my ‘three peaks’. Each garlanded with an essay. And forming the arena that the

Some for me (and I am not going to mention all the authors—their

stage is central to, there are the seventeen glancing voices, glancing because

companion contributions can be pursued and savoured individually), like Ross

diverted from their own trajectories for a moment, they dock, and then their

Jenner’s enigmatic rock, ricochet through (mentally that is) as a meteorite,

own journey tugs at them and they are off again.

saying something ‘paper/scissor/stone’ to each exhibited piece. Others (as is

Looking on from the wings are RoseLee Goldberg and Bernard Tschumi,

acknowledged Rem Koolhaas did in Delirious New York) ponder the nature

their project an unmentioned but clearly present precedent. From the opposite

and impact of the traditional architectural working drawing, seeing in each

wings the collage artist Peter Lyssiotis peers in, his working mode not present,

supposedly neutral sheet subtexts of political import. There are sections (but

but his voice guiding me: ‘Who have they drawn in, Leon? Who have they

not plans, is that significant?) here from New York—the downtown athletic club

drawn up? In the drawing up what grooves have been worn in the sides of the

sans naked boxers eating oysters—and from a Ladies Waiting Room, Auckland

well of drawing?’ I note that Robin Evans has his mention. ‘But,’ asks Anton

Railway Station in August 1927, and through an imaginary Moral Institute of

James, ‘What of William Kentridge?’ This is a continuing discourse. Every

Higher Fiction replete with acronym MIHF. Sections resist replaying, while

generation must have its go, and it is a sign of the open enquiry of this legacy

plans, like old vinyl LPs invite a spin… There is an erasure at work here maybe,

of a wonderful exhibition, that these questions are posed.

akin to that experienced by Paul Carter when he stumbled across the grassedin platform that was once Coole House,2 where so much of Ireland’s literary culture was nurtured, a past that a particular present could not abide.

Leon van Schaik

What of the other senses? Does Roland’s piece whistle in a breeze? Do the blades in Simon’s work shriek when a gale catches the gallery door? Sound is imprinted deep within Sarah’s prints. I recall from my 1994 essay on the Sound of Space 3 the wheatsheaf stair at a Country House in Buckinghamshire that rustles as you ascend or descend, its murmurings intent on guying you into believing that the wealth that made it possible came from the fields around,

Bernard Tschumi and RoseLee Goldberg, A Space: A Thousand Words, Royal College of Art Gallery (Dieci Libri), London, 7 February to 6 March 1975.

Paul Carter, ‘At Coole’, unpublished poem, shown to the author in October 2015.

Leon van Schaik, ‘The Sound of Space’, Art & Australia, November 1994, pp. 244–249.

Mairtin O Caidhan, The Dirty Dust, [1949], first published in English 2015, Yale University Press, New Haven, 2015.

and not from the slaves on Jamaican sugar plantations. Eu Jin Chua reflects on Cornelia Parker’s project that ‘draws out’ a line of metal wire from a single Georgian silver spoon, a ‘cultural referent’ creation of a length calibrated to the height of the Niagara Falls that is at precisely the same time the destruction of an object laden with the raw-and-cooked-ness of the Enlightenment. Film has to have its say amongst these ghostly penetrating voices, investing the arena like the voices in the graves in The Dirty Dust, the great Irish language novel.4 Translations between media—‘a drawing of a film’ writes Penelope Haralambidou—is here, and Jondi Keane writes and overwrites his 10

Introduction

actions and conceptual motivations. The work of Roland Snooks, for instance, responded to the plastic material world of computation. Snooks works in a digital aesthetic realm and investigates possibilities offered by the shared authorship of human and computer. His AgentBodies Prototype project is created through algorithmic processes, where lines develop their own computational prerogative and swarm together into organic compositions in digital space. Snooks’s work is inflected through digital fabrication that feeds back the influence of the construction material and the mode of making; he experiments with robotic arms that mimic the arcs and delicate placements of the human hand, and builds complex surfaces that conflate structure with

Drawing Is/Not Building began with a simple impression; of drawing and

highly patterned ornament. His work in Drawing Is/Not Building used thin

building being one and the same, as if both were merged in a curious

metal to realise a swarm of lines. The resulting dark, gun-metal cloud made

stereoscopic image. Bringing them together jolted things into question,

from a bewildering array of individual steel sheets, was bent and pop riveted

especially relations between representation, occupation and matter. In this

by hand to reflect the lines’ dance in digital space. It was accompanied by three

weird shared space, drawings gained the mass and presence of buildings

videos showing the design process. These featured animations of lines actively

and buildings the criticality of art.

coalescing in the black void of the screen.

Drawing Is/Not Building featured three people who research through

Sarah Treadwell’s work challenges the representational onus of drawing

architectural drawing: Roland Snooks, Sarah Treadwell and myself. It was

to predict or order future space. Her large-scale lithographs and mixed-media

important that we three had markedly different approaches, not only to cover

drawings engage the impossible scale of the ocean and the calamity of its

the bases in terms of drawing technique, but also to create some critical friction

pollution. Two black drawings were sections through the sea, made by applying

between three polar positions. Roland Snooks works in a digital way, Sarah

inky, oily materials that merge together or react and resist being shaped.

Treadwell’s drawings and prints are largely analogue and allied to writing, and

Adjacent to these large dark drawings Treadwell hung two grids of lithographic

my work is a hybrid of analogue and digital drawing and architectural practice.

prints—one negative, the other positive—completed with the printmaker,

Installations springing from these approaches played out over the three levels

John Pusateri. A mass of aleatory lines, these came together as a variously

of the Adam Art Gallery between April and June 2015.

textured surface, which, when viewed at close range, featured slightly bleeding

This book is an extension of Drawing Is/Not Building and uses the

edges and subtle variations in calmness and intensity. Both drawings and prints

work in the show as an armature for a larger discussion about contemporary

connect to their subject matter in material ways, to capture the dynamics of an

architectural drawing. The first section of the book captures the exhibition in

ocean under threat, combining observational, poetic and critical intentions in

the Gallery and documents Snooks’ AgentBodies Prototype project, Treadwell’s

the physical act of making.

Oceanic Drawings and this author’s Concrete Drawing, with each critically

In Concrete Drawing, I was interested in fusing the active space of drawing

reviewed by an invited writer. This provides a base for sixteen commissioned

with that of built space. The work is a 1:1 drawing of a single wall surface,

texts by theorists and practitioners who offer their positions by taking a single

cast in concrete, which is the material intended for the building. The surface

drawing as the object of their discussion. Somewhere between a shotgun blast

of the wall/ drawing is a record of the design process, much as any drawing

and a scatter-shot these contributions catalogue what academics, architects

becomes a plastic terrain marked by conceptual and material interaction. Its

and artists currently think about drawing. The volume is bracketed by a

surface was puckered with impressions from moving elements; little walls that

preface by Leon van Schaik and an end word by Neil Spiller, who establish

had been played with in digital space swarm in constellations over the larger

the parameters of the terrain and account for the small tears that have been

wall’s surface. In this way spatial interactions in designing found their way

opened within it.

into the built object, creasing the concrete surface. These constellations were

The exhibition set out to render explicit material relationships in drawing,

arrayed to engage the gallery goer as they moved around the object. By closing

by focussing on the way these three projects came to realisation. Each was

the representational distance between drawing and building, viewers found

produced in a different context, with different feedback loops, and different

themselves occupying and participating in the space of both.

Drawing Is/Not Building picked up on many contemporary threads.

Documentation and essays

Drawing’s traditional connections to language and representation were tuned down to allow material ontologies to surface. An argment was mounted that those facets of architectural process: the slow turning of a physical model in the hand, the gritty application of a pencil to paper, the rapid generation of lines in computer modelling, all contribute to the designer’s spatial awareness. Such a view coincides with much work in the humanities looking at the agency of matter and how actions can expand understanding through the ‘mutual constitution’ of human and matter, to paraphrase Karan Barad.1 Drawing’s capacity to be the ‘opening of form’, as Jean Luc Nancy has observed,2 merges with this materialist stance, so that drawing/ designing is posited as a means to probe things, gathering information as an open-ended process of feedback and negotiation with the potential to uncover new and evasive understandings. Drawing’s ties to the space that it apparently orchestrates are by no means without turbulence. The medium and the practice has been variously positioned as a way of understanding atmospheres, as a tool for critical observation, as a discrete world with its own spatiality, or as an instrumental yet aesthetically reticent servant to building. Built space has a similarly complicated relation to drawing, investing it with understandings of scale, mass and occupation. Both worlds could be argued to occupy the same space: architecture might therefore span the making of both drawings and buildings, oscillating between two and three dimensions. The exhibition and this book attempt to capture contemporary understandings of architectural drawing. They bring material entanglements within drawing into focus, and point to new architectural directions in a very old practice. Simon Twose

Karan Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning, Duke University Press, Durham and London, 2007, p. 185.

Jean Luc Nancy, The Pleasure in Drawing, translated by P. Armstrong, Fordham University Press, New York, 2013, p. 1.

Roland Snooks Laminar Bodies 2015, from the AgentBody Prototype series

Laminar Bodies 2015, from the AgentBody Prototype series, was designed through an algorithmic process in which a turbulent surface was enabled to emerge from a swarm of computational agents. This process imbued the project with a natural or swarm-like character, which was set against its industrial fabrication and tectonic detailing. While sculptural in nature, the project was fundamentally an architectural prototype. The intricate pattern within the surface was designed through a multi-agent algorithm that draws from the self-organising logic of swarm intelligence. It is part of an ongoing exploration into the synthesis of surface, structure and ornament through complex systems. This research has been developed through a series of installations and prototypes, which experiment with embedding intricate patterns within translucent surfaces that negotiate between structural and ornamental behaviours.

▲= Roland Snooks, Laminar Bodies from the AgentBody Prototype series 2015, cut steel and aluminium, installation views, Adam Art Gallery, Victoria University of Wellington, 2015

Within this design research a feedback has been developed between the expressive algorithmic process and fabrication realities. The constraints of material, structure and machine limitations are reintegrated to enable a highly volatile generative approach, which incorporates and facilitates a series of pragmatic necessities.

In Formation: Curating Emergent Design Behaviours in Algorithmic Scripting and Robotic Fabrication Brent Allpress

The professionally prescribed and contractual relationship between architectural drawing and building has conventionally been to codify, document and communicate a set of instructions for builders and other industry contractors in order to fabricate and assemble a work to an intended design. The hierarchical economy of architectural drawing as governing documentation for materialisation can be traced back to Renaissance architect/theorists such as Alberti.1 Drawing Is/Not Building explored the more generative and processual role of architectural drawing. It showcased the productive possibilities opened up by the complex interrelationships between drawing, modelling and materialisation that are embodied in a work and evidenced across a body of works. The three practitioners featured in the exhibition, Roland Snooks, Sarah Treadwell and Simon Twose, engage with very different practices that nevertheless share some commonalities and affinities. They each offer artefacts of process and production where drawing has a material outcome. Their work eludes easy classification. This isn’t drawing reducible to instruction for

▲

Individual pieces of Roland Snooks’s Laminar Bodies prior to fabrication, 2015

Finer textures and pliant indentations are imparted by casting moulds, registering the liquidity of the material. Non-standard

modules produce a modulation of surface topology. Roland Snooks’s installation is an instance, one possible curated material

building or drawing in the service of representing a physical reality, even while

application, of a process of designing with algorithmic scripts that he has

those roles are still selectively in play. They embody and enact architectural

been testing across a range of projects and scales, from processual studies to

relationships that have inherent graphic and material qualities and experiential

developed architectural proposals. His work challenges any easy separation

values at the perceptual and spatial scale of the installation.

or order of priority between drawing and building. The desired physical

The different lineages of the exhibitors are usefully complementary.

behaviours of architectural elements and forms are algorithmically encoded in

Sarah Treadwell has made substantial contributions to defining the field of

self-generating mutable computer models, which can be directly fabricated by

architectural drawing as both the focus of and the vehicle for design research.

digitally controlled robotic manufacturing tools.

