Output details

Architecture Drawing: Grasping for the Fifth Dimension Portfolio

The research involves creating drawn architectural speculations, that often investigate cyberspace / virtuality, biotechnology, nanotechnology, augmented and mixed realities and reflexive architectures. The 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 act of re-reading, post rationalisation and chance. Outputs include drawings and writings.

Research Questions

1. Has the drawing much to offer us nowadays in the face of the animated digital model?

Whilst welcoming and championing the importation of computation and virtuality into architectural practice, the author is sceptical that this is enough to guarantee architecture’s centrality to society.

2. 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 and has been influential in creating avant-garde preoccupations with form and not spatial thinking. Many areas of rich potential architectural experiment have been left fallow, such as augmented and mixed realities.

3. Can drawing show us wider and more diverse arena for architectural invention?

Much of what is currently considered cutting-edge in architectural design has little to do with the semiotics or the poetry of architecture and the rejoicing in the everyday. The author’s research work seeks to find new ways of describing, composing and representing architecture in the digital age.