Models & Drawings: The invisible nature
of architecture
2nd Annual AHRA Conference:
University of Nottingham
18-19th November 2005
Programme - pdf
Proceedings
Participant Information
Accommodation
CALL FOR PAPERS:
This two day international event
is held in association with the Nottingham-based Image Studies
Network supported by the Humanities Research Centre at the University
of Nottingham. The conference theme has been set by Professor
Marco Frascari of Carleton University, Ottawa, also a Leverhulme
Visiting Professor at the University of Nottingham in 2005-06.
The conference will address the various relationships
between drawings and buildings under four key themes: The tendency
of architectural representations to become ‘models’
for imitation; the claim of new imaging technologies to make
visible the previously unseen; the cognitive spatial implications
of traditional imaging practices relative to CAD; the critical
potential of the architectural image.
Theme:
Nowadays, we know what kinds of drawings architects make. They
have been codified by tradition, by profession and by legislation.
Although this canonization has been a very recent event nevertheless
it has reached a condition where innovation is almost impossible.
The architect’s drawings have become "models"
and generate "models" to be preserved in museums,
magazines and archives. To challenge this idle condition it
is necessary to question the imagination of construction and
the construction of imagination and how these processes affect/effect
the envisioning of architecture in absentia. Throughout the
history of humanity's attempt to envisage an absent architecture,
the alternation of the roles of the model and the drawing predominates.
The model presents itself to the gaze and purports to be a representation
of the absent and thus proposes to offer knowledge pertaining
to its otherwise invisible referent. It is the willingness of
the gaze to attribute such qualities to the model rather than
any quality of the object itself, which accounts for the object's
status as model. For these reasons the model-gaze proceeds no
further once the model is encountered and a further pursuit
of the absent beyond the model is stifled. Any discussion of
whether the invisible remains invisible or becomes visible belongs
to the domain of the model whose function it is to divide the
invisible into that part which is reduced to the visible and
another part which is invisible due to the gaze's fixation on
the model. This share of the invisible is thus envisable.
The real architectural drawing, however, does
not result from a vision of the absent, but instead it provokes
one. Rather than resulting from the gaze aimed at it, the drawing
summons insight by allowing the invisible to saturate the visible,
but without any attempt or claim of reducing the invisible to
the visible drawing. The drawing attempts to render visible
the invisible as such, and thus, strictly speaking, shows nothing.
It teaches the gaze to proceed beyond the visible into an infinity
whereby something new of the invisible is encountered. Thus
the drawing-gaze never rests or settles on the drawing, but
instead rebounds upon the visible into a gaze of the infinite.
Invited keynote speakers:
Prof Marco Frascari (Carleton University)
Prof Don Ihde (SUNY Stony Brook)
Prof Alberto Perez-Gomez (McGill
University)
Prof Agostino De Rosa (lUAV)
Prof Jonathan Hill (The Bartlett,
UCL)
Prof Judith Mottram (Nottingham Trent
University)
Dr Jane Rendell (The Bartlett, UCL)
Four separate strands will address the following
areas of discussion:
Models versus Drawings:
The architect’s drawings have become "models"
and generate "models" to be preserved in museums,
magazines and archives. To challenge this idle condition it
is necessary to question the imagination of construction and
the construction of imagination and how these processes a/effect
the envisioning of architecture in absentia.
Interdisciplinary Imaging:
Architecture shares much common ground with related practices
of image-making. In engineering, manufacturing, medicine and
neuroscience new technologies are being employed to image previously
obscure and invisible processes. In the expanding field of visual
culture traditional hermeneutic practices are rapidly adapting
to the alternative modes of engagement required by these new
‘ways of seeing’. In the hands of the architect,
how might these tools of diagnosis become tools of prognosis?
Real and Virtual - The Hand
and the Eye:
Cognitive science suggests a link between the embodied act of
drawing and the perceptual experience of space. What happens
during problem solving, remembering, perceiving, and other psychological
processes in the transition from pencils and pens to keyboards
and mice - from the tangibility and resistance of traditional
media to the acquiescence and intangibility of digital data
and screens?
The Critical Dimension of
Architectural Drawing:
In challenging the idle codification and canonization associated
with traditional architectural drawing, this panel will address
the ways in which drawings and other media (such as texts and
non-representational models) can be used as critical design
tools to investigate and/or to express the role and performance
of architectural mediation itself. It develops the Criticism
by Design theme from the 2004 Critical Architecture UCL conference,
where the term design is used to mean both the drawing of lines
and the drawing forth of ideas.
A selection of papers from the conference will
be published in ARQ (Architectural Research
Quarterly) in 2006.
Conference Committee:
Prof Marco Frascari (Carleton University, Canada) Leverhulme
Visiting Professor, University of Nottingham.
Jonathan Hale and Bradley Starkey, School of the Built Environment,
University of Nottingham.
Arthur Piper, Department of Critical Theory, University of Nottingham.
Dr Jane Rendell (UCL) and Dr Adam Sharr (Cardiff), for AHRA.