Her work is situated through and against cultural, historical and environmental narratives specific to South Pacific conditions.

Over the past ten years in his role as an architecture academic at RMIT University in Melbourne, Snooks has sustained a collaborative research

Simon Twose developed an innovative approach to drawing as an

practice: Kokkugia, with Robert Stuart-Smith, who is based at the Architectural

undergraduate prodigy where the excessively detailed articulation of a design

Association (AA) in London.3 They began by exploring the role of algorithmic

drawing took on its own material texture, enhanced through the medium

processes in architectural and urban design. They employed computer-

of artist-grade paper and a shellac finish. His recent architectural practice

modelling scripts that were adapted from flocking simulations using rules for

work has featured concrete screens as a conspicuous spatial element.2 In this

the interaction of individual entities in a complex adaptive group such as a flock

exhibition his literal concretization of drawing is deployed with brutalist impact.

of birds or a school of fish. They re-scripted individual entities or agents as

geometric bodies, mutable component figures with linear limbs and extending extremities that could be given the tendency to interact and connect with other agents to form larger structures and systems. Across different projects particular agent bodies have been encoded with specific technical and qualitative material and spatial criteria for adaptive and interactive behaviours. The aspiration has been for unforeseen emergent configurations created by the complex interaction of agent-based systems. The agent bodies are given tendencies to cohere into continuously connected surfaces that create complex formal and spatial patterns. They are curated and developed through iterative cycles, applied at a range of system scales and integrated into resolved architectural schemes. Snooks formed the architectural practice Studio Roland Snooks to focus on the implications of applying this research to built projects.4 As the scale of architectural projects being entered for competitions increased, the design approach of the practice shifted from entirely emergent algorithmic modelling. Snooks set out top-down, large-scale formal frameworks such as surface envelopes, authored by the designers and established by the constraints of the brief. These were then adapted and elaborated through the bottom-up emergent algorithmic design modelling that brought another finer level of complexity and articulation to the various fabric systems at different scales across the schemes. This was particularly employed as a means to develop the aesthetic value and formal spatial qualities of the proposals through the layered interference of structural systems and material surfaces.

▲

Detail of Laminar Bodies from the AgentBody Prototype series 2015

configurations developed through algorithmic scripts that incorporated the

Snooks founded the RMIT Architecture Robotics Lab to explore the

bending constraints of the material. The process of curation, from model to

role of robotic fabrication as a tool to reconsider the relationship between

manufacturing, included criteria for lines of structural continuity, influencing

emergent algorithmic design practices and digital fabrication techniques and

the alignment of the welded edges of deflecting figures.

technologies. Recent projects have included the fabrication of large-scale

Snooks’s installation Laminar Bodies is another prototype project that

composite surfaces made from moulded fibreglass with veins of foam rubber

explores material translation of computational processes using flat steel

running through them.5 The fibreglass is thin and flexible and the foam rubber

sheet. Algorithmic agent bodies generated a complex formal configuration

also bends easily. The manufacturing process draws directly on boatbuilding

of intricate component parts that could be laser cut from steel sheet. These

techniques. Through the introduction of double curvature in the fibreglass

small thin elements were laminated to form double-curved surfaces that were

surfaces and corrugations for the veins of foam rubber, the resulting composite

algorithmically generated to give greater structural strength. These large-scale

combination is very light and strong. Veins of darker foam trace through the

surface geometries embody a sense of dynamic turbulent movement. The

translucent surfaces in branching fingers with their own formal logic, while the

component elements cohere to form differentiated linear patterns of framing

geometry of the surfaces and the veins interact without strictly conforming to

figures and void perforations across these surfaces.

each other, producing a scale interference that animates the outcome. Snooks’s current research interest is to incorporate the behaviour

Snooks aspires to subvert the modernist account of an assumed hierarchy between essential structure and secondary applied ornament. He seeks to

of the robotic tools interacting with the behavior of materials into the

hybridise the roles of his agent bodies. They are load-bearing through multiple

algorithmic scripting cycles. Video documentation in the exhibition showed

connections and also deform to enhance that structural capacity through

the development and testing of the Brass Swarm prototype. Agent bodies

extension and double curvature. Their individual geometries and collective

consisted of brass rods that were bent by two Kuka Agilus robots in complex

surface forms are however not simply reducible to mathematically optimised

structural criteria. The agency of the bodies incorporates a capacity to respond to other architectural values that exceed the technical. Form follows formation through scripted reconfigurations of agents responding to the

Leon Battista Alberti, On the Art of Building in Ten Books, translated by Joseph Rykwert, MIT Press, Cambridge Massachusetts, 1991.

Simon Twose, ‘Concrete House, Wellington, 2011’, in ArchDaily, Dec 3, 2011. Available online: http://www.archdaily.com/188547/concrete-house-simon-twose

complex interaction of quantitative and qualitative criteria. Snooks curates the

Kokkugia, research practice website, available online: http://www.kokkugia.com/

affects of the work to produce very particular aesthetic, spatial, textural and

Studio Roland Snooks, architectural practice website, available online: http://www.rolandsnooks.com/

scale outcomes. He describes this qualitative experiential surplus value as ornamental. Decoration has traditionally served a representational purpose,

Studio Roland Snooks, Composite Wing, RMIT Design Hub, Melbourne 2014, available online: http://www.rolandsnooks.com/#/compositewing/

Adolf Loos, Ornament and Crime: Selected Essays, translated by Michael Mitchell, Ariadne, London, 1997.

communicating the hierarchies of society through systems of decorum where high-status structures are more richly elaborated. Breaking with this conservative and expensive economy was a primary motivation for the negation of ornament by modernist architect theorists such as Adolf Loos.6 The agent bodies in Snooks’s work are not simply applied decoration. They are not acting in the service of decorum and propriety. They are unruly. They create form that is made up of and overrun by disfigured elements. The profusion of agents with dynamic lines of force and deflections of geometry collectively produce complex surface configurations. There is a predisposition for porosity and spatial ambiguity. The work is strange and over-articulated. The outcomes tend towards the grotesque. Ornament in contemporary architecture can be better understood through its actions, and particularly its role in mediating spatial and material transitions in state. The agent bodies in Snooks’s work take on ornamental agency as they articulate the transitions of material force and form through deflection and extension. They retain semi-autonomy as distinct modular figures, and cohere to create a complex larger-scale formation of linear connections. A perceptual experience of the built installation oscillates between the component scale of the distinct figure of each agent body, the scale of a porous surface where framed void figures gain prominence, and the collective scale of the complex double-curved surfaces of the installation occupying and disrupting the space. Snooks’s prototype installation conflates spatial, structural and ornamental roles in one material system. The use of robotic tools allows for the fabrication of complex differentiated elements that could not be easily produced otherwise. The composition of differentiation is curated through algorithmic agency in the digital modelling. This is a critical revision of the modernist model, which employed separate systems of standardised mass-produced modular elements. However, the liberating motivation for the modernist separation of structural and spatial systems was to free spatial arrangements from conventional hierarchies and proprieties. How the economies of more generic construction and differentiated digital fabrication might interact productively is a significant emerging question in architectural design practice research.

Sarah Treadwell Oceanic Drawings 2014–5

We sweat and cry salt water, so we know that the ocean is really in our blood.1 These drawings and prints are signs of attention to material conditions in the world from a non-instrumental point of view. They address ‘...moments of trauma...turning points, accidents, catastrophes, crises—events that mark moments when the world changes. And [they look] at them insofar as they are moments when relations intersect with things, moments when matter comes to matter’.2 They investigate the spatial zones of Oceania and reference a desired internal relation with the sea. The Pacific Ocean is understood as ground, site and context of architecture in this part of the world and these works attend to mutable foundational and interior conditions through strategies of the

▲

Installation view of Sarah Treadwell’s Oceanic Foundations:

architectural plan and section.

Rising Water 1 & 2, 2014, Adam

Architects generally draw sections as both abstract and material constructions, numerically and graphically defining geometry and indicating

created on the surface of rising seas—lines which stretch out and connect oceanic

Art Gallery, Victoria University of

people across vast distances—tracing

Wellington, 2015.

the repetitive rise of tidal water through

materiality with codes and disciplinary marks. These works seek to extend the

a repulsion of oil. Initially drawn from a

attention to materiality and politics that is inherent in architectural sections.

lithographic residue, the images were translated into an enlarged drawing,

The ostensible control with which architectural drawings operate falters as

layered into a digital image, further translated into a cutting file before being

the scale and surface detailing of these works expands and contracts between

inscribed onto polycarbonate plates with a CNC router. The entangled images

macro and micro dimensions.

were finally hand printed in positive and negative versions.

The black drawings started at a moment of disaster, the wreck of the Rena on the Astrolabe reef in the Bay of Plenty in 2011, and they operate with an intention to traverse, or perhaps rehearse, the disaster in order to acknowledge a habitual complicity with such consequences of global consumption/ capitalism. The drawings record their sectional cuts with traditional zones of

1 2

Museum Fridericanium, Kassel, p. 30 =

greyness, replacing the translucent blueness of the sea—a sea now thickened and concretised. The prints, produced in collaboration with the Auckland-based printmaker, John Pusateri, at his Auckland Print Studio, depict the oily strands 28

Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, ‘The dance was very frenetic, lively, rattling, clanging, rolling, contorted, and lasted a long time’, dOCUMENTA (13) Catalog 1/3: The Book of Books, Hatje Cantz, Berlin and

blackness and draw past the cutting plane into the thickness of a sea filled with the material evidence and sadness of repeated tsunami. They are pervaded by

Teresia Teaiwa quoted in Epeli Hau´ofa, ‘The Ocean in Us’, in We are the Ocean: Selected Works, The University of Hawaii Press, Hawaii, 2008, pp. 41-59.

pp. 30–1 Sarah Treadwell with John Pusateri, Oceanic Foundations: Rising Water 1, 2014, hand-printed CNC-routed drypoints and engravings from polycarbonate plates on paper © Sarah Treadwell

pp. 32–3 Sarah Treadwell with John Pusateri, Oceanic Foundations: Rising Water 2, 2015, relief printed CNC-engraved polycarbonate plates on paper © Sarah Treadwell

pp. 34–5 Sarah Treadwell, Oceanic Section 1 & 2, 2014–5, mixed media on unstretched canvas © Sarah Treadwell

Mapping Relations: Direct and Oblique Levels of Representation in Sarah Treadwell’s Oceanic Foundations: Rising Water Paul James

and positive space and, by extension, oil and sea is clear, while at others it is blurred within a muted grey smear. The flickering of density implies the propulsion of oil in specific directions across the expanse of the sea. The ink’s viscosity is intensified further in Oceanic Sections, to the extent that the medium takes on the qualities of the earth from which it was extracted. Treadwell has written extensively about oceanic architecture and its cultural relationship to water. Relations between text and image have also been a recurrent area of interest. Seen in this context, Rising Water establishes links between the method of production and models of translation and representation. For her exhibition at the Adam Art Gallery, she writes:

