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DECEMBER 2013THE DRAFTERY

THE DRAFTERY

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Issues ofTranslationin DigitalAesthetics

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ISSUES OF TRANSLATION IN DIGITAL AESTHETICS


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HANS TURSACK / CAPTIONERHans Tursack is a designer currently based in Princeton, New Jersey. His work explores the intersection of con-temporary painting, sculpture and architectural practices. Currently a masters candidate at the Princeton School of Architecture, Hans studied at the Rhode Island School of Design and the Cooper Union School of Art in Manhattan where he earned his BFA in 2011 with a concentration in painting, drawing and printmaking. His written work has been published in Pidgin Magazine.

HUGH MCEWEN / ARCHIVE NO. 057Hugh McEwen is a London based teacher, writer and architect. He is a partner at the architectural design practice Office S&M, teaches at Oxford Brookes, and has been pub-lished in international peer reviewed journals and national magazines, recently including Blueprint, A10, and the Ar-chitects’ Journal. His work examines the methods by which architecture can express and condition social outlooks and political positions. As well as being Unit F Design Tutor at Oxford Brookes, he has taught at the Bartlett and acted as a guest critic at Kingston, Brighton, Greenwich, and the AA.www.officesandm.com

PETER JELLITSCH / ARCHIVE NO. 043Peter Jellitsch is an artist living and working in Vienna. He holds an M.Arch from the Academy of fine Arts in Vienna, where he has studied Art and Architecture. For the time he is residing at the Citè des Arts in Paris. In 2014 he will be Ar- tist in Residence at the MAK / Schindler House in Los An-geles. Among others, Jellitsch has received the Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky Award and the Outstanding Artist Award by the Austrian Federal Ministry of Art and Education. Pe-ter’s work can be found in permanent collections such as the SFMOMA (San Francisco Museum of Modern Art) and the MMKK Carinthian Museum of Modern Art.www.peterjellitsch.com

DAVID LEMM / ARCHIVE NO. 104David Lemm is an artist based in Edinburgh, Scotland. He studied at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and De-sign, Dundee. Fundamentally his work aims to explore and interpret systems for defining reality. He primarily works in printmaking, drawing, collage, and video installation. Re- cent work has centred around shamanic practice within indigenous peoples and the navigation of physical and me- taphysical space through idiosyncratic cultural constructs. In 2012 he completed an extended research project with The Onaway Trust and was recently shortlisted for the prestigious Engramme Exchange Prize.www.davidlemm.co.uk

THE DRAFTERYThe Draftery provides a focused context and pointed com-mentary on the drawings of lesser-known architects, art-ists, and other practitioners by focusing the conversation on how and why they draw. More than mere representation, drawings exercise power in the built environment; and this reality remains inadequately addressed in a world more focused on technological advancement than methodological understanding. We talk about how architects function in the world today by looking directly at the documents, mod-els, and drawings that orchestrate the constructed world.

Visit us at www.thedraftery.com

Geolas Pubishing1072 Bedford Avenue, #108Brooklyn, NY, 11216U.S.A.

CAPTIONSCaptions is a digital-first publication offering detailed and critical commentary on drawings previously published in the Archive. The Draftery invites a guest critic to select and comment on a set of drawings according to a theme they find relevant to architecture today. Calling attention to the elements of their rhetorical force, each Caption takes drawings out of context, lays them down on a dissection slab, and makes a detailed analysis of their parts and techniques.

CAP. 01 EDITORIALAthanasiou Geolas

CAP. 01 DESIGNJesen TanadiAthanasiou Geolas

http://thedraftery.com/archive/no-057

http://www.officesandm.com


http://www.peterjellitsch.com


http://www.davidlemm.co.uk

http://www.thedraftery.com

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11. Paper architecture has historically had a curious rela-tionship with Surrealism and Early Modernist abstraction. I’ve always found it strange for example, that Cooper [Union]’s program, under Hejduk, developed an entire ped-agogy in the 1960s and 70s by looking at European easel painting from the first half of the 20th Century. It’s espe-cially strange when you consider all that was happening in New York, and specifically in Lower Manhattan during that time (right at the school’s doorstep). Koolhaas revis-iting Dali in the 1970s was a similarly bizarre example of an architect making a speculative project with hackneyed painting references.

