Drawn in: The Intimacy of the Hand Drawn Image & Design for the Robert McDougall Drawing Institute

Abstract

Drawing by hand is a privileged tradition in architecture. Yet recent technological advances have challenged its representational authority. This research revisits manual representational practices to evaluate the tactile, embodied, and experiential aspects of line drawing and mark-making. The hesitation of the hand creates an understanding of built and un-built architecture that can extend beyond the aesthetic sense to engage with other faculties such as haptic sensation. This thesis investigates how architectural drawings can be regarded as tangible and embodied methods of representation by emphasising the connection between the hand and the page. Through the design of a Contemporary Drawing School, this research demonstrates how the formative connection between the hand and the page, as well as sense of intimacy between an architect and their work, can be imbued within an architectural outcome.

Traditionally, and in modern practice, architectural drawings are produced as an obligatory part of building production. Working documents such as orthographic, axonometric, perspectival, and sectional drawings are invariably the methods for communicating how the building will eventually coalesce. These are depictions from which a design may be directed, but that usually lack emotional resonance. Robin Evans critiques theses standardised techniques as a highly representational and distanced mode of working that is often inherently disembodied and uninhabitable.¹ Using analogue techniques, this thesis offers a way to better connect the architect to their work, both physically and emotionally. Through a theoretical framework, based on case studies and my own design methodologies, the hand drawn image is described as a form of embrace, a physical and emotive method of communication, which is used to inform an evocative architectural outcome.

Like a built work, the intimate nature of the hand drawn image is caused by the immediate connection between the physicality of a work and the experience of the beholder. The Robert McDougall Art Gallery, in Christchurch, evokes such a sense. The intimacy that I feel with this site relates to the building’s design, construction, and accumulated cultural history, which it physically embodies through the signs of use and age. Focusing on the documentation and development of the McDougall, this research utilises manual practice as a way to intimately engage with the experiential aspects of the space. Through sequential recording, haptic and embodied methods of mark-making are tested as an expressive mode to communicate the emotional spectrum of architectural space. These evocative techniques inform the production of a contemporary architectural design, a drawing school that connects with and revitalises the historically significant Robert McDougall Art Gallery.