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Drawing after Computation
Andrew Kudless and Adam Marcus
A history of architecture that dealt with the impact of drawing would need to explain two things: how architectural spaces arose out of the deployment of depthless designs, and how architectural space was drawn into depthless designs.
— Robin Evans, The Projective Cast 1
The relationship between drawing and architecture is foundational yet paradoxical. As Robin Evans suggests, architecture can be defined by the struggle between the inherently two-dimensional plane of the drawing and the three-dimensional reality of space. Architects must fold the complexities of construction, materiality, and perspectival view into flat drawings while at the same time unfolding the abstract rationality of the drawing back into built form.2
This tension between the abstract and the real was codified in Leon Battista Alberti’s fifteenth-century text De Re Aedificatoria, in which the architect’s role as designer is established as separate and distinct from the role of the builder.3 Following Alberti, the architectural drawing remained primarily a communicative device: it simply conveys instructions for others to fabricate and construct a building. Over the next few hundred years, architectural drawing made great progress, enabled by new drawing techniques and their dissemination through new media technologies. From the wide distribution of Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s prints to Gaspard Monge’s development of the mathematics of descriptive geometry, architects learned how to communicate their designs with both more realism through rendered perspectives as well as more dimensional accuracy in plans, sections, and elevations. However, a disciplinary schism slowly developed, foreshadowing Evans’s dichotomy between the abstraction of “depthless designs” and the reality of architectural space. Was drawing’s primary role to communicate the functional and analytic information of dimensions, proportions, and constructability, or was it to communicate a prospective and evocative simulation of reality?
1 Robin Evans, The Projective Cast: Architecture and Its Three Geometries (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995), 107.
2 This essay expands upon a paper previously published by the authors, documenting the first volume of the Drawing Codes exhibition. See Adam Marcus and Andrew Kudless, “Drawing Codes: Experimental Protocols of Architectural Representation,” in Recalibration: On Imprecision and Infidelity: Proceedings of the 38th Annual Conference of the Association for Computer Aided Design in Architecture, ed. Phillip Anzalone, Marcella del Signore, and Andrew John Wit (n.p.: ACADIA, 2018).
3 Leon Battista Alberti, De Re Aedificatoria / On the Art of Building in Ten Books, trans. Joseph Rykwert, Robert Tavernor, and Neil Leach (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988).
Fig. 1
Andrew Kudless, Non-Square Pixels, 2020. This project samples input images into a series of vector-based irregular “pixels.” Instead of the square grid of pixels found in the source image, the image is divided into irregular fields whose centroid is then used for the color of the region. Although we have become accustomed to viewing blurry low-resolution images, these drawings are simultaneously low resolution and highly defined.
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Accumulated Error No. 41
Stephanie Lin
Accumulated Error No. 41 is one of a series of generative drawings (originally produced in color) exploring the interdependence of volume, shape, pattern, and tone. The repetition of a linear pattern over a collection of slightly “imperfect” volumes appears to go gradually out of sync; but after a certain threshold, determined by the relationship of the pattern’s interval to the properties and dimensions of the surfaces it is projected onto, shapes of solid and gradient tones come into unexpected convergence from the apparent predictability of their context. At moments, the volumes appear to fade into their background, while at others, they read as distinct objects in space. Using neither outlines nor fills, this project codes the traditional printmaking technique of the linear hatch to become a digital etching that both reveals and dissolves spatial legibility.
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Of Process, Mark, and Figure Viola Ago / MIRACLES Architecture
This drawing is process based. It is neither an abstraction nor a representation, but rather situated in an approach that places its desire on the slowness of the emergence of figure from field. The boundary of the figure is intentionally ambiguous so that the emergence of the figure from the field flickers as you get closer or farther away from the picture plane. To be specific, the picture plane is the design agent in the compositional logics of the figure. The lines, conceptually of annotative nature, register every possible state during the process of the drawing. Typically, an architectural geometry drawing will display the information of the final product. Here, the discrete line network further reinforces the notion of time in generating the drawing and delay in the reading of the drawing. The input/output operation, very familiar to digital design, in this case functions as an apparatus that distances the authorship between user and drawing—that is, between instruction and execution. It is in this space, between instruction and execution, that there exists an area of indeterminate figure. Of Process, Mark, and Figure does
not privilege any meaning beyond what it is; it instead questions the possibilities of what else it could become in terms of process-based drawing and authorship
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The ultimate pleasure of architecture lies in the most forbidden parts of the architectural act, where limits are perverted and prohibitions are transgressed.