Mimesis is not resemblance understood as the relationship between a copy and a model. It is a way of making resemblances function within

Initially drawn from a lithographic residue, the images were translated

a set of relations between ways of making, modes of speech, forms of

into an enlarged drawing, layered into a digital image, further

visibility, and protocols of intelligibility.1

translated into a cutting file before being inscribed into polycarbonate plates with a CNC router. The entangled images were finally hand

Throughout her academic career Treadwell has moved between image making

printed in positive and negative versions. [My emphasis]

and writing to gain insights into the cultural horizons through which the natural and built environments of Oceania have been represented and understood. Her

Consider the allusions to translation, transformation and loss within

inclusion in Drawing Is/Not Building contributed to her large body of academic

the description of the process of production. Just as the print medium

work in this area, by exploring the relationship between figuration and matter

communicates meaning, the method of production is linguistically framed

within her representations of contaminated oceanic waters.

through terms that evoke the theoretical underpinnings of the work. There is

In her writing for the exhibition, Treadwell deployed words to signal the

an implied connection between shifts in techniques of production and different

matrix of relations between the direct and oblique levels of representation

modes of intelligibility. The loss of quality and visual information, through the

present within her images. Her descriptions demonstrate the role that words

shift between mediums and techniques, echoes the play between the image’s

play in amending ‘the surface, by causing another subject to appear under the

competing models of representation and intelligibility.

representative subject’, as Jacques Rancière puts it.2 She writes:

Elements within Rising Water signal the different horizons through which oceanic waters are perceived and understood. The grid organising the sheets of

These prints depict the oily strands created on the surface of rising

paper evokes both cartographers’ maps and the modernist grid deployed within

sea-lines, which stretch out and connect oceanic people across vast

minimalist art to emphasise the system underpinning the production of the

distances. The works trace the repetitive rise of tidal water through a

art work. These allusions offer competing models of intelligibility. Treadwell’s

repulsion of oil.3

deployment of the grid as a double sign is an indicator of the extent of ink that has been spilled within the contested process of representing oceanic waters.

While her work cannot be reduced to a didactic political statement,

Modernist aesthetic theories relating to the materiality of representation

Treadwell implies concern for global warming and the extent of pollution present

hover like a cultural spectre around the work, colouring the tension between

within the Pacific Ocean. There is an intriguing connection between the medium

figurative forms and dense matter. The early modernist convention of using

of the work and its political message. The repulsion of oil floating on tidal

representations to signal a gap within representation is re-orientated in

water is depicted through printers’ ink. This medium is awarded an analogical

Treadwell’s work. Oil covers the sea, delineating a troubled surface while limiting

relationship to oil, which in turn forms a palpable relationship between the

visibility into its depths. Ink is the medium through which the ocean becomes

representation and the artistic medium. The density of ink suggests the extent

visible and intelligible, but it is also linked to its obliteration as a substance and

of oil in a section of sea. There is variation in the degree of opacity of the black

as an image. In Rising Water the patterns of oil within the ocean are recorded,

ink within the print’s various parts. Sometimes the relationship between negative

rather than the ocean itself. The ocean is represented as negative space.

Treadwell’s decision to evade direct representation of the ocean gains further levels of significance when placed in the context of other evasions evident in her work. She recounts that ‘the performative aspect of the process was my way out of picturing disaster or beauty’.4 This comment suggests that there may be a theoretical connection between the pictorial concept of ‘negative space’ and the semiotic concept of ‘spacing’ guiding the formation of the drawing. By refusing to adhere to the conventions of representing the ocean in terms of either disaster or beauty, Treadwell depicts it as something in excess of these dominant visual tropes. Just as printers’ ink is awarded an analogical relationship to oil, negative space serves to delineate the limits of representation. Treadwell’s (non-) representation of oceanic waters is contained and given form by figurative elements. Rancière argues that the representative regime of art contains’a model of visibility of speech that at the same time organises a certain restraint of the visible; an adjustment of the relations between knowledge-effects and pathos-effects’.5 By describing oceanic waters as negative space Treadwell suggests that it is either un-representable or in excess of what can be represented. Through this conceptual move, she associates Rising Water with the restraints of the visible aligned with sublime art. This complicates the status of her use of negative space as a form of nonrepresentation, as it is determined by the restraints of the visible associated with the representative regime of art. In this context her resistance to imaging the

determined by a regime of art. Treadwell is aware of this complex knot between representation and non-representation and co-opts it within the labyrinthine

1 2

non-representation of the ocean as negative space becomes another trope of

In conclusion, I suggest that Treadwell offers a lament to the exploitation of the ocean as well as an aid for reflection on the lenses through which oceanic

Jacques Rancière The Future of the Image, translated by Gregory Elliott, Verso, London & New York, 2009, p.73.

network of layers that she negotiates within the production of her artwork. The representation that she plays against other forms of oblique depiction.

Detail of Sarah Treadwell’s Oceanic Foundations: Rising Water 2, 2014 (photo Tom Ryan) © Sarah Treadwell

ocean in terms of beauty or disaster can be seen as sanctioned and ultimately

Ibid, p.76. Sarah Treadwell, wall text accompanying Oceanic Foundations: Rising Water 1 & 2, in Drawing Is/Not Building, Adam Art Gallery, 2015.

4 5

Email to the author, 31 May 2015. Rancière, op.cit., p.120. For a fuller discussion of Rancière’s characterisation of the ‘regimes of art’ see: Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, translated by Gabriel Rockhill, Continuum, London, 2004.

waters are seen and understood. Her print conveys a sense of the contested field of representations surrounding these waters. Rising Water is structured by coexistent modes of representation—pictorial forms offer mimesis, whereas the shifts in the density of medium appear to be an attempt to fill a gap perceived in pictorial representation. Her symbolic investment in the medium and method of production offers a performative model, which establishes a connection to the physical matter of polluting oil. When the printed image takes on the physical attribute of oil, it conveys a different dimension of significance. Treadwell’s symbolic investment in the use of her medium and the process of her work’s production complicates the figurative level of representation and offers an alternate understanding of the significance of matter. 38

Simon Twose Concrete Drawing 2015

Concrete Drawing merged building with drawing, by drawing directly with concrete at full scale. In this project, the surface of a single wall was taken from an architectural design, peeled away from its two-dimensional context and laid prone in the gallery space as a concrete, built thing. This was not intended as a straightforward prototype; it was an active part of the drawing process. The drawing is a test that will ripple back through the house design, feeding into the process the impact of a drawing that can be walked around and experienced at full scale and in actual material. The Concrete Drawing has a surface that is puckered with impressions from moving elements; little walls that have been played with in digital space were arranged into constellations over the larger wall. These small-scale walls alluded to the handling of models during designing, turning them in the hands to assess their qualities. In this way, complicated spatial interactions explored in the design stages were recorded, creasing the finished surface of the building. The clusters of little walls engaged

▲= Simon Twose, Concrete Drawing 2015, installation views and details concrete, polystyrene, wax, photographs, graphite, digital drawings, Adam Art Gallery, Victoria University of Wellington, 2015

people as they moved around the concrete plane which, in a sense, overlaid drawing’s material engagements with those of building. The exhibited object was a composite of both.

Wall Drawings

size of a shovel, the hand of a child. The material and industry of the undertaking on the white gallery wall became an improper drawing or a diagram that

Sarah Treadwell

returned the materiality of making to a system of disciplinary process. In contrast to the rhizomatic images, around a corner, a series of 3D prints was placed along a ledge; a line of perfectly spaced small white objects. Each was a test, an experiment, considered, cast aside, retrieved, like crumpled pieces of paper archived for future use, suggesting a process of discrimination in which everything has value—including the melted and the partial. The prints prompt consideration of alternatives having themselves no commitment to completion, no currency in materiality. Barely anchored in the strip of thick

Architect John Hejduk, by way of explaining his Wall Houses, stated that: ‘The

polystyrene, the 3D objects operated on the oblique as cantilevered structures;

wall is the most present condition possible. Life has to do with walls; we are

their foundations were minimal and the substance of the wall or roof planes

continuously going in and out, back and forth, and through them; a wall is the

owed much to shadows that gave them depth and pattern. Each print is an

“quickest”, the “thinnest”, the thing we are always transgressing, and that is why

architectural proposition in miniature with the architectural potential to

I see it as the present, the most surface, condition.’1

expand, change or multiply.

In 2011 Simon Twose designed a house for an edge of the steep surrounds

The massive concrete wall drawing, in the lowest gallery, might be seen as

of Wellington city. The house presents to the road a curved concrete wall slung

an expanded detail, built as the outcome of an engagement between analogue

above the ground allowing slits of light and views down into a lowered interior.

and digital experiments. The concrete drawing is not conceptualised as an

Rather than an enclosing skin of space, freestanding concrete walls shape the

end-point object, but rather positioned as the result of work undertaken, labour

internal space. The Concrete House has attracted attention, including an NZIA

productively expended. For the observer, the wall appeared determinedly

Award, and Twose has written about the house in relation to Wellington’s vivid

weighty, crafted and horizontal as it occupied most of the gallery floor. Made

topography and earthquake-prone land. It was, he wrote; ‘designed to be a set

of 40 cast concrete panels connected by a responsive grid, the volume of the

of heavy concrete elements in a dynamic relationship with the site; elevated,

material, the sheer weight of concrete, was physically compelling. The wall is a

leaning over or cutting into it. The end product was a rather abstract courtyard

prone body of a landscape, gridded, facetted and finely ribbed in texture. Small

house crushed into a 250m site.’

inclining planes in clusters, inserted into the surface, register local disturbances

The substance of the wall in the Concrete House, the weight and curved

and oblique terrain. Like hairs on skin they seem to rise in fright, lie down in

force of its mass, has an uncanny effect, which is both disturbing and suitable

contentment. The surface textures are fine with subtle colour changes and

for a city with a turbulent colonial past. All acts of foundation in New Zealand

breaking bubble marks and the gridded concrete puckers and ripples pointing

are conditioned by anxiety and blind spots, something recognised in Twose’s

to the liquid origin of its materiality.

exhibition pieces, which continue his practice that has involved both one-to-

What does it mean to lay a wall down, to refuse the closure and privacy

one experiments and particularised arrays of small tests and investigations.3

of containment? If walls are the elements through which space is navigated,

His work in Drawing Is/Not Building began with an extracted part of a drawing

as Hejduk suggests, does a horizontal wall suggest access to an underground

of a concrete wall and tests the possibilities and limits of the ubiquitous

interiority? Does the heavy horizontal wall open many small portals, through

architectural element: ‘wall’. His project includes three sorts of drawings:

porous materiality, into worlds that don’t claim the privileges of the vertical? In

process images, a sequence of 3D prints and a full-scale wall surface.

her works, Doors and Sky Puddles, both 2011, Yoko Ono stripped away all walls

Like seaweed fanned out into separate strands by tidal movement, or

leaving only a collection of doors, navigational compasses of passage turned

a map of a journey with many points of entry, a pattern of small images is

into immobile wall substitutes.4 The floor of the installation was pockmarked

stretched across a gallery wall. The strands led into clusters, forming abstract

with small puddles that reflected the sky down into some sort of underground

connections and narratives of production. Small square photographs in non-

realm. If, for Yoko Ono, the doors were seen as blockages they were also

hierarchical threads laid out diverging patterns of labour, mixing up worlds;

understood as allowing passage.5 The walls that were absent verticals in her

home and work, interior and the natural, connections were unexpected—the

installation became an enveloping, reactive drawing in Twose’s project; his wall

did not contain or control but rather tilts and inclines towards architectural potential. In the book text that accompanied his photographs and paintings of the famous rock walls of Aran, artist Sean Scully described the stone walls as drawings: ‘They are ground made vertical with drawing. Drawing that is spectacular and self-effacing. Always insisting on its subservience to function— that being to keep the raking wind out and the animals in.’6 Twose’s wall also implies programmatic possibilities; lying horizontally to receive the passage of the dead and the miniscule, it provided an embracing surface for many small incisions of occupancy. Acknowledging the constructive aspect of drawing, Scully expresses some anxiety about usefulness in relationship to a description of the walls as drawing (and art). Drawing is, in this situation, he suggests, ‘selfeffacing’, ‘subservient’. He is pointing to the utilitarian aspect of a practice that often leads elsewhere (to building, to other drawings). A self-effacing practice driven by other concerns, other conditions, revealing, perhaps, that the desire to become estranged, to relocate, is the nature of drawing. Drawing might be seen as an open and secretive practice of shape shifting, operating between all sorts of situations and states. To be selfeffacing might also signal a disappearance of the personal (which might be the best pleasure of effacement). Scully points out that the walls of Aran have collaborative, unknown makers and he concludes that the absence of knowledge of the artists is liberating rather than causing a categorical shift.

