Introduction

 

This research-creation platform constitutes an evolving site of reflection and experimentation for my Phd. It brings together a variety of works that include : free spontaneous and partly subjective texts (Sketches) inspired by process philosophy; creation (drawing) work that resounds, to various degrees, with or from these textual Sketches; theoretical texts that link philosophy to the creation work; and potential pedagogical outcomes of this process in the form of exercises or projects for students of architecture.

 

The content revolves around four interconnected and overlapping questions that seek to examine what drawing is, what it can do and how, as well as what this might imply for architecture education. One of the objectives of the research is to explore how drawing can reveal and in-form lived spacetimes ecologically, ecosophically; how it can enable us to see ‘space’ differently. It therefore brings drawing into site (actual or virtual) and looks at how the qualitative or atmospheric elements that constitute sites themselves can become instigators of drawing. Drawing with light, drawing with sound, drawing with wind, drawing with the the weather or seasons are recurrent in explorations. The human is no longer the sole author of drawing but simply a participant amongst others in a more-than-human practice.


What these explorations have revealed as conjunctive of all their processes is the primordiality of air. Air constitutes the medium that animates space and that is animated and made visible through drawing forces. Light moves through it, wind and bodies move it, sound sets it in vibration, and breath is drawn from it to drag the line or utter the word. Air is the space of architecture, a space of fluids, of the in-between; it is a slippery space of immersion, uncertainty and intangibility. It also constitutes, as Luce Irigaray points out, the forces of the world that architecture has always attempted to cut us off from by enclosing, sealing off spaces in vacuums preventing any sensory engagement with the world, by prioritizing visibility. Perhaps then this research asks, can air (space) be made compatible with vision to teach us something of the places we live in?

 

Lastly, one can hardly think of architecture without taking into account its relation with drawing. The research-creation therefore always situates itself, directly or indirectly, in the interval between drawing and architecture, probing the transductive potential of one into the other. Environmental elements and the body are the co-activating sources of this potential. One may think of the body of the drawer in Arakawa and Gins’ terms, as an ‘organism-that-persons’ : ‘persons that are behavioural subsets of the organisms from which they emanate and out of which they compose themselves as agents of action’.

 

The various projects are accessed through links on previous pages. The first page lists the research questions and their ‘corresponding’ explorations or projects, which may be accessed by clicking on one of the Xs and then on the various project titles. To change pages, return to the questions' page using the 'back arrow'. To connect with these research questions click here.


For an account of the pedagogical thinking that underlies this research, connect to Pedagogical Basis .

 

For current work in progress see Urban Surf(ac)ing.