28. Snow Crash, written in the early 90s, is uncannily similar to 2nd Life. There’s junk everywhere—the novel revels in the capitalist trash bin of cyberspace. Ads all over the place. Your visual field is completely saturated with signage. McEwen’s drawings are definitely channeling a similar space.

3. Oil painting, graphite drawings, even gouache and watercolor have been re-invented several times over in the past century. Pastel is one of the few mediums, like etching, that still feels impossibly weighed-down by the baggage of European easel painting.

31. McEwen’s drawings strike me as more self conscious in terms of their medium and the fabric of historical referenc-es they weave. Sketchup, in this case, is probably more of a drafting aid. He could have just as easily made a physical maquette to figure the space.

4. I immediately thought of Michael Graves’ amazing elevations from the 70s and 80s. He drew in color because his elevations were about color—albeit artificial, surface color-ation. Po Mo was all about imaging architecture and I think Perspective evinces an awareness of that history.

1. It speaks less to a predetermined color scheme than to an improvised celebration of the spectrum. The unfiltered quality of the color range makes it read like a dissonant collage, whereas Modernist color theory in the manner of Albers and Kandinsky was all about creating harmonies.

5. Perspective also neither abandons a sense of reality (shade and shadow are believable), nor does it follow it through. Flat color, a shaking hand, confusing spatial depth, and ambitious layering of volumes encroaching overhead—all suggest a greater interest in this drawing’s rhetorical focus.

6. I think there is more to the fantastical utopian quality of space in Perspective. The exuberant patterns, technicolor pallet, perspective games and stage-set quality of the architecture reminds me more of Nintendo 64/Play- station graphics than Charles Moore.

REFERENCES » Pop painting » Lichtenstein » Rosenquist » Hamilton » 80s Neo-Geo crowd » Peter Halley » Jeff Koons’ recent paintings » Josef Albers » Vasily Kandinsky » Al Held’s expansive perspectives » Fred Sandback » Wolf Kahn » Michael Graves’ amazing elevations » Charles Moore » De Chirico’s paintings of vacant space » Henry Moore like object in the middle ground » Neal Stephenson’s “Snow Crash” » Uncannily similar to 2nd Life » Benjamin Edwards and Julie Mehretu’s work » If you ever had a Nintendo 64 you might re-

member the environments from Extreme G

18. The strongest quality of Perspective is that it isn’t a throwback and doesn’t wallow in historical references de-spite its medium. However, the outside edge of the drawing seems to say something like, “the drawing ends here, but you can imagine that it continues…”

10. Beyond the surrealist tropes, Perspective also has food carts; prosaic additions to the scene that are all the strang-er since again, they appear indoors.

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15. STB’s diagrammatic qualities and the current fetish for the scientific diagram in architecture at large are not somehow outside of art-historical lineages. The look of the dia-gram in the STB series, be it of weather, traffic patterns or finite element analysis, gives the drawings an air of objectivity, but they’re not without a gestural expressivity.

16. Here, the translation is from a digital-looking-object to a handmade drawing. I’m curious what the value-added is in this situation. What should we make of a digital aesthetic becoming handmade?

17. That a digital aesthetic is made by hand in both Per-spective and STB will hopefully turn out to be much more than a fetish and is definitely a common thread between these two seemingly polemical images.

19. Perhaps this is another case of purposefully rendering a digital object in a physical material while preserving—even celebrating—the computational logics that it was originally built with. On the one hand triangulation is a fact of translating curved surfaces into economically and technically feasible material constructions. On the other hand, it’s an aesthetic related to mapping and old scientific illustrations of crystals and mineralogy.

23. The mood of these drawings is more like a Philip Glass composition than early LeWitt. There is a certain structure that allows for a number of variations (very rigorous) but there is also curious push and pull between that structure and the mathematical sublime.

“what you see is what you see”If you were to write a construction set for a Sol Lewitt

drawing what you would see would be an algorithm. But then why is it so emotive…? I think this is where notions of the sublime come back in. Picturing the landscape of ma- thematics... or something. Art historians often avoid this conversation because the work is super intellectual, but it’s very present here.

