Drawing Millions of Spaces

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Abstract

02.10.2017
Drawing Millions of Spaces
Helle Brabrand, KADK, School of Architecture, Copenhagen

My project Drawing Millions of Spaces takes up some recurring questions about drawing and perception, stating that kinesthetic perception alone is a decisive force in drawing architecture. The assertion is that awareness of produced sensuous effects is a core issue of drawing, framing the way we see and imagine.
Affective tonality attaches to proprioceptive and kinesthetic experience, being the mode of experience that transverse the senses. Movement is always there; you have to make distinctions between kinds of movement and experimental dynamics, questioning what difference they may create. Drawing Millions of Spaces looks for ambiguous and resonant body-space articulations, preparing for a use of AR (augmented reality) as an additional creation approach. For instance, working with combined projections, using a flat surface in actual space for projection of line-, photo-, and video effects, and then, out of this surface-context, provoke a participator to move and extract different atmospheric perspectives. Presently, the work is presented as a video.

In The Art-Architecture Complex Hal Foster criticizes what he calls the image-making of today’s architecture. A central chapter is Building Contra Image, a dialogue with the sculptor Richard Serra seen as an ‘activator’ of ambient space. Engaged with dance, in terms of movement and equilibrium, stasis and balance, Serra dissolves sculpture into a field of process - movement - time. Asking very basic architectural questions, his focus is on elevation, on what happens to your body when the elevation is shifting: how do you cut into space, gather the land in a volume, and hold that volume? Serra’s concern is moving body-space experiences: ‘when you face a concave shape, the whole breadth of the curvilinear volume opens up in front of you; but once you walk around the edge, it changes to an opaque convexity that reveals itself only through walking – you can’t see the openness of the field or how the volume sucks into it. Just turning the corner opens up another world. That interests me, and it didn’t appear to be critical in architecture’.
Drawing Millions of Spaces deals with such questions, as they emerge and may be reflected in the making/ mediation of architecture – i.e., sketching concave and convex configurations and forces. Unlike Serra, though, my work ‘faces’ spatial imagination by making dynamic deformations and camera movements confronting the participator’s own moves.

The conference asks what is the agency of the ‘plan’ in architecture today. May we still consider plan a generator, a promotor of our imagination? Or, with the advent of digital design possibilities, has the plan merely lost its previous status as a privileged tool for development and communication of architecture? My project takes up these issues and suggests that plan-drawing be challenged as the major generator in development of contemporary architecture. Concurrently it suggests a shift related to aspects of generating ambiguity, traditionally associated with hand-drawn sketches. Although continuously making use of projective ways of looking at and working with geometrical drawing, the work as well incorporates diverse digital editing dynamics potentially widening spatial imagination.



Keywords:
kinesthetic perception as a decisive force in drawing architecture,
body-space articulations and augmented reality,
‘activator’ of ambient space,
moving body-space experiences,
spatial imagination confronting the participator’s own moves,
Original languageEnglish
Publication dateNov 2017
Number of pages1
Publication statusPublished - Nov 2017
EventDrawing Millions of Plans - KADK, Copenhagen, Denmark
Duration: 1 Nov 20173 Nov 2017
https://kadk.dk/drawing-millions-of-plans

Conference

ConferenceDrawing Millions of Plans
LocationKADK
Country/TerritoryDenmark
CityCopenhagen
Period01/11/201703/11/2017
Internet address

Artistic research

  • Yes

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