< Detail of photographic component of

Architectural drawing often attracts such remarks despite determined archival

Simon Twose’s Concrete Drawing, 2015

attempts to locate authorship from bare initials. Twose visually acknowledges the participation of others in his wall. To describe a wall as drawing is to disrupt the allegedly habitual passivity

(photo: Simon Twose) © Simon Twose

participation from maker and viewer to enact spatial separations and containments. They encourage small glimpses through

the habitually containing boundaries that beset us. Twose’s concrete wall and the Aran island wall might be seen, after Jacques Rancière, as archives of

of matter. Looking at the materiality that images possess, architectural historian

making, as collections of matter, and as mysteries. For Rancière, ‘The machine

John Macarthur proposes that, rather than being a tool of architecture, or a

of mystery is a machine for making something common, not to contrast worlds,

technique, architectural drawing can now be understood as a practice that

but to present, in the most unexpected ways a co-belonging.’8 Scully concludes

oscillates between idea and object—affecting both. Drawing carries traces

his text; ‘They are walls, or they are Art, or they are Art as wall. As we wish.

of ‘thingness’ and adhering substance in its most linear conditions. The image

The land is bounded but we are free. We look, we see, and the drawing is

has become a ‘material’ for architects.7 Architecture and drawing rely upon

everywhere and miraculous.’ 9

material foundation (inert concrete, stable footings, flat paper) but the recent flood of liquefaction and ink has allowed matter to be seen as an unpredictable bedrock condition. Drawing on a material world understood as flow or pulse, the concrete horizontal wall, and the stone walls from Aran, are proposed as momentarily still and restless, with the potential to form and reform. The drawn wall of Aran is like Twose’s wall (which he has described as a weird presence and in terms of a cloudiness) in that both depend upon

John Hedjuk quoted by Manfredo Tafuri, ‘“European Graffiti”. Five x Five = Twenty-five’ in Oppositions 5, 1976, p. 45. Available online: http://www.quondam.com/58/5800.htm

Simon Twose, ‘Architects are Actors’, Block: The Broadsheet of the Auckland Branch of the Institute of Architects, 12, 2011, p. 2.

Andrew Barrie and Simon Twose, Familial Clouds, exhibition at the Palazzo Bembo, Venice, 2012.

Yoko Ono, War Is Over! (If you want it), Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, 2013.

‘These are the doors that we opened and closed to go through life,’ Ono explained. ‘There were many

labour, a substantial expenditure of physical energy and strength, and upon

doors that blocked us. But we opened them, and we went through. This is the journey to uncurse

curiosity, driven and engaged. The walls change direction; they need bodily

yourself.’ See: http://www.lucyreesart.com/blog/2013/11/24/yoko-ono-war-is-over-if-you-want-it.

Sean Scully & Colm Tóibín, Sean Scully Walls of Aran, Thames & Hudson, New York, 2007, p. 126.

John Macarthur, ‘The Image as an Architectural Material’, Project Muse, The South Atlantic Quarterly, vol.

Jacques Rancière, The Future of the Image, translated by Gregory Elliot, Verso, London & New York,

17 Drawings / 17 Practitioners

101, no. 3, Summer 2002, Duke University Press, p. 674. 2007, p. 58. 9

Sean Scully & Colm Tóibín, p. 127.

Cornelia Parker’s Measuring Niagara with a Teaspoon, 1997

Measuring Niagara constitutes an important counterpoint to the classically idealist logic of drawing. The drawn line is often thought to be a

Eu Jin Chua

kind of ideal virtuality, a distillate of form that is itself a distillate of base matter. But Parker’s work

Cornelia Parker’s Measuring Niagara with a

presents a world in which another order reigns—a

Teaspoon consists of what used to be an ancient

materialist or anti-idealist order in which drawing

teaspoon of Georgian vintage, now melted down into

is merely the transfiguration of one kind of matter

a hundred-and-eighty-seven foot length of thin wire.

into another, rather than a tool for the realisation

A hundred and eighty seven feet is the height of the

of a latent Idea or Essence. In Parker’s world, there

Niagara Falls. It’s the literalisation of a metaphor,

is no point at which a drawing can be said to enter

the figure of speech contained in the work’s title. As

into the realm of idealist Form. What’s a drawing?

with T.S. Eliot’s Prufrock who measured out his life

Nothing but the incessant hammering and stretching

with coffee spoons, the idea of measuring out the

and spooling and unspooling of a piece of the world,

world’s largest waterfall one spoonful at a time is an

each configuration or delineation being different in

excellent metaphor for referring to an impossible,

degree but not in kind. First it’s a teaspoon, then it’s

absurd, futile, or Sisyphean task. Or a metaphor for

a piece of wire, then it’s a picture of frothing water,

incommensurability: tiny scoopfuls amortizing the

then it’s a mental image in my mind’s eye, and then

vastness of a whole life or whole waterfall. Parker’s

who knows what else. Parker is better known as

work takes the metaphor literally. The hypothetical

a sculptor, but it is instructive that ‘drawings’ too

spoon is now a real one. So too that act of measuring

inhabit her universe of material transfigurations. In

which we imagined to be impossible: this simple

this alternate reality—which might be our reality

coil of wire in a glass-fronted box really is the

too—a thing and a drawing of a thing, and perhaps

(approximate) height of the Niagara.

even thoughts and ideas, are simply different modes

It’s also a pun. Measuring Niagara is one of a

of material plasticity. The ‘haulage’ in Parker’s

group of wire works made by Parker from the 1990s

drawings is from matter to matter, ad infinitum—not

onwards that she calls ‘drawings’. ‘Drawing’ is the

from matter to Idea, or drawing to Idea.

name of the process by which a piece of metal is melted and stretched out into a wire. So we can speak of the teaspoon having been ‘drawn’, and the

Janine Randerson, Neil Haigh, Fleur Palmer, and the editors

realise that the wire also constitutes a drawing in

of this volume.

the more usual sense of the word. It resembles a cartoon sketch of the froth at the base of a waterfall,

This is an extract from a longer essay that can be read in its entirety at http://bbk.academia.edu/eujinchua. Thanks to

resultant wire as a ‘drawing’. Seen in this light, we

Cornelia Parker, Measuring Niagara with a Teaspoon, 1997,

or perhaps a whirlpool. The Niagara isn’t just

Georgian silver spoon drawn to the height of Niagara Falls,

measured by the wire; it’s also depicted by it. The

610 x 610mm, courtesy the artist and Frith Street Gallery,

point is that the work conflates the two meanings

London.

of drawing. If this is a drawing, it is one of particular interest because it’s also a drawing (a stretchedout piece of metal). And vice versa. Drawing is the conversion of things into lines—a definition which can be interpreted representationally or materially. Measuring Niagara fuses these two registers. I have chosen to write here about Parker’s work because of this conflation. If its pun can be said to constitute a proposition about the nature of drawing, the proposition might be this: that drawing = linearity = representation = materiality. 54

Drawing the Irrational Section Cut:

cut, and it’s not necessary to cut deep to discover

Moral Institute of Higher Fiction

unease and sad passions at work in the city. The section that the MIHF cuts is a literal re-linkage

Hélène Frichot

of disparate events, of distinct durations, made sufficiently concrete through drawn means, so that

An irrational section cut is composed of diverse

elements are linked together in an arrangement

visual forms and scales that disrupt the normative

across time. Architectural drawing conventions are

linkages between spaces and things, creating

maintained, and yet the drawn elements remain

interstitial zones that demand of us a critical and

disjunctive, even while holding a multifaceted world

creative re-interrogation of our local environment-

together across the same scene. Something is

worlds. The irrational section cut secures its

produced between two elements which belongs to

autonomy from the concrete imperative of building,

neither, something novel, something unexpected,

because it has another kind of story to tell about

which is to say, some new way of seeing and

architecture. It offers another way out for an ethico-

subsequently engaging in an environment-world.

aesthetic expression of the architectural imagination. Such a section cut never proposes to offer the whole story, for the ‘whole’ is an impossible ideal or fantasy. Instead it is a curated selection, a slice of life disjunctively superimposed, offering glimpses, close up, and far away, of a particular problematic field of immanence: simply, what is directly confronting us, here and now. A mode of resistance to that which over-determines our existential territories is opened up if the cut is made just right. Insofar as the irrational section cut ‘exists’, it exists in the reconfigured mind that brings it to life, and the work on the mind that the cut entails also lays out certain ethical demands. When it works it is a productive, non-representational thinking-tool through which the ‘not yet’ of an image, of a people, of a space, may well come forth, even suggesting liberatory lines of flight or escape, especially for minoritarian actors. But how is the irrational section cut at work in the Moral Institute of Higher Fiction (MIHF)? A suspicion might be aroused that the Institute is merely an example of ‘paper architecture’. Its precursors, furthermore, are perhaps too evident. And yet its director, Olga Tengvall, who is more than willing to collapse temporal registers, opens up a stage for encounters between historical and contemporary aesthetic characters. She is concerned with how the MIHF maintains sufficient structural support for a suspension of disbelief. The current ‘commissions’ for the Institute include, urban fear, xenophobia and violence, concerns that would not usually be associated with such a polite and constrained northern city as Stockholm. Nevertheless, the wound would appear to await the 56

Olga Tengvall, Moral Institute of Higher Fiction, 2014, architectural section © Olga Tengvall

Déjà vu: Restaging Resnais’s Last Year at Marienbad

Déjà vu combines model making with projection mapping as drawing tools to perform and display an analysis of Resnais’s Last Year at Marienbad.