26. There isn’t the assumption that they want you to know what it feels like to be there. Because there is no “there” in these drawings; they are primarily analytical.

30. He runs it through his eye and hand as another process of translation. In this way, errors, shortcomings in technique and misreadings might produce something beyond his original model. Similarly, with David’s drawings, when you run an image through a printing process (silkscreening in his case), the material translation will mediate the drawing in a way you don’t necessarily expect.

12. The obvious architectural distinction between the two sets would probably have to do with the two dominant analogies in post-war academic discourse—the linguistic and the biological. I see McEwen’s set through the lens of Post Modern architecture’s exploration of vernacular semantics and the game of weaving cultural/historical references into facades. The STB series seems to belong to a biomorphic understanding of form generation.

13. The dark side of architecture’s love affair with the dia-gram has more to do with data visualization than descrip-tions of formal processes. In a very dumb sense, I would argue that the one convention is conducive to properly architectural propositions, while graphs and charts (in the manner of Edward Tufte) are more about convincing the viewer that some body of legitimizing, extra-architectural research has been amassed. It goes hand in hand with the pressure to represent our architectural ideas as something more scientifically than aesthetically motivated.

REFERENCES: » Columbia’s “paperless” studios » Members of the Surrealist camp creep into

the conversation » Futurists » Yves Tanguy » Joan Miro’s Lunar Bird series » Umberto Boccioni » In the manner of Edward Tufte » Wade Guyton and Kelly Walker’s

collaborations » Conceptual artists in the 60s and 70s » The generation after Abstract Expressionism » Richard Long wrote these poems » Frank Stella’s dictum » A massive, light filled Thomas Moran

landscape » Neal Stephenson’s “Snow Crash” » Much like 2nd Life » Piero Della Francesca drafted

22. The STB drawings aren’t asserting themselves as scientific drawings so much as borrowing the aesthetics of certain scientific fields. Historically, the artistic appropria-tion of the dia-gram is a technique that conceptual artists in the 60s and 70s employed in order to get out of romantic notions about drawing which suggest that visual forms can approximate inner states. The generation after Abstract Expressionism came down hard on these ideas (and Jung-ian notions of the soul) and they tried suppress individual expressionism by using deadpan diagrammatic techniques or otherwise de-authoring their drawings by way of au-tomatic systems. While Peter’s drawings are significantly more “authored” than works by the generation I’m referring to, they still evince a desire to get away from the romance of the gesture. It’s a move towards the cerebral and away from the expressive. Where he lands on the spectrum is neither here nor there; it’s in the language he’s speaking. There’s something analytical about these that says that they are not meant to be read as expressions of psychological states.

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20. The pairings in Lemm’s set are beautiful, but they aren’t meant to disturb you or to short circuit meaning the way The Pictures Generation used collage. This kind of practice is more structural—building relationships between two dis-parate things and thereby suggesting emergent meanings.

[AG.] Lemm’s drawing, Fractalism, suggests a direct cor-relation between some cosmic organization and a scaled skyline. As extremely rhetorical images these kinds of prints always imply many relationships—perhaps this is a testament to David’s particular technique where he only needs to say a little in order to send us off in so many dif-ferent directions.

21. These are kind of retro—they might belong to the art discourse of the 1970s when everyone was reading Levi-Strauss and more popular figures like Joseph Campbell were trying to salvage the place of mythology in our increasingly technocratic culture. In the simplest sense, these figures were interested in “overlaying” (this is Lucy Lippard’s word) the language of ancient, mythological thought onto the contemporary landscape.

22. Historically, the artistic appropriation of the diagram is a technique that conceptual artists in the 60s and 70s employed in order to get out of romantic notions about draw-ing which suggest that visual forms can approximate inner states. The generation after Abstract Expressionism came down hard on these ideas (and Jungian notions of the soul) and they tried suppress individual expressionism by using deadpan diagrammatic techniques or otherwise de-author-ing their drawings by way of automatic systems.

REFERENCES: » The Pictures Generation » Terry Winters’ notebook collages » Alice Aycock’s drawings similarly suggest

everyone was reading Levi-Strauss » Joseph Campbell » This is Lucy Lippard’s word » Resurgence of Earth