Drawing: Research, Theory, Practice - Volume 6, Issue 2, 2021

Some argue that the tendency to ignore the self as an aspect of the relationship between architects and their drawings is a consequence of the hegemony of digital modes of representation, others that it is inherent to traditional perspectival and projective techniques. It is in this repressive context that architects struggle to consider their subjectivity in relation to the drawings they produce. This article aims to divert this subjective distance by proposing a method for revealing the unconscious forces that abide between architects and architectural drawings. Through a comparative analysis of this intermediate space with the psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott’s theory of the Transitional Object, the author considers his own relationship to perspective drawing and materializes this through the production of a drawing apparatus titled: the autobiographical hinge. Bilaterally, the conception of this drawing apparatus is founded on examples of visual art practice that challenge the repressive qualities of linear perspective, this includes the work of Penelope Haralambidou (2003); Lawrence Gowing (1965) and Marion Milner (1950). In a time of dissolved agency for the architect, this article presents a method through which to mine one’s own relationship to architectural drawing, through which a disturbance to those codified regimes occurs as a consequence of one’s own subjectivity being recognized.

To draw on something means to allow yourself to be informed by and to heed the clues, suggestions and directions emanating from another source. The aim of this article is to describe how walking, as an embodied form of visual and performative practice, might open up opportunities and avenues for an expanded drawing approach. The first step is to plant one’s feet on the ground and let yourself be drawn to the terrain. The whole experience emerges from the terrain and thus it can be considered as drawing from the ground up. This article discusses and considers how un/planned perambulations can be transformed into a drawing(-out) tool that extends the meaning of the practice to comprise multimodal extrapolations and a diverse range of media. The eclectic approaches discussed in this article draw heavily on phenomenology and bear traces of a grounded theory that borrows from deep mapping combined with aspects of Dasein, which can be discerned throughout the process. The discussion explores the wider meaning of drawing as a form of seeing and making in response to place and time, while it attempts to push drawing beyond the limits imposed by a restricted flat surface.

Aspects of Edmund Husserl’s egological phenomenology and James J. Gibson’s ecological visual perception theory are construed dialectically for the purpose of informing the teaching of drawing, with an emphasis on understanding relationships between viewer positions and objects in the environment as represented through geometric projection systems. Such a grounding is conducive to a drawing practice capable of insights leading to new knowledge of our relationships with our environment, both egological and ecological, in an art school curriculum currently distorted by neo-liberal trends from the core study of visual perception and communication.

In this paper, art historian Sanneke Huisman and curator Sven Schlijper-Karssenberg discuss Jorrit Paaijmans’s drawing practice based on his recent performance installation Radical Drawing Device (RDD). Huisman and Schlijper-Karssenberg show the important role notions of physicality and craftsmanship play in Paaijmans’s hyperdrawing practice and demonstrate the ways in which Paaijmans uses these notions to question mechanization and craftsmanship in relation to the artistic practice and discipline of drawing. RDD, the case study of this text, is a tattoo machine made by Paaijmans that can only perform one action: applying a straight line onto the artist’s arm. The authors argue that with RDD, Paaijmans continues his research into physicality, as well as reflects on the status of drawing in relation to technology, time and the passage of time. The paper further shines light on the ways in which the work encourages reflection on being human in a technological society.

In this paper we analyse the impact of the COVID-19 measures on teaching the conceptual drawing course at the Architecture and Urbanism Faculty of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (FAU/UFRJ). The remote model of teaching followed from July 2020 determined many changes in our methodology, these being essentially practical rather than theoretical. This adaptive process resulted in what we called ‘pandemic drawings’, proved to be a useful tool for expanding drawing skills and confined senses. The outcomes were surprisingly positive and pointed out that these ‘pandemic drawings’ could become a hybrid model of drawing in the following post-pandemic years.