Penelope Haralambidou

Therefore, I use design and drawing as an analytical rather than propositional language. The work

Déjà vu: Restaging Resnais’s Last Year at Marienbad,

reflects on the communicative possibilities of

2009, is a drawing/model/film that performs an

architectural representation and uses it to suggest

analysis of Alain Resnais’s enigmatic film Last Year

a new form of film theory. This restaging of the

at Marienbad (1961). Last Year at Marienbad was

film uncovers the architectural significance of the

based on Alain Robbe-Grillet’s screenplay and takes

themes that Resnais’s film explores and exposes

place in a labyrinthine Baroque hotel, where X, the

the architectural structure of the screenplay by

male protagonist, meets A, the female protagonist,

becoming a topographical rather than chronological

and confronts her with descriptions of their romantic

incarnation of the plot. Finally, Déjà vu is a drawing

involvement a year previously, of which she has no

of a film, using light on paper, where the play of

recollection. A riddle of seduction, the narrative of

black and white seeps through and stains the paper

the film flips between present and past, memory and

screens like ephemeral ink.

imagination, and has been described as a love story, abstract thriller or philosophical puzzle. Although it received mixed reviews, the film was winner of the Golden Lion award at the 1961 Venice Film Festival. My work, Déjà vu consists of an abstract paper model of the Baroque hotel, and a digital reworking of selected scenes specifically designed to be projected on the model, thus ‘redrawing’ the film in light. The three-dimensional arrangement of the hotel ‘rooms’, made from cut and folded paper, breaks the flatness of the single screen and the linear delivery of the plot. The crisp simplicity of the substrate—folded sheets of paper and white painted blocks of wood—reflects the elliptical modernist storyline of Alain Robbe-Grillet’s screenplay in contrast to the ornate Baroque setting. Placed on a table, the model, dressed with the luminous imagery of the film, allows the viewer to circulate around and behind it and to occupy this expansion of the picture plane at an intimate level. Déjà vu investigates the film’s spatial arrangement; how the plot links architecture to memory, imagination and desire; the significance of the juxtaposition of the lavish location to the minimalist narrative; and the portrayal of the labyrinthine hotel as one of the protagonists. Resnais’s film is notoriously enigmatic, addressing the audience as a riddle. Drawn by the unresolved riddle of the film’s mise en scène, my redrawing/restaging aims to unravel the visual organisation of clues and proposes an allegorical architecture: a paper ‘model’ displaying scenes within metaphorical ‘rooms’ of the Baroque hotel. 58

Penelope Haralambidou, Déjà vu: Restaging Resnais’s Last Year at Marienbad, 2009, paper, digital print, projected light © Penelope Haralambidou

The Waiting Drawing 1

aural desert where light enters unobserved passing over unburdened chairs. The room can longer be

Susan Hedges

read as part of a larger whole; time has slowed where passing circumstance sees other parts of

Time slows as one enters the waiting room, a

the building move in other directions. The waiting

transitory space in a transitory building. The hour

room has an unwitnessed existence: walls, ceilings,

does not pass, the line does not shift; time is

doors and windows are cupped around a space and

withstood, it slows and thickens. This is a transitional

have held it for a while; something else occupies

point before entering or moving, in which no actual

this mysterious emptiness and fills it with different

movements of the journey occur but time is implied.

sounds that time makes in passing. To see this

A place where our attention is directed towards

drawing thus is not an attempt to restage history as

the fact that the passage of time has slowed down,

it was, but rather to explore historical knowledge as

until later it seems as if no time has passed at all.2

an ongoing reconstruction in the present, located

Opportunities to construct narratives out of static

somewhere between fact and fiction. The remnant

scenes through repetitive waiting and minimal signs

waiting room, as a point of mobility and temporary

of activity, the checking of a clock, or lipstick, an

arrest, is caught in time where many voices have just

exchange of glances sees the room as a threshold

left the building.

between stasis and movement. The waiting drawing offers a sense of marking time, an instant of concentrated activity, a seized,

Drawing’ in The Interior Architecture Theory Reader, edited

the waiting drawing may reside in the still: the longdrawn-out process of thinking, making, breaking and remaking. Here, time figures as both contemplative

by Gregory Marinic, Routledge, London, due 2016. 2

p. 108 3

new ground each moment of doing contributes to

Angela Eames, ‘Embedded Drawing’ in Writing on Drawing: Essays on Drawing Practice and Research, edited by Steve

A reflection of the drawing process itself but also an overriding awareness that in order to break

Mieke Bal, Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative, University of Toronto Press, Toronto, 2009,

and instantaneous. The specific is approached with a fastidious attention to the unseen or invisible.

This text is part of a larger work to be published as ‘The Waiting Room: Transitional Space and Transitional

drawn moment in an attempt to grasp time. Equally,

Garner, Intellect, Bristol & Chicago, 2008, p. 136 4

‘Railway Decoration’, New Zealand Herald, Volume LXVII, Issue 20698, 18 October 1930, p. 13. Papers Past,

another sense of the ‘whole’. For the drawer these

National Library of New Zealand Te Puna Mātauranga o

moments of drawing, looking, thinking and reflecting

Aotearoa, available online at http://paperspast.natlib.govt.

are critical within the process of making a piece of

nz/cgibin/paperspast?a=d&cl=search&d=NZH19301018

work. But they also provide a time for thought when

.2.129&srpos=1&e=18-10-1930-18-10-1930--10-NZH-1----

the drawing is complete.3

2railway+decoration-- (accessed 28.12.14).

‘Sheet No. 24 Details of Ladies Waiting Room’ of the Auckland Railway Station, allows at one and the same time, consideration, complexity,

Gummer and Ford, Architects and Structural Engineers, Sheet No. 24: Details of Ladies Waiting Room, August 1927, Scale ¾”, ¼” and Full-Size, Auckland Railway Station, ink

incompleteness and a promise of structured waiting.

on linen with annotations, 1010 x 640mm. Image courtesy

A complex set of plans, sections, elevations and

of Ministry of Architecture + Interiors Ltd.

details shifting in scale, ¾”, ¼” and full size, pepper the sheet. Ornate, partially-drawn details show wooden panels and fluting, plastered false ceilings, pierced carvings, bronzed radiator grills, bevelled mirrors, a marble mantelpiece, a place for a clock and openings to the concourse, for women who wait.4 For part of its history the room held people, furniture and luggage. The empty room in a deserted building, offers a drought of sound, an 60

Stone as Drawing: Drawing Stone

right, petrified evidence of the hidden laws coursing through the whole of nature, in which we share. In

Ross Jenner

China, this is the ‘breath’ (qi) at the origin of things, perpetually circulating and engendering everything.

The granite fragment drawn here, was discovered

Rocks are specific instances, being kernels of energy.

on the shores of the harbour of Helsinki in 1978.

In the West, Goethe, in his beautiful essay ‘On

Despite looking nothing much at first, each of its

Granite’, explored Werden (becoming), an ever-

faces very gradually revealed complete worlds in

present potential in all nature to form itself according

drawings. This one would fit within the tradition

to basic laws. Granite is solidified becoming.

of Chinese scholars’ stones—pebbles or rocks that

The task of drawing something which is all

open up wonders only under contemplation, their

matter, and only matter, is to release becoming

cold, dumb, lapidary, inscrutable character, quite

from solidification, revealing the energy within

devoid of all affect, a necessary precondition to the

the kernel. Resulting from turbulence and tectonic

inaugurating act of opening which is drawing.

ordeal, the stone immediately appears as a chiasmus

The meaning of stones is in the stones

in three dimensions and ouroborus. In this drawing

themselves. In the twelfth century the Taoist

(drawn without outlines), a tissue composed of

eccentric, Mi Fu, painter, poet, calligrapher and

intertwinings, an intreccio, becomes evident in

governor, found ecstasy in stones and caves; in the

detail, (suggesting the minute intricacy of a Scarlatti

twentieth, Roger Caillois, surrealist, literary critic

sonata, dry but passionate) or the restless intrigue

and sociologist, shifted magical thinking in Pierres

of a page of the Book of Kells (the Chi Rho motif,

(Stones, 1966) from the inward turn of the uncanny

for example). The main figuration, however, is of

to probe a world out there—beyond subjective

gaseous expansion, haze, foam and swirls where

selfhood, existing in the phenomenally marvellous.

mineral bursts into flame, seethes and loses surface.

Stones have appeared pregnant with meaning over

To capture such an explosion requires patience,

the centuries and they remain inexhaustible books,

to get as close as possible with a fallible and

written in hieroglyphs.

inaccurate hand, to put marks on paper, to draw a

Because the mind resists meaninglessness, it

Jackson Pollock while looking so hard at the thing

is precisely in the amorphous and inchoate that the

that all knowledge of what is offered to visibility

most enticing icasms arise. Leonardo found fertile

is lost. Pulsating and vertiginous shifts then occur

sources staring at stains on walls and, according to

between still life, landscape and a collision of

Alexander Cozens, ‘the odd appearance of some

nebulae in space.

streaked stones’, finding there landscapes, battles, clouds, uncommon attitudes, humorous faces, draperies, etc. The Rorschach test (the way the world characteristically appears) amply attests to the mind’s sense making, but such an attunement to formlessness requires abandonment of self so that consciousness identifies with the external world. Stones thus attract a particular imagination where things are revealed rather than invented, and where they tend to appear within a network of natural correspondences, as correlations between microcosm and macrocosm. Stones are depictions-embodiments, both recordings and revelations of cosmic time, being castings of an irreversible instant of the fabric of the universe. They are drawings. The traces left in them are not only effigies but things in their own 62

Ross Jenner, Stone Drawing, pencil on cartridge paper, 560 x 420mm © Ross Jenner

Moving within Movement

the studio. I am constantly building up to the line: a line in waiting. In order to outlast the impulse

Jondi Keane

to conform, drawing evades, elides, eclipses and embraces ellipsis to prompt moving to move … in

Not building is not so easy. For the most part, no

a non-linear fashion … from attention to perception,

matter what or how immaterial one thinks they are,

selection, decision and judgment. Drawing is

things build upon each other. Between the letter and

building reconfiguration.

the line, drawing moves within and across modes of sensing and scales of action. Drawing-out and drawing-in retains the felt connections and material

pp. 48–51.

It is no longer possible to take a line for a walk. Lines flutter, time travels, phases shift and give way to all manner of tendencies. This is what we look for in a line. In turn, lines select in us a tentative constructing towards a holding in place.1 Lines move us. Drawing primes perception and action so that nextness ensues. More than not just building or not building, drawing is one mode of the realisation of living. Drawing holds back when it rehearses a line, putting a line under t h i n g s or striking-through everything as it goes. The virulent becoming of drawing can easily be rendered benign. For a drawing to resist this foreclosing it must barely find itself recognisable: active pro-finding rather than the already pro-found. This requires drawing to be a tangle of practices, including drawing as the building that buildings are not, not yet. Enacting what one is drawing consists in moving within movements. If the body is already in action even before the decision to act has been made, then drawing can move within and against its own automatic processes. Drawing can become the practice of moving within what are called ‘readiness potentials’ (all the actions my body is readying to do before I know it). For example, driving while daydreaming requires precise coordination of cognitive processes that enable me to look at someone in the daydream and not drive off the road. The cognitive skills needed to inhabit two spaces can be developed and honed. Because drawing involves moving between modalities of thought, perception and action, it is an opportunity to hone coordination and push through unconscious intentions into actions without templates or readiness profiles. If I am already reaching for a cup before I reach, then perhaps I am already drawing the line before I draw, before I wake, have breakfast and walk to 64

Shusaka Arakawa and Madeline Gins, Architectural Body, University of Alabama Press, Tuscaloosa, 2002,

qualities of the domains through which its lines pass.

Jondi Keane, Timbre, pen and brush, ink on notebook paper and found document, 300 x 210mm © Jondi Keane

‘A Letter to the Builder’

drawing ‘a letter to the builder’ in order to emphasise drawing as an instruction in how to make something.