— Bernard Tschumi, “The Pleasure of Architecture”1
The notion of “code” in architecture is often associated with the restrictive legal codes that govern the design and construction of buildings. These include zoning codes that establish the use, size, and shape of buildings; building codes that specify life safety and accessibility standards; energy codes that govern energy consumption and conservation; and design codes intended to ensure conformity with a specific style or aesthetic. Often, these regulations are perceived as restrictive and limiting; in many ways, practicing architecture can be understood as a constant search for novel strategies for complying with this complex landscape of codes. But constraint can also be an engine of creativity, inspiring architects to think differently about a problem and generate perhaps unexpected solutions.
Drawings play a critical role in this process. Architects spend significant time and labor producing drawings for review and approval by clients, community stakeholders, and municipal authorities, and these documents often become the basis for contractual or legal agreements surrounding responsibility and liability. The drawings in this section explore this territory: how drawing can be a site for exploring the sometimes blurry lines between legality and illegality, the generative capacities of restrictive codes, and the broader cultural reverberations of such constraints.
Drawings by Leyuan Li of Office for Roundtable and Höweler + Yoon engage the spatial politics of social codes by exploring the disconnect between architecture and the social behaviors it can generate. Contributions by Oyler Wu Collaborative and Clark Thenhaus of Endemic Architecture test the limits of restrictive codes: the former through a clever use of parametric tools in designing a code-compliant mezzanine for a project in Los Angeles, and the latter through an assemblage of unconventional yet permissible architecture elements that reinterpret San Francisco’s design guidelines for Victorian-style houses. And works by Daisy Ames and Bz Zhang employ drawing techniques to advocate for spatial and environmental justice by uncovering and revealing the oppressive and racially biased impacts of urban zoning codes. Together, these contributions demonstrate how architectural drawings serve not only as a mechanism for compliance, but also as a means to speculate, question, critique, and challenge existing codes.
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1 Bernard Tschumi, “The Pleasure of Architecture,” in Architecture and Disjunction (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994), 91.
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Of Oil and Ice (Iceberg Calving) DESIGN EARTH
“Where were you when the Larsen B ice shelf broke up?” asked the essayist and novelist Amitav Ghosh in a quest to register the climate crisis through stories and an aesthetics of the climate crisis.1 The Of Oil and Ice geostory weaves together two water issues brought forth by the climate crisis—melting glaciers in Antarctica and energyintensive desalination industries—in a proposal to haul icebergs from Antarctica to the Arabian Gulf. Antarctica annually calves approximately 93 percent of the world’s total iceberg mass—equal to approximately 500 million Olympic swimming pools of fresh water. Icebergs are res nullius—legally free for the taking without interference from national or international regulatory bodies. A large tabular iceberg, which best resists rolling, tipping, and the draw of the Circumpolar Current, is captured and towed to the Arabian Peninsula at a cost considerably less than that of fresh water from desalination plants. In the drawing Iceberg Calving, the geometric and organic volumes are suspended on a gridded white canvas to produce the impression of a horizonless world. The frozen ocean
and the moist air blur the contours. The pure tabular geometric abstraction navigates in a pure frictionless movement as if in its own suprematist universe.
