Revolutions in Parallel: The Rise and Fall of Drawing in Architectural Design.

Abstract

This dissertation examines how the foundational principles of architectural design are influenced and reflected the discipline’s conceptual media. The first section explores the transition to drawing as architecture’s conceptual medium. Arguing that the use of drawing within masonic traditions of the Gothic period was not the same as its use during the early Renaissance, this work maintains that the simultaneous employment of plan, section and elevation (i.e. triadic form) was key to changing how drawing was understood and utilized in design. Examinations of Strasbourg Plan A (c. 1260) and the Milan Cathedral Plan and Section (c. 1390) demonstrate how drawings that appear orthographic may not indicate the use of orthography to prefigure forms in space. The examination of Raphael’s interior drawing of the Pantheon (c. 1509) further demonstrates that more than just a technical hurdle, the use of triadic form indicates epistemic shifts in both the understanding of design as a human rather than exclusively divine activity, and in the elevation of form as the primary quality of architectural contemplation.

The second section of this dissertation examines the transition to computation as the medium of design. Through an exploration of Peter Eisenman’s House VI (c. 1975), this section demonstrates that the shift towards process-based (as opposed to form-based) thinking isn’t dependant on computation as a medium, and yet the medium of drawing constrains the ways in which process can contemplated. Further, this section suggests that rather than being a twentieth-century development, a turn to process is evidenced during the nineteenth-century by emerging fields like morphology, biology and genetics. Gehry Technologies’ project for the Yas Island Formula-One Hotel and Evan Douglis’ project for Choice Restaurant (both 2009) demonstrate how the focus on process and the use of computation as a medium impact both the practice and aesthetics of architecture.

Tying these sections together, the over-arching argument of this work is that these two shifts in medium are similar in scope and impact for the architectural discipline. Like the transition to drawing centuries before, today’s shift to computation imbricates both technical and epistemological developments for the representation, design and practice of architecture.