Christopher Kelly Drawing for me, a practising architect, whether by hand or digitally, is a means to an end. The end is usually a building. Drawing is not building. Drawing is an immediate and direct way of exploring a design that then becomes a means of realising the design. Drawing is a verb. Drawing actively draws out solutions: a rough sketch separates elements with colours, through marks on opaque or translucent paper, overlaid in a disciplinary way, that explore the beauty of dimensional integration at the same time as testing thinking; does this idea actually work? Spatial thinking is carried by the discipline of scale, say 1:20 for instance, where the outline of a human figure ensures anthropomorphic relativity. Drawing at a larger scale, at 1:5, expresses the idea of the building through the hierarchy of elements, such as at a corner detail where flashings come together to keep the water out. In this, drawing is a test of thinking—a test of a solution. Often the problems with a solution are not apparent until it is drawn. The role of the drawing, then, is to discover, by testing a variety of options to find the best fit. If the best fit doesn’t work then the thinking is discarded, along with the scrunched-up paper, and the process begins again. The drawing also communicates. It shows a specialist an intent that can then be drawn over or adapted to incorporate their thinking and solutions. For instance, in the illustrated drawing, a digitally drawn detail is sketched over and the construction roughed out by the architect. The intent is to resolve how steel brackets and ply timber lintels come together to span between columns, so a structural engineer can refine the support structure and determine the assembly’s fabrication. The drawing can also be used by the service engineer to check heat loss and the position of the lights. All three lines of thinking are individually resolved, documented and integrated in the final drawing. So drawing’s role is to integrate disparate physical elements that words, by themselves, cannot succinctly convey; a picture is worth a thousand words. Louis Kahn called such constructional 66

Christopher Kelly, working drawings for Ahuriri Valley Lodge, digital prints, pen, pencil © Architecture Workshop

Len Lye’s Animations

In the 1920s Lye declared himself done with representational art, what he called ‘white-man’ art.

Kate Linzey

And from that time Lye’s films, paintings and batiks (possibly even his writing), rejected conventional

For me, drawing is a minor form. It is not a building,

perspectival depth. In 1958, with Free Radicals

as much as it is not a painting or a sculpture. Its

however, depth appears. In the opening scenes,

work is to present the possibility of building,

jagged horizon lines shift like a landscape seen

of painting and of sculpture. This is drawing’s

from a speeding car. These are followed by floating

strength, its flexibility, its ability to slip into and out

lines that rotate in space, growing and shrinking

of places where more complete forms of media

like half-seen dancers moving across the floor. In

would become ensnared. We see this quality in the

the subsequent Particles in Space, swarms of white

drawn animations of Francis Alÿs and the prosthetic

specks coalesce and disperse in an empty expanse.

performances of Rebecca Horn. It might be that

I argue that these animations, as drawings, reveal

drawing builds, paints and sculpts, in the same

a lack, a spacing, which allowed the sculptures to

way that it records acts of seeing and processes

flourish.

of analysis, because it is not these things. Drawing

Much later, from 1967 onward, Lye explored the

might be the ‘/’ in the ‘Is/Not’, the hinge across

possibility of an architectural form, the ‘Temple of

which the difference between being and not being

Lightning’, to hold his sculpture. However, he mused,

is activated, producing a lack, from which things

the image of this architecture eluded him. Only the

(art and architecture) can emerge. It does not define

exterior, a cloud form raised on a pedestal over a

what ‘is’ over what ‘is not’ but questions the status

lake, was clear. And this he drew several times. He

of presentness, and completeness. There may be

compared architecture to a sculptural plinth, and

other ways to describe this idea of drawing, such as

lamented that he had never been good at designing

metaphor or mimesis, but these terms are too grand,

these either. But he never, to my knowledge,

invoking ideas beyond the corporeal, functional

attempted to draw an animated film of this Temple,

limits of drawing.

and perhaps, in this, his sense of space, and the

In Len Lye’s oeuvre the scratch animations,

possibility of architecture, evaded him.

Free Radicals, 1958, revised 1979, Particles in Space, 1980 and Tal Farlow, 1980, I suggest, do the work of drawing. I can say this simplistically and point

to their drawn graphic qualities. However, I also

Bouhours, Centre Pompidou, Paris, 2000, pp. 212–213;

refer to their status alongside Lye’s tangible motion

Cinéma, Quinze Vingt & Un; and Evan Webb, ‘Planting

sculptures: there is a lack in the former, compared

at Night’ in Len Lye, edited by Tyler Cann and Wystan

to completeness in the latter. As has been suggested by several people, there are apparent similarities

Curnow, ACMI, Melbourne, 2009, pp. 93–105. 2

described by after-images. But in this, the sculptures

scratched lines that echo the flashes of animated

produce, rather than are, drawings.

steel. Lye also gave Free Radicals a soundtrack using 1

These animations were begun about the same time as Lye’s experiments with motion sculpture. He continued to work and revise the films through the 1960s, and the final edits of Particles in Space and Tal Farlow were not completed until the very end of Lye’s life. Did it really concern Lye that they weren’t finished? Might the act of making them actually have been their value?

It may also be possible to describe the motion sculptures as producing drawings: the ephemeral virtual volumes

between these works; the patterns of flashing,

recordings from his sculptures.2

For example see essays by Yann Beauvais, ‘Free Radicals’ in Len Lye, edited by Roger Horrocks and Jean-Michel

Len Lye, Untitled Notebook, 1969, Len Lye Archive, courtesy of Len Lye Foundation at Govett-Brewster Art Gallery/ Len Lye Centre, New Plymouth.

Downtown Athletic Building

data shapes the physical world. In its fascination with big data, S, M, L, XL rehearsed the conceit

Joanna Merwood-Salisbury

of parametricism. Without obeying the rules of traditional architectural analysis or expression,

No matter the author, an architectural drawing is

the parametrically derived building is presented

the graphic statement of an idea, an idea about the

as the unique, sculptural expression of the world

arrangement of the social world. For example, it is

sui generis. This is our current point of view. But

possible to construct an entire theory of urbanism

despite our obsession with form making through

using the section of a single building, as Rem

computation, it is worth noting that the origins of

Koolhaas did with this drawing of the Downtown

BIGNESS lie in a totally conventional drawing, albeit

Athletic Club (1931). Employing the rhetorical device

one interpreted idiosyncratically. As the section of

of the classical memory palace, he described a

the Downtown Athletic Building reminds us, the

complex journey through the section of this New

true power of drawing lies not in illustration but in

York City building, using the disjunctions and

abstraction. Infinitely flexible, the plan, the section,

unexpected adjacencies he found within it to tell

and the elevation are more than instrumental.

a story about a new kind of urban condition. He

Employed creatively they are graphic statements of

called this condition, one without hierarchy or order,

ideas, fragile artefacts that affirm architecture as

‘Manhattanism’.

both a material product and as a way of thinking.

A decade later, Manhattanism spawned a new urban theory and a seismic shift in thinking about the relationship between building and drawing. If asked to identify the moment when our current view of architectural drawing became crystallized, one might point to the publication of S, M, L, XL twenty years ago, in 1995. With its alluring silver cover and serious yellow and black lettering, this monumental book posited nothing less than the end of architectural drawing, or at least, the end of architectural drawing as we knew it. As with all good manifestoes, the premise was simple, highly debatable, and brilliant: the scale of the city has become too large for architects to comprehend or to control. On the brink of the twenty-first century, the era of modern urbanity, of Manhattanism, has been eclipsed by a new era, an era of BIGNESS. BIGNESS was the label Koolhaas applied to the placeless landscapes of postindustrial production and consumption proliferating on the edges of urban culture, landscapes he deemed unnameable using conventional language and unmanageable using the available tools of representation. It was essential to his argument that BIGNESS could not be drawn. In order to make sense of it, an entirely new kind of graphic was called for. The numerous successors to S, M, L, XL are packed with pie charts and bar graphs, diagrams and photo essays, alternative systems of representation employed to make sense of the ways in which big 70

Section of the Downtown Athletic Club reproduced in Rem Koolhaas, Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan, The Monacelli Press, New York, 1978/1994, p.154 © The Monacelli Press, New York.

1:1 Instructions for Carbon Filament Winding on Bamboo Formwork Jules Moloney Drawing by scripting continues the trajectory of

fn ConnectTheDots =

the iterative hand sketch—the mark / reflect /

-- Loop through the frames.

re-mark cycle—so often referred to as the site of

-- Get the number of joints

architectural creativity. Rather than manipulate

-- Loop through the joints and animate the filament.

graphite or ink, the architectural hacker-scripter experiments with lines of instructions that generate

-- Create array of joint indexes for current frame

sketch geometry, visualised on screen. Unlike

-- Get the total number of joints

those trained in software engineering there is no

-- Create array of positions for each joint

prefigured specification. Rather a beginning script fragment (often re-purposed from a previous

fn GetIdBirthLife = [This is where the magic

project) is repeated with alternate variables and

happens (based on script by John Rand et al, 2014)] (bornTime = #() for t in animationRange.start

extended through reflective, iterative edits. There are constraints, of course, linked to technical skill

to animationRange.end do ((num = source.numParticles()for p in 1 to

and the drawing software, but these are analogous to the drawing ability and media constraints of

num do (pb_sub.value = p*100.0/num if source.getParticleAge p < 1 thenpID =

hand sketching. In this regard, the drawings of the architect are usually intentional rather than

source.getParticleID p life = f_end – t a = [pID, t, life]

definitive, aligned with the Latin for design: disegno, which captures the act of drawing and the drawing

appendifUnique bornTime a)) else for p in 0 to num-1 do(pb_main.value =

out of an idea. With similar intent, the sketch-script operates to reveal potential and evoke architectural

p*100.0/num if (source.TP_MasterSystemInterface.Age

form. With this sketch I am exploring the potential of a material—carbon fibre filament—and the

p) < (1 as time) then (life = f_end – t)(a = [p, t, life]))) fn FilamentGrow =

formal quality of the manufacturing technique

for i = 1 to n do(“loop i %\n” i pb_sub.value =

of filament winding, conceived at the scale of architectural structure.

(i*100.0/n) * pVal local n2 = startNum + (n * 3) for j = ( (((i * 2) - 1) + i) + startNum ) to n2 by 3 do (animate on(if i == 1 do(if spn_start.value > 0 then at time (spn_start.value) obj[#Object__ Editable_Spline][#Master][j].value = knotPosArr[i] else at time (bornTime[o].y) obj[#Object__ Editable_Spline][#Master][j].value = knotPosArr[i]) at time (((((startFrame - 1) + i)*increments)+(bornTime[o].y+increments))) obj[#Object__Editable_Spline][#Master][j].value = knotPosArr[i] )) startNum += n * 3))

Jules Moloney, Digital drawing for Carbon Filament Winding on Bamboo Formwork © Jules Moloney

Drawing an Ideogram

mastery were first drawn in a conversation with Marcelo Stamm, on a train from Brussels to Ghent.

Leon van Schaik

They describe how we all establish our mastery, from the ground up over time: discovering, integrating

While I greatly admire and even collect drawings

applying and ultimately disseminating a body of

that create states of affairs, through the acts of

knowledge.

their making (like Fiona Abicare’s use of archery

Once we are proficient we are capable of being

to produce Neither/Nor/Nor, 2013 or Julie Irving’s

professionals; that is, people who take care of and

1997 inscription, made with pencil point piercing

apply a body of knowledge in the interest of their

and creasing), the drawings that I do are always to

communities. And as professionals the specific

capture or pin down ideas. These are thus ideograms

knowledge of an arena reaches a horizon of mastery

symbolising situations, not diagrams representing

at which it communicates equally and usefully with

relations between discrete parts of a system.

the knowledge produced in other arenas.