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1 Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 129
Environment as Politics: From Identity to Density Politics
In 1909, Patrick Geddes’s famous valley section posited that physical environments shape human activity, and that people, in turn, act on environments through their labor. A half-century later, Team X published the “Doorn Manifesto,” which updated Geddes’s valley section to show corresponding dwelling types. Team X contended that housing should be conceived as habitat, a negotiation of local circumstances, environment, and social relationships. Their “scales of association,” from city to town, village, and farm, matched density to particular social relations and patterns. For Geddes and Team X, our lifestyles, and therefore our politics, emerge from our environment—specifically, the density of the spaces we inhabit.
a range of geographic locations and political affiliations, to understand their varied spatial organizations. So rarely are the spaces in which we live depicted when Americans discuss politics. We wanted to show that landscapes are not neutral, that they reflect social and economic relationships that shape (and are shaped by) our politics.
It’s remarkable that even as the internet disperses information and enables us to form online communities across great distances, our politics are still highly correlated with physical environments. Who we are is largely defined by where we are. The spatial code of politics is density itself, and the urbanisms and lifestyles they foster.
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Can the typical American voter tell you how dense their community is? How land, housing, and infrastructure are organized at different scales? To illuminate this question, we examined the relation between density and the popular vote across all 3,144 counties from the 2016 US election. We then illustrated 51 counties, representing
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Softie
Unstructured SCHAUM/SHIEH
This drawing centers on the collision between sets of inflated forms and the tension between these soft forms and the structured backdrop of the wall upon which they are tethered. Objects were anchored according to the logic of the wall’s constructed grid. The drawing is an extension of an installation, partly inspired by work at the 1970 Osaka Expo. Like Yutaka Murata’s circle of circles at the Fuji Group Pavilion, it investigates soft forms in a rigid matrix. Like Sverre Fehn’s nesting inflatables at the Nordic Pavilion, it looks at the dynamic interplay between soft forms as an interactive form-finding device. The inflated elements come together to make up sets and forge complex nonlinear and nonhierarchical material linkages and multiplicities. The potential of a single soft object, then, is dependent on the forms that it groups and connects. In this scenario, the formulation of a soft set is a process of change and perpetually unstable movement. The drawing inscribes the characteristics of iconic form within a relational economy of self-similar architectural object sets.
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ATAP Facade Pattern Iteration
Christine Yogiaman and Kenneth Tracy / yo_cy design
ATAP Facade Pattern Iteration captures a snapshot of the process for refining a code used to design a facade. The drawing diagrammatically and spatially represents one possible arrangement of a found set of reclaimed wood boards supported by a steel frame. The code leverages the constraints of material reuse to create subtle porosity through a dispersed field of gaps. By correlating lineweight with the length of boards, the diagonal lines simultaneously depict the variation in color and shape of the untreated wood while also indexing the tendencies inherent in different packing or assembly strategies. Algorithmically, the code uses a mix of packing strategies such as best fit and next fit, edge cutting, increasing gaps to accommodate close-fitting boards, and reusing offcuts.
and tune the method of assembling the tropical hardwood planks so that simple instructions can be given on site and yield a generally predictable pattern type without deterministically placing each plank. This method, in addition to details that are designed for disassembly, follows principles of circular design. In this conception, the rainscreen is one stage in the life of the wood and metal parts rather than their final, disposable state.
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Developed for the ATAP Resort in Bali, Indonesia, the design tool is meant to mediate between the intention to have a diffused pattern of gaps and the logistics of placing boards within the limits of the frame with as few cuts as possible. This strategy seeks to preview
Arduino Bot Print
V. Mitch McEwen
This drawing of ink on paper imprints a figure ground made by avoidance. “Obstacle avoidance” is one of the behaviors programmed into the Arduino bot (Penguin Bot Arduino Biped) that performed this drawing. When the two flat bases of the biped bot are coated in ink, the bot avoids the areas marked by its prior steps. The pattern of avoidance then veers toward the turning radius of the machine, making a group of closed circles, until the ink runs out or the machine halts entirely. The title pretentiously evokes Robert Rauschenberg’s Automobile Tire Print of 1953. As cars were redefining American cities at the time of that work, bots and robots redefine work and everyday life in this era.
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This drawing is an exploration between flexibility and rigidity, digital generation processes and their physical form. The goal of the drawing is to capture the fluidity, flexibility, and softness of a textile manufacturing process in a rigidified state that highlights the difference between an idealized code and the deviating, hard-to-control material world.
the weight of the material and the cracks caused by its shrinkage during drying.
