In 1967, artist Sol LeWitt wrote that the artist’s “idea becomes a machine that makes the art.” He claimed that, in conceptual art, the artist designs a systematic process—a machine—that allows her to create a drawing or some other type of artwork in a step-by-step, procedural way. LeWitt’s ideas about conceptual art and its rule-based methods, are not unlike the way architects design buildings. In the architectural design process, there are procedures and rules, and codes and drawing techniques, that determine how the drawings architects create translate into built architecture. Drawing is our primary medium. It is a form of proto- or para-architecture that precedes or exists alongside the making of buildings. It is within the drawing process that architectural speculation, creativity, and innovation reside.
Although British architect and theorist Robin Evans stated that architects almost “never work directly with the object of their thought, always working through some intervening medium,” which he claimed puts them at a clear disadvantage in relation to other artists, this procedural aspect of architectural drawing, is also what enables it to be a site of intense experimentation when its tools, techniques, and methods are intentionally unleashed from their instrumentalization—that is, from their role in the designing and making of objects, buildings, landscapes, and cities. Drawing then becomes not simply a means, but also an end—an aesthetic object that is simultaneously a work of architecture and a work of art.
This exhibition explored and experimented with the many tools, techniques, procedures, and choreographies of drawing, looking to a rich archive of creative works. We invented mechanisms for transcribing perceptions and experiences, and transcoding objects and information into ways of
drawing, and experimenting with rule-based systems, that, like games, generate an endless variation of outcomes. 5 drawing themes organize the work: •ALEATORIC LINES •TEXT + TEXTURE •INDEX AND IMPRINTS •FRAGMENT + FIELDS •CHOREOGRAPHIES and •TRANSCODING MATTERS. #architecture #archilovers #architecturaldrawing #drawing
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