ARCH_408Q Seminar: ‘Fabricated Drawings’

This seminar focused on using digital fabrication tools, techniques, and image theory to uncover new methods for producing physical drawings. Today, images are built in a myriad of ways including from physical media or data. Physical drawings, defined in the context of this seminar, transcend 2D limitation to develop thickness. The increase to 2.5D or 3D opens opportunities for investigating digital fabrication tools as a means for constructing drawings.

In particular, students focused on the way information technology continues to have a profound effect on how the built environment is perceived and represented. The images that surround us are becoming increasingly easy to generate through information technology. Access to technology, both in terms of digital design and output ,affords the opportunity to reconceive the nature of images. Images are developed through analog, digital, or hybrid processes. Their generation is a collaborative interaction between intuition and information processes using clearly defined rules. 

The scientific theoretician, Peter Galison, discusses the tension between intuition and information on the nature of images in the arts and sciences. Images reveal the intricacy of relations and knowledge, but are simultaneously deceptive because they bypass the mathematics of pure science. In the arts, this tension tends to exist between the intuitive, interpretive ability of the image as representation versus the image as evidence of a computation-based process. Architectural theoretician Mark Linder talks about how images in architecture are moving away from representations of something else toward a more literal, non-idealized result of a procedure. The image is literally the process of making visible the end result of an operation; therefore, images are evidence of the process by which they were generated.