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For the drawing, a textile was produced using a Steiger Vega T 3.130 CNC flat-bed knitting machine. The machine takes a coded bitmap image as input, where each pixel in the image grid represents an operation. Several operations were programmed within the bitmap to generate a textile with varying properties and porosities. The textile was then coated with porcelain, dried, and fired in a kiln. The resulting ceramic is a solidified version of the textile, which seems rigid but conveys the same fragility and tenderness of a textile in a frozen form. It shows in its solidified form the tension between digital design and physical form, through the deformations caused by
Porcelain Knots Mariana Popescu
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Stacks office ca
Stacks is an exploration of vernacular architectural forms and combinatorial logics. If the roof form is typically what gives a building its character (i.e., its primary reading in a public-facing elevation), we can play with those proportions to achieve a particular reading. Square proportions become domestic, while shallower gables suggest more industrial typologies, and narrower ones may even feel religious. Mixing a variety of proportions together allows for a proto-urban cacophony of elevational readings. These generative compositions play with both existing perceptions of the built environment and the imaginary potentials of future architectures to come.
to be tightly packed into a dense stack. They are rendered using an elevation oblique projection, a form of parallel projection that visually distorts the geometry to show accurate depth and a true frontal elevation.
Each stack’s uniqueness is generated using a base-58 transaction hash which is the result of a transaction on the Tezos blockchain. This hash seeds the randomness and variation of the project, including their alignment, recursion depth, and total number of buildings. Each transaction produces a completely different composition.
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As impossible as these compositions may seem, they are fully realized as three-dimensional forms, extruded at various lengths, all connected to a fictional “ground” (the base X-Y plane of virtual space). The arrangement is based on a simple rectangular subdivision with up to eight levels of recursion. This allows the volumes
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A Line, An Island Drawing Architecture Studio
It was recorded in The Classic of Mountains and Seas1:
There was a huge whirlpool in the center of the ocean, stirring the underwater coral into a huge spiral.
Thousands of years later, a spiral coral reef appeared on the sea level.
Thousands of years later, sand and gravel filled the sea between the coral reefs.
Thousands of years later, plants covered the island.
Thousands of years later, fishermen discovered the island and the emperor announced plans to build a city on it.
built, and trenches were dug along the roads. Houses and long corridors were built along the city walls.
The island was named Spiral Island and became very prosperous. Later, it disappeared in the greatest tsunami in a millennium.
Thousands of years later, we tried to portray the Spiral Island. We drew a spiral as the initial structure of the island and generated more derivative lines by cutting and offsetting. Those initial and derivative lines were coded into a variety of brush patterns, such as wall, road, mountain, water, tree, house, etc. Then the Spiral Island gradually emerged into the drawing.
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Dams and roads were built along the coral reefs. City walls were
LIMA/MALI/AMIL/ILAM
Young & Ayata
Symmetry as a compositional device is one of the most codified of all formal systems in architectural design. The interpretations that have been attached to symmetry are multiple and varied: transcendental perfection, mystical symbolism, humanistic harmony, cultural order, mathematical abstraction, academic formalism, complete banality, erotic sensuality, social domination, etc.—the list could go on. As a convention, symmetry is usually rejected or embraced based on one or more of these interpretations, but what is often ignored is how symmetry operates aesthetically as opposed to metaphorically, symbolically, or epistemologically. Symmetry is aesthetically complex, but to pull out one aspect, there is a distinctly different aesthetic affect between global and local symmetries. A dominant global symmetry pulls a composition out of its ground as a figural object; it becomes a thing, an object. On the other hand, the even repetition of local symmetries produces patterns that push a composition into the background, into the atmosphere.
This drawing is a shuffling of local and global symmetries. It is created out of the repetition of multiple locally symmetrical figures. Slight differences in each figure produce clusters of independence while also eliminating the possibility of a tight fit of an overall repetitive pattern. The result lies somewhere between Piranesi’s Campo Marzio, Baroque Poche figuration, and flower arrangement.
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