The technique of perspective drawing has evolved over the past 600 years. Yet this has been primarily an external approach to visualizing and has lead to a mechanical interpretation of space. The influence of the Cartesian coordinate system has further forced perspective drawing into a rigid response to one’s surroundings. In the domain of creating architecture, this mechanical approach has led our culture into a banal and characterless environment. Furthermore, it has suppressed our emotions and crippled our intuition. Through the collaboration of our thesis for masters of architecture, we developed an approach to transforming space that begins immediately with one’s feelings. With the use of our method called the reverse engineered perspective, we have created a successful mathematical model that can be used to unfold one’s inner vision into physical space. The process takes the form of an intuitive sketch, from which a plan can be extracted by reversing the sequence of convention...

This paper discusses the effect of generative concepts on the planning, execution, documentation, and interpretation of my recent series of three-dimensional sculptures. My intent was to build systems that had both cyclic and open-ended processes from which there is no combination of fundamental design or surface evidence that traditionally identifies an object as precursor or final product. Metal, plaster, rubber, clay, and other commonplace sculptural materials are categorized as points on a set of continuums including rigid-flexible, absorbent-waterproof, opaque-transparent, buoyant-dense, and so on. Based on these intrinsic qualities, I build systems that manage constraints and define and implement rule-sets to regulate the order of interactions. Despite the limited use of virtual technologies, the results of these physical activities can be compared to computational and iterative processes including Boolean operations, graphical user interface tools such as fill and skew, programming structures such as loops, random number generators, and geometric identities. Additionally, my intent was to allow any transformation to initiate or conclude another process. Observable “links” to preceding or successive iterations may be perceptible, but traditional notions of completeness or progress towards a particular state are discarded. The physical constraints in these systems inform a discussion of successes and failures encountered during the building of processes that respond to these requirements. Of particular interest is the way in which plaster, metal, clay, and rubber are used over a series of transformations that demonstrate recursive structures, variations in high-and low-fidelity data compression, and distortion. Documenting ongoing systems that have one or more real-time unfolding aspects and one or more physically durable artifacts raises philosophical issues as well as practical ones. The paper examines the implications of documentation through still images and time-dependent mediums. The paper concludes with a brief discussion of how the classification systems and transformational rules could inform future work.

This paper investigates the practice of drawing as a central element for development of creative processes in sculpture classes. From first to third year, students are encouraged to develop and maintain a graphic journal with relevant information concerning the progression of their work. For this purpose, drawing emerges as an important activity in many phases of the tridimensional work of the students. Recording, scribbling and sketching to generate ideas are the main strategies of the drawing practice in the classroom. Other practice, such as drawing the ongoing work-piece and create from that drawing, a new tridimensional form, revealed to be a successful process to achieve a tridimensional work. Special attention is given to the latter case, for which drawing is both, but not simultaneously, representation of an external referent and drawing for itself. In a first stage the piece is represented; the student then elaborates freely over it, cutting the link to the original referen...

One of the fundamental characteristics of architectural drawing is its use of scale. Since the Renaissance-during which architectural production shifted from the construction site to paper-this scalar understanding began by using bodily measurements. In developing designs, the architect projects future occupation of the drawing with their eyes and hands moving over both its physical surface and represented space. The different relationship established between the digital drawer and the body has been criticised; Paul Emmons argues that CAD's full scale-or rather scale-less-capabilities omit this bodily presence of the drawer (Emmons, 2005). Due to the use of full scale data recording, the drawer zooms in and out to consider aspects, severing the drawing's relation to the operator's body. This paper explores ways in which the body and drawings intersect, beyond Emmons definition, and hence considers the influence of the method of drawing on perceptions of scale and the inhabitation of digital drawings. It uses ongoing collaborative research projects and exhibitions to explore the inhabitation of digital drawing at full scale. These works highlight the fundamental importance of the line within architecture, not as demarcation, divider or indexical reference, but as a traces of bodily projections.

This paper concerns some practical drawing work that has been done with a group of students from the point of view of its suitability as a generative and speculative means of suggesting how space may be articulated, with a view to architecture. In respect of the remit of the conference, the reference is to perception and cognition in drawing in the context of teaching and learning in creative programs at university. The paper is written against a background of a first year, second semester drawing class. The class meetings were once a week of three hours, with twenty South Korean students studying in design degree programs through the medium of English language. Students were made aware of the spatial contextualizing of the drawing exercises through the attendant question of movement, while this paper considers the efficacy of the approach to the work, and its results, from the point of view of architecture. The paper’s theoretical contention in the context of architecture follows an opinion of the architect and educator Peter Eisenman, concerning what may be paraphrased as the lack of relationship between planimetric articulation of space, through architectural drawing, and one’s “affective” understanding and presence of oneself in space. The exercises of the paper’s referenced drawing class concerned the students’ citing and positioning of their own bodies in space, as a means of articulating space through using oneself as the object, and the paper has introduced the experiential and phenomenological implications of this. One of the two referenced exercises was carried through to the beginnings of three-dimensional structuring, and has therefore been illustrated. The implication of the exercises in the architectural context discussed in the paper is that the drawings are useful for generating ideas of how to structure space from the initial sense of presence of oneself in space.

In this article I examine the perspectives of Charles Sanders Peirce, Gilles Deleuze, and Nelson Goodman on diagrams in order to assess the variety of meanings of diagrammatic reasoning, form, and manipulation. I argue that diagrammatic reasoning may not only guide the understanding of the functioning of schemas, graphs, and chains of equations, but also-as I show in this article-the functioning of scientific images, photographs, and artistic paintings. More precisely, I focus on the relationship between the concept of diagram, the composite photographs by Francis Galton studied by Charles Sanders Peirce, works of art such as the paintings by Francis Bacon studied by Gilles Deleuze, and scientific images (especially aggregate images such as those of black holes), while taking account of the distinction between autographic and allographic semiotic systems.