Drawing: Research, Theory, Practice - Current Issue

This paper explores how architectural drawing can serve as a tool of resistance and spatial reclamation in the aftermath of genocide, focusing on Jabalia Refugee Camp in northern Gaza. Amid catastrophic destruction and erasure, the project rejects conventional reconstruction frameworks that often reproduce colonial power structures. Instead, it proposes a methodology rooted in memory, storytelling, and speculative drawing – developed through collaboration with a former resident of Jabalia. Using co-mapping, 3D recollection and fictional letters from a liberated future, the work repositions survivors as active authors of space. Drawing becomes a means of witnessing, not to fix loss, but to resist it – layering emotional geographies, temporal fragments and imagined possibilities. This approach challenges the neutrality of architecture, arguing for a practice that emerges from within the community rather than being imposed from outside. Ultimately, the paper offers a method of designing grounded in solidarity, care and the collective right to remember, return and rebuild.

This research investigates how drawing, when combined with emerging technologies such as robotics and artificial intelligence, can redefine the representation and understanding of territorial boundaries within a multispecies landscape. Framed as both methodological tool and a critical epistemological practice, drawing is explored not simply as a representational technique but as a dynamic means of engaging with ecological processes, change and disturbance. Focusing on post-disturbance landscapes in northern New South Wales, Australia, this practice-based research combines site-specific fieldwork, sensor technologies and machine vision to record environmental transformations across time. However, it is through the act of drawing, manual, speculative and interpretive, that these technological data are translated into new cartographic forms. The paper introduces the concept of an ‘Atlas of Events’ to describe a methodology of dynamic mapping that visualizes ecological succession, interspecies activity and the temporal layering of landscape processes. By situating this work in both environmental design and critical cartography, the research aims to contribute to a rethinking of territory and mapping beyond human-centric, static frameworks. The resulting visual and spatial outputs challenge dominant cartographic conventions, proposing instead a hybrid drawing methodology that foregrounds collaboration between human and non-human agents, and that is sensitive to ecological knowledge systems. In doing so, the paper responds to urgent calls for more nuanced, temporally responsive modes of environmental representation.

This article presents soil conceptual frameworks to understand soils as historical living archives, such as the understanding of soil palimpsest memory and the way in which local material histories expand over the territory. Soil memory concepts have been widely explored and instrumentalized to understand Earth’s history and much more extensively in archaeological records, where relationships between environmental conditions and human activities are mutually shaped, so environmental changes can be recorded in soil memory over time. For this article, drawing serves to bring attention to the details of soil memory that are visible in the unearthed materials. Moreover, drawing articulates soil detailing across scales, starting with the microscopical drawings illustrating the forensic attention required to delineate features associated with environmental dynamics. The drawings presented in this work integrate the microscopic detailing, the soil pits and the territorial scale photographs, slicing and layering the grounds to expose the material manifestations of the presented soil concepts. The drawings presented in this work elaborate on the palimpsest nature of soil memory, meaning that when looking at a soil at the present, it is possible to see the factors of its formation from the present, the recent past and the remote past. By drawing different processes recorded in soil formation, historical drawings can provide insights into processes and moments in time that can hint at alternatives worth proposing and drawing for design and planning purposes. The soil conceptual frameworks are used to bridge concepts that can provoke material and metaphorical fresh lenses to represent soils as living archives of the processes of landscape design. The drawings presented were developed in the Just Transition research project and explore how soil knowledges provoke soil-related visual narratives relevant for the design and planning fields through their concepts, methods and metaphors.

This paper investigates the potential of architectural drawing as a speculative and political practice in cities marked by conflict, displacement and spatial erasure. Moving beyond conventional understandings of drawing as a representational tool, it argues that drawing can serve as a mode of spatial resistance and reimagination – particularly in contexts where architecture’s material agency is interrupted. Focusing on Lebbeus Woods’s Sarajevo Project (1993), developed during the siege of Sarajevo, the paper examines how visual techniques such as fragmentation, layering and sequential narration enable drawing to function as a conceptual reconstruction of space. Extending this analysis, the paper considers how contemporary practices echo Woods’s methods in resisting spatial violence through visual means. The argument culminates in a reflection on my own creative practice: a collage-based drawing situated in the divided city of Nicosia, Cyprus. Here, drawing becomes a means of engaging with inaccessible terrain through speculative intervention. In doing so, it contributes to architectural discourses that grapple with the politics of form and space in conflict-affected geographies.