I began producing these ideograms in 1964,

The ideogram thus describes a wide field of

making analytical drawings under the tutelage of

knowing and transcends the spurious duality of

British artist Richard Hamilton, and they matured

the silo and the matrix, two organisational forms

into ideograms in 1969 when Peter Cook of

between which institutions ricochet helplessly.

Archigram was my design thesis supervisor. Here I describe one developed in the first quarter

To pack all of this into the one ideogram, inventions and then conventions from earlier

of 2015. My Dean, Richard Blythe asked his executive

ideograms are marshalled together. Touching at the

team to make drawings of their roles and set me to

horizons refers to Gadamer’s assertion that we are

observing them as they drew hoping that I could

responsible for making contact with all knowledge

produce an ideogram that captured their intent.

as horizons of mastery emerge alongside our own.1

The first idea spatialises the school as an arena focussed on the activity of students. The arena edge is defined by four vertical totem poles topped

vol. 22: no. 6, 16 March 2000, pp. 23–25.

symbolising the two thousand years of scholarship in architecture and allied disciplines that underpin western architecture. The profiles could have been caricatures of specific people—the first such I drew (1977) had nose silhouettes that could be identified with particular people. Here they are generic, because these leadership roles are a constant through time. From the eye of each profile an arc distends backwards, symbolising the incumbents’ on-going process of establishing platforms of mental space from which they launch their own scholarship. Circling around the arena are six profiles, each of which takes responsibility for one of the literacies that all must master (pedagogy, research, international relations, university leadership, planning and technical support). From the eyes of these, two arcs of mental space development extend. The arena has something of the quality of an upward-rising funnel of growing mastery that, at its apex, reaches out and touches the horizons of other arenas of mastery in other fields. These funnels of 74

Richard Rorty, ‘Being that can be understood is language: Richard Rorty on H. G. Gadamer’, London Review of Books,

with face profiles. These poles have broken bases,

Cut and Colour: Establishing Orographic

creating a sense of fraying and a fluidity that evokes

Drawing Procedures

the qualities of the orographic map as described by Cache. As with the city it tangentially acknowledges,

Katrina Simon

this new image is also linked to the processes of its formation, to the processes that bring it into

Maps are powerful expressions of the

visibility through the repeated laying down of inked

transformations, ambitions and idiosyncrasies of

stencil filaments. Due to the solubility of the ink,

cities, with an ambiguous and sometimes reciprocal

the process is as much subtractive as additive. The

relationship between city and map.1 I developed

resulting image evokes a sense of gradual advance

a fascination with a particular map drawing of a

and retreat, analogous to processes of erasure

distinctive city: the orographic map of the city of

and superimposition already embedded in the

Lausanne in Bernard Cache’s book Earth Moves: The

emergence and transformations of the city.

Furnishing of Territories.2 The drawing seems at once familiar and enigmatic—scale, height and depth are left ambiguous, and the usual traces of urban form

are conspicuously absent.

J. Abrams and P. Hall, University of Minnesota Design

Cache is drawn to Lausanne because it is a city ‘rich in geography’,3 and is drawn to the orographic

Institute, Minneapolis, 2007, p. 148. 2

than a fixed template. This also relates to the actual formation of the terrain, which in this case was

Massachucetts, 1995, p. 19. 3 4

Cartographic Reason, Mapping and the Geo-coded World, Routledge, London, 2004, pp. 149, 194.

geographies enfolded the territory into furniture— 5

The extended drawing sequence, of which this

new speculative urban forms.4 This particular sequence of research-through-making generated over a hundred images, through dust-stencilling, ink-washing, photocopying, decalcomanie and cutting.5 This image is made through the repeated printing and washing of a hand cut draughting film stencil, cut over Cache’s orographic drawing. The stencil does not create a clean outline of the cut form but instead, through the superimposition and displacement of pigment, participates in a process of masking and of layering. The process of cutting the original line drawing into a stencil has released its flattened, undulating geometries into the third dimension, and the repeated overlay of their imprint starts to build the image into being. It creates an image that is more like a dissection than a map of a surface, revealing areas of density and vulnerability in the territory, 76

Katrina Simon, Image, Territory, Picture, Map: The Slipperiness of Landscape Inscriptions. Unpublished PhD Thesis, University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia, 2012.

image is an early element, explored ways in which of maps and of cities could be activated to provoke

John Pickles highlights the ‘contradictory moments’ within opportunities. See John Pickles, A History of Spaces:

during the Ice Age. Cache’s engagement with wider

some of the inherently ambiguous characteristics

Cache, ibid, p. 6. current cartographic practices that present transformative

part of the period of glacial advance and retreat

merging the scales of the territory and the body.

Bernard Cache, Earth Moves: The Furnishing of Territories, translated by Anne Boyman, MIT Press, Cambridge

image because it reveals the terrain as a field of possibility for the establishment of a city, rather

Denis Cosgrove, ‘Carto-city’ in Elsewhere: Mapping. New Cartographies, Networks and Territories, edited by

A Maelstrom Practice

The studio participants were required to negotiate the collage detritus like archaeologists and to

Michael Spooner

manifest what was in front of them in a meticulous way. This differs from the draftsperson in that an

Jan See Oi’s Archaeological Drawing, 2015, is the

archaeologist ennobles a type of fiction that opens

result of the translation and transformation of a

the apprehension of the wall-collage to something

rectangular wall-scaled collage that was assembled

other than filiety. The drawing pursues the figurative

from copies of selected art-historical images

elements envisaged by the original copied images

produced by participants of an architectural design

but throws everything into a maelstrom, resulting

studio at RMIT University, Melbourne.1

in stretches, smears and slurs. This anamorphic

The images copied included etchings of the

gesture is reflexive in part because the capacity of

twisted figures of Icarus, Tantalus, Phaeton and Ixion

the cylindrically projected collage to negotiate a

from the series ‘The Four Disgraces’ by Hendrick

circumstantial spatial history is wedded to the event

Goltzius (1588), and a selection of Japanese

of translation and the transformative conditions

woodblock prints from the nineteenth century.

of performance that made the collage possible in

In addition to the drawings were a handful of 1:1

the first place. The circle does not comprehend

scale watercolour-paper models of ‘Iced VoVo’, a

the extent of the drawing but rather identifies an

celebrated but sentimental Australian biscuit. It is

invisible rift where an unknown drawing turns just

not entirely necessary to understand the selection of

beyond the horizon of the collage.

these artefacts over any others, though the etchings

The negotiation of the vertical to the horizontal

by Goltzius exhibit an extraordinary dynamism and

and the implication of a spatiality that is responsive

the woodblocks exhibit a contraction of depth that

to the proximity of the performative realisation of the

belies the lengthy process that delivers them. The

wall-collage, and the consideration of the panneau,

biscuit models are objects of frivolity intended to

was intended to deliver a spatial lucidity that could

celebrate an everyday grotesque.

not be maintained in any other way; a serendipitous

The drawing describes the artefacts of the

morass of the seemingly autopoietic process of

collage contracted and held in suspension, but it is

the collage and the unambiguous instruction to

evidently more than a cock-eyed representation of

complete a drawing.

the detritus disinterred from the rectangular wall and positioned in a circle. There is a subtle shift in the composition of the fragments intended to emulate a

panneau, a form of 360° panoramic view projected

Unreal Studio, for the Bachelor of Architectural Design

spherically in the form of a circle. The panneau is not

at RMIT University, Melbourne.

a cartographic technique as such, but an impression of the world that describes an expanded horizon beneath and out from the viewer. It collects—like a coiled periplus (an early navigating device that was composed of descriptions and observations of the features of the coast from the point of view of a ship in the offing)—the experience of the drawer as they stand at the centre of the wall-collage. Thus the drawing was imagined as a type of spatial subterfuge that results in an animated augury or the microscopic detritus of some polluted sample floating in loose formation. There is no intention to transcend what was visible in the wall-collage, or to construct a dialogue with the artifice of the drawing act. 78

The drawing was produced under the supervision of this author, for the NoHomo! Architecture in the Real of the

Demolition: The Afterdrawing of Architecture

more than destructive attacks, planned demolition is a project whose logistics and layout are orchestrated

Teresa Stoppani

as much as the project of building. Implosion applies explosive force to release the energy that is

When does a building become a building? And

embedded in the building; it releases matter from

when does a building cease to be a building? Is the

the form imposed on it by design (through drawing

drawing of its ruin an architectural drawing—that

and its translation). It controls the sequence of the

is, can an architectural drawing release rather than

process, but not the details of its formal outcome.

determine form?

It re-releases the potentiality of drawing.

In ‘Translations from Drawing to Building’ (1986),1

Heide Fasnacht has explored through drawing

his seminal investigation of the possibilities and

the planning and execution of implosions of buildings

limitations of the architectural drawing in relation to

(Three Buildings, 2000–2001, Demo, 2000–2001).3

the building of architecture, Robin Evans observes

More recently, New Frontier, 2015, has focused on the

that the building ‘is brought into existence through

debris of demolition, showing that while the drawing

drawing. The subject-matter (the building or space)

continues to represent forms, it does not define

will exist after the drawing, not before it.’ 1 Evans

forms, but releases the possibility of forming the

calls this ‘the principle of reversed directionality

building, again or anew.4 Another form of translation

in drawing’: the architectural drawing prefigures

from drawing to building is invited here. Evans had

something that is yet to be, it carries a potentiality

observed that drawing is done ‘prior to construction;

that the representational drawing does not have.2

it is not so much produced by reflection on the reality

The architectural drawing is by definition incomplete,

outside the drawing, as productive of a reality that will

not only because it is instrumental to the making of

end up outside the drawing.’5 The afterdrawing, the

something other than itself, but because in order to

drawing of the demolition’s rubble that still bears the

produce that other a translation (from drawing to

identity of the building, and with it the history of its

building) must be performed. The translation that

many incarnations, marks the restarting of the project

takes drawing beyond drawing is made possible

(indeed its continuation). The drawing becomes

by a complex knowledge that performs a cultural

translative again, placing again the making, the

and contextual operation besides the technology of

knowledge and the thinking of architecture precisely

building, acting deep into the layered significations

in the moment of discontinuity between drawing and

that invest the built environment.

building. The afterdrawing is architectural because it

When then does the building cease to be a

makes space.

building? What is the role of drawing in relation to building when the building is no more? Is the architectural drawing still architectural when its

Robin Evans, ‘Translations from Drawing to Building’ (1986), in Translations from Drawing to Building and Other Essays,

‘reversed directionality’ is reversed once again?

Architectural Association, London, 1997, pp. 153–194.

The twice-reversed directionality, which passes back

through the drawing again, produces a different

ibid, p. 165. Heide Fasnacht interview, Artnet News, 11th August

potentiality, in fact opening it further, as it renders

2015, available online at https://news.artnet.com/

explicit the relation of architecture with time. The

people/interview-with-heide-fasnacht-323167 (accessed

afterdrawing of architecture is more powerful (it has more generative potentiality) because it is

14.08.2015). 4

not the rendering of a closed project fixed in the moment that informs its translation (to building),

Teresa Stoppani, ‘The Fasnacht Fold’, lo Squaderno, 37, September 2015, available online: <http://www.losquaderno.professionaldreamers.net>

Evans, op. cit., p. 165.

