The Agency of Drawing: New Paths for Architectural and Urban Research (Book Project with Lars Müller Publishers)

This proposal for the publication, The Agency of Drawing: New Paths for
Architectural and Urban Research, is a collaboration between faculty and
academic environments at the Royal Danish Academy, Harvard University and
Cornell University. This book explores how the agency of drawing has been
deployed within the fields of architecture, landscape, urban design and planning
as a research methodology to analyse, interpret and communicate the complex
spatial reality of our urban world. In the context of various spatial challenges we
face – from social inequalities to climate change – it unfolds how the practice of
drawing can synthesize diverse forms of data and generate unique formats of
evidence that produce knowledge otherwise inaccessible in other formats.

This book addresses a wide audience: as a textbook for establishing site and
contextual understanding within educational contexts; as an inspiring resource of
contextual drawings within practice settings; and as a valuable contribution to
framing drawing as a scientific and artistic method for knowledge production in
research environments. At the Royal Danish Academy, for example, the book could
be a key reference in bachelor and candidate environments.

Drawings open up a myriad of possibilities. Drawings can be revelatory,
uncovering otherwise invisible conditions and dynamics of space production.
Drawings can have an organizational dimension, structuring thoughts, connecting
multi-scalar, complex systems composed of many of interrelated components,
forces and actors. Drawings embody arguments and power; drawings are never
neutral. Drawings can expand the agency of research on the production of space.

In contrast to drawing as a heuristic and prescriptive act prior to the realisation of
building, this publication explores how the agency of drawing has been deployed
as a tool to understand and interpret our complex reality as it unfolds. Its focus lies
in the use of drawing by scholars and practitioners within the fields of architecture,
landscape, urban design and planning to analyse and communicate the pressing
spatial conditions and challenges of our urbanized world – from social inequalities
and predatory economic forces to the climate emergency and ecosystem
breakdown. It addresses drawing as a performative tool to identify and to think
through the complexities of the political-economic, the environmental, and the
social within the built environment. In this context, the publication develops the
practice of drawing as a research methodology capable of synthesizing diverse
forms of data and generating unique forms of evidence that in turn produce
knowledge otherwise unavailable or incomprehensible in other formats.

The publication addresses questions such as: How does drawing work when
employed to understand existing realities and phenomena? What happens to the
object of study when it is reconstructed critically and graphically? How does the
analytical documentation process (the act of drawing) constitute a unique form of
research? How do the complex graphic artifacts that result (the drawings
themselves) operate as epistemological instruments capable of generating
complex and reliable knowledge about the built environment?

The research drawings described and theorized in The Agency of Drawing allow
for the unravelling of complexities of a particular situation through their capacity to
transcend limitations of both scale and subject. They are capable of connecting
construction details to immense territorial systems through unified and
simultaneous graphic treatment. The book suggests that even the precise and
disciplined redrawing of a single building or context — though apparently simple — allows for an expansion of the agency of the researcher, the drawing, and the
field more generally. The act of drawing is capable of grasping and communicating
what occurs at the threshold of politics, geography and the built environment and
embraces the agency of its primary tools. The drawing is therefore a way to
expand this capacity in order to engage and affect matters traditionally considered
to be beyond the purview of the design disciplines. The publication articulates the
features of this form of critical scholarship by marking an inflection point in the
development of research into the built environment.