A series of lines like those produced by an old, broken photocopier creates a fuzzy axonometric drawing of a brick building with a Savoye-esque roof garden. A Revit Basic Sample Project seems to have been shredded and reassembled, producing complicated overlays, impossible geometries, and clipped architectural fragments. A 45-degree square inverting the conventional figure-ground diagram (black-filled space, white-stroked poche) invokes memories of Hejduk’s Diamond House but quickly realizes itself as a fractalized version of the Villa Rotunda. While these drawings imply particular futures for architecture, the sheer quantity and complexity of their linework also make apparent that computational automation was integral to their production.
These three drawings represent three projects in the new book Drawing Codes: Experimental Protocols of Architectural Representation: Kevin Hirth Co’s Drawing of a High Plains House, Andrew Heumann’s The 11-House / 1.8%, and Another Villa by Outpost Office. These are just a small fraction of the 96 works curated by authors Andrew Kudless and Adam Marcus. The introductory essay makes their message clear: “Rather than using computational techniques to automate the translation of digital models into drawings, the Drawing Codes project explores computation’s agency to generate drawings without models, thereby recapturing the generative capacity of architectural representation.”
The promise of technology has always been to lessen the burden of work by automating the minutia we were previously bogged down by. Today, we live in an era of computational ubiquity that certainly has liberated us from particularly annoying aspects of the drawing board, but we are still seeking more efficient workflows. In his closing essay, “Ends of Drawing,” John McMorrough points out there is a level of abstraction, the traces of skill that are somewhat lost in the digital. Once-complicated-looking drawings can now be made easily with simple scripting, yet simplistic drawings might actually take much more time and iteration to look effortless. MOS introduces their drawing FLATSAND_20181024_24562818.TIF saying, “This just happened,” which isn’t quite true: Time and effort were required to write the software which allowed the ghostlike figure to “just happen” with six clicks of the mouse. On our efforts to make things appear to just happen naturally in our representations, McMorrough states that “drawings offer a preparatory transition from one reality—the world or an idea of it—into another, the result of which we can only see once it is drawn.” Drawing Codes thus finds us in the right moment: a post-digital compendium of possible approaches emerging from one and alluding to another material reality and their means of production.
Drawing Codes collects three volumes of exhibitions mounted over the last seven years at design schools across the country. While they sort this collection into eight categories—Representations, Permissions, Opportunities, Translations, Fabrications, Frictions, Materialities, and Generations—the first three drawings I described exemplify several fundamental qualities shared by drawings throughout. Hirth utilizes fuzziness; the High Plains House wasn’t run through a copier, of course, but is made up of 136,438 line segments. “It took a long time to produce—probably more than 40 hours, but maybe just a little less,” said Hirth. Similarly, Heumann’s 11 House is composed of layers of automated, superimposed versions of the Revit Sample to, as he described, “create, challenge, estrange, and make ambiguous, resulting in a drawing that demands (at least) the human affective labor of interpretation and reflection.” These 11 versions also echo the seriality that Outpost’s Villa Rotunda recursive remix represents, which they position by stating: “We made this drawing with a custom script. We could have done it ‘by hand’ in Illustrator. Does it matter? We made hundreds of other studies. If it was harder to do, would you like it more?”
Representation begins with a primordial mark: a line. To draw a line is the most fundamental act of architecture. This is no new insight but is so consequential that it is worth reiterating in relation to a book about architectural drawing today—drawing, not rendering; drawing, not AR or VR. Kudless and Marcus cite that despite the plethora of documentation architecture produces today via computation, with BIM models and direct design-to-fabrication, drawing itself as a practice is in danger of being lost or overlooked. Of course, the authors do not assert this out of nostalgia. We’re not lamenting the loss of the drawing board and mayline here. Instead, over the last seven years, they’ve curated a series of drawings that take advantage of the very computational processes that facilitated the drawing’s decline in the first place. The line drawing opens up possibilities and defines a lineage of labor—both architectural and constructional—which must follow to create a new material reality.
But the drawing itself, while concerned with this forthcoming process, cannot be limited to, overwhelmed by, or subservient to it; it must maintain an abstract detachment from what necessarily follows. It is seminal, generative, and foundational to architecture as a discipline. It takes courage, if even a bit of hubris, to suggest what a drawing implies. Ludens Prototype, a drawing by HABITABLE Studio featured in the Opportunities chapter, shows an endless and varied collection of play structures made of simple components: pipes and curtains in circular arcs and equilateral triangles. HABITABLE’s vision for the project is about the joy of play: “Living is playing in the garden, the Eden of Pleasure….The ‘community’ is alive in continuous motion, transforming itself to invite its inhabitants to take part in the pleasures of nature beyond the routine of labor.” Likewise, despite its simple pieces, the complexity of the drawing—which the designers liken to the chaotic 16th-century painting Garden of Earthly Delights by Heironymous Bosch—alludes to a joyful architecture that must ironically power through the routines of labor to document all the different conditions of the 40+ unique pavilion structures in the drawing. After all, 40 copy-paste pavilions that all use the same typical details wouldn’t create the joyful world the drawing offers, would it?
Facilitated by today’s computational production processes, fuzziness, layering, and seriality allow architects to deal with the primacy of labor and time in relation to architectural computation. These qualities leave space for ambiguity and irresolution, for an attitude akin to “we’ll figure that out later” integral to the design process. The generative drawing, the parti, or the sketch cannot resolve every issue which the architect must solve in bringing a building to life. To draw anyway suggests a commitment to turning the idea into a material reality: coordination, RFIs, and other downwind headaches be damned. In a time where architects have absorbed earlier resolution with BIM models and larger drawing sets drawn as much to protect from liability as to convey design intent, these generative computational drawings reclaim something of the cliche napkin sketch in all its imperfection, stimulating the imagination. The collection of drawings and discourse in Drawing Codes asks us to think critically about the discipline, its shared language of representation, and the material conditions under which architecture is produced. Must the show just go on, business as usual? Or are there new scripts for us to follow?
Davis Richardson is an architect at REX and has taught at NJIT and the Architectural Association.