Heide Fasnacht, New Frontier, 2015, coloured pencil on

but it includes also the undoing of the project. The planned demolition of the building by implosion can be considered a powerful architectural statement that carries building (but not its project) literally to the end. More than weathering and slow ruination, 80

paper, 1016 x 1524mm, Courtesy of the artist and Kent Fine Art, New York.

Drawing Is/Not Building: Question Mark

This drawing is an active quest for structural innovation. Brick walls, steel columns and I-beams

Jo Van Den Berghe

form a rigid frame composed of tripods, based on the assumption that tripods are stable and

As rational metaphysics teaches that man

resistant to squalls of lateral loads, if the brick walls,

becomes all things by understanding them,

columns and the steel I-beams retain their shape

imaginative metaphysics shows that man

as a coherent system. This assumption is tested

becomes all things by not understanding them

by investigating the connections between these

for when he does not understand he becomes

structural elements, through sketches.

them by transforming himself into them. — Giambattista Vico, 17251

And in this, what of the bearing capacity of the brick wall? How to tie it together so as to prevent it from collapsing? Steel plates, wire rods, bolts,

I am not an engineer. I am an architect. By proxy. It was spring 1979. I decided to become an engineer in shipbuilding. Although I had

rondels and nuts generate tension that ‘binds’ the steel beam to the crown of the brick wall and correspondingly to its mass.

been struggling with mathematics I started my

I was trying to understand the wall through

preparations to go to university. I have always

drawing my way into it, empathically ‘building’

been fascinated by a ship’s hull below the

it. The bricks let me in. So instead of distantly

waterline; beautiful fluent shapes informed by

understanding, I became the wall.

hydrodynamics—rudder, propeller and keel. I

This is the first drawing of the building. Only

was amazed by the beauty of the technics that

then, and better informed about its inner logic, could

seamlessly turned into poetics, gazing endlessly

I begin to think about (the) architectural design. Yes: drawing is not building!

at cut-away perspectives in books and magazines: the steel frames, the transmission of movement from engine to propeller. In the following months one of the major

shipyards in Belgium closed down. People advised me to move to Japan or South Korea if I wanted to

Giambattista Vico, Scienza Nuova: Principi di Scienza Nuova d’ intorno alla Comune Natura delle Nazioni, 1725.

Jo Van Den Berghe, The Boathouse 1, Eemnes, The

build ships. Not much later Elvis Costello wrote his

Netherlands: Preliminary Design 1, 5–6 July 2009, pencil,

song Shipbuilding.

But I wanted to stay at home. Home. In autumn I decided I would abandon my first love and become an architect. As a consolation prize, I would be constructing ‘home’. This drawing is an example of such contruction and is a preliminary design for a boathouse in The Netherlands completed between 2008 and 2012. I have never lost my fascination for technically detailed drawings. I don’t believe in aesthetics as a starting point for architecture. I see beauty as the outcome of a rigorous process of logic. In architecture, as in shipbuilding, form follows fact and necessity. Beauty is not a whim cast down to the common world by the architect’s genius mind, beauty comes up from the common world. 82

Diagram for make believe: imagining a new

parts or materials. It’s in this manner of building that

park for New Lynn

this drawing does its work; assembling disparate activities, objects, actors, scales and temporalities

Kathy Waghorn

through an abstract mechanism of spatial and temporal plotting. hand; embraced by the authority and order of the X

performative approach was employed to imagine

and Y axes on the flat, bounded space of the page;

a new suburban park. A series of episodic live

the drawing evades the messy material realities and

events and material installations were proposed

potential inequalities and conflicts of objects, actors

for the park site, currently a filled clay quarry,

and relations in favour of a propositional illustration

invisible and inaccessible behind a factory. Each

of neat and possible co-existence. The park I would

event or performance would allow for a fleeting and

like to see eventuate from this process would act

propositional manifestation of this future park to

in the same manner—a park conceived as some

emerge, with each bringing together a distinct group

kind of assembling and enabling infrastructure,

of constituents. In so doing make believe applied

open to possibility, a space where anything goes

performative means to generate local exchanges of

but, unlike the drawing, where material and social

knowledge in regard to public urban space, how it

collision might occur. This drawing therefore defines

might be shaped and used, what importance and

an agenda—unlike a master plan, in this projective

meaning it might hold for specific communities.

diagram the park is inevitably construed as social

This diagram was produced to convey the

make/believe: imagining a new park for New Lynn possible projects diagram green text = onsite blue text = off site = day time = night time Guy Fawkes Nov 5 / Diwali Nov 3 firecracker event and bonfire Urban Beach artists installation (like PS1 NYC)

borrows a mathematical spatial logic, with the X axis 1

SPCA Wag’n’walk

by Mohsen Mostafavi and Ciro Najle. Architectural Association, London, 2003, p. 8.

Coloured text is used to map a relation to ‘real’ space :

Kathy Waghorn, Diagram for make believe: imagining a new park for New Lynn, 2013, digital diagram using

disparate elements to co-exist as equally probable—

dogs, badminton players, remote control plane

Exhibit New Lynn Maps

public table tennis

operators, ponies, kites, fire crackers, markets, bmx

Empty shop conversations and installations

BicyKill Bike jam Spring vege garden & market

Classic car meet kite flying for Moon Festival

Heritage audio walk as part of AKL Heritage Week

Claystation public badminton

World Parking Day Installations

remote control airplane club

Conversations of New Lynn posters

very small

night). This use of abstract, coded language allows

mapping new lynn

Gymkhana: local pony club

bike riders, seedlings, lanterns, white elephant stalls, beaches, bonfires, old soldiers, children, elephants, movies, hot-rod cars—and by extension, fire, light, speed, flight, food, dung, heat, photosynthesis, decay, commerce etc. … converge in the act of imagining the possible. The method employed in this document aligns with that of the landscape-urbanist move away from the picturesque conception of landscape in favour of a relational approach. According to Mohsen Mostafavi, ‘this approach aims at a search for the hidden pockets of potential [ . . . ] consequently the urban surface becomes a site of new and unexpected events’.1 The title of this publication is Drawing Is/Not Building. Building, as a verb, is the action of construction by assembling and joining 84

immediate

winter 2013

small

events are then arranged across four phases.

Circus

Youth photography project (AKL Festival of Photography)-show as large projections

New Lynn School Gala and Game Day

Urbanism: A Manual for the Machinic Landscape edited

scale of events. In this space twenty-six possible

and symbols are used to indicate ‘real’ time (day or

ANZAC day community brunch picnic

Mohsen Mostafavi, ‘Landscapes of Urbanism’, In Landscape

Home Made Lantern Festival medium

Avanti Temporary BMX pump track Open Air Cimema

and performed.

design approach to stakeholders. The diagram denoting the progression of time and the Y axis the

AKL Architecture Week Giant illuminated space-making installations

spring 2013/summer 2014

winter 2014

time structured converstation based events

spring 2014 / summer 2015

scale

This diagram therefore performs a sleight of

Auckland Council in which a spatial, material and

large

This is an image from make believe, a project with

Abstract Architectural Drawing

The plan plane provides geometric flatness for notations that ideally translate perfectly into built

Michael Young

material. This is an abstraction for the pragmatics of measurement, not abstraction as an aesthetic

When asked to describe drawings such as the

agenda tied to the medium of drawing. It is difficult

one included here, I most often say that they are

to say that an architectural drawing is ‘medium

abstract. Since I am an architect, the follow up

specific’ as defined in art discourse, leaving us with

question usually pertains to their relation with

the odd conclusion that architectural drawings are

architecture, to which I respond in the positive,

simultaneously both less and more abstract than the

‘These drawings represent ideas of organisation

definitions associated with art. This confusion leads

similar to a sketch or a diagram.’ But, I’ve always felt

me to answer the paragraph’s opening question

that this description was somehow inaccurate, for

with another: Can one even make an abstract

I do not intend these drawings to be a structural/

architectural drawing?

spatial/formal image of a building. They are in many

This predicament does not become clearer if we

ways closer to paintings, and it is from the discourse

discuss contemporary architectural representation.

on painting that I consider them as abstract. One,

Digital models are three-dimensional collections

they are concerned with the low-relief tension of

of points, not lines on planes. Either through

the flat plane. Two, they explore the limits of the

illumination in a monitor or ink arrayed on a printout

specific medium used to create them (NURBS

we are actually looking at renderings (colour

software). Three, they are attempts to create a

translations of data), not drawings. The rendering

non-representational image that conveys sensations

can simulate the line work of drawing, but this

rather than recognisable forms. These three

is just one of several visualisation options for the

categories of the planar support, medium specificity,

information contained by the digital model.

and non-representational image all come from

There is a strange outfall here. Points are more

twentieth-century painting discourse on abstraction,

abstract than lines and planes. Could this simple

which has also been one of the guiding discourses

fact suggest that an abstraction in architectural

for abstraction in architecture.

mediation is possible if built from collections of

What would it mean for an architectural drawing

spatial points, not lines on planes? A statement

to be abstract? To start with, traditional wisdom

such as this would distance architecture from

tells us that the conventions of plan, section,

its connection to painting, a legacy so dear to

and elevation are already abstract. They do not

architectural discourse since the Renaissance,

represent the building as it would appear visually,

which also includes many of the ideas from the

but instead are notations which require disciplinary

past century surrounding abstraction. A shift like

training to interpret and create. On the other

this could set an aesthetic agenda for the relations

hand, architectural drawings are representations

between objects (points) as opposed to one of

of something; they are not things in themselves.

looking through objects (planes), which somehow

Furthermore, although architectural representations

sounds more like realism, and more like architecture

do use a flat plane, the piece of paper that this is

(and will require me to change how I draw, again).

typically associated with is not the same as the flat plane of the canvas. For painting, the canvas provides a support reinforced by the painted composition to create a unity for the painting as a thing in itself. An abstract painting is both a real concrete thing provoking sensory response and a non-representational image devoid of any visual resemblance to something outside of the canvas. Architects generally do not treat the materiality of the paper drawn or printed on in this manner. 86

End Word—Drawing on My Mind Neil Spiller

Love, life and drawings; so individual, so human, so imperative. Drawing helps to describe our world and our perception of it. To each of us the world is different, constantly being re-drafted. My work involves creating drawn architectural speculations that investigate cyberspace/virtuality, biotechnology, nanotechnology, augmented and mixed realities and reflexive architectures. To me, architectural drawing is not a passive, one-way architectural occupation but a symbiotic relationship where the drawer can learn from the drawing and the act of making a drawing can inform the overall concept, idea and scope of architecture, by the processes of re-reading, post-rationalisation and chance. Drawing informs my writing and vice versa. My work asks the following questions; as such, it is a microcosm of some of the preoccupations of this book: Has the drawing much to offer nowadays in the face of the animated digital model? Whilst welcoming and championing the importation of computation and virtuality into architectural practice, I am sceptical that this is enough to guarantee architecture’s centrality to society. Are there other methods of making contemporary 21st-century architectural representations that do not rely on parametricism and tessellations? Much of the new breed of digital architecture and its attendant limited-software applications (that were often not initially developed for architecture) have brought a ubiquity to architecture and its representations. This can only be a bad thing. It has been influential in creating avant-garde preoccupations with form rather than spatial thinking. Many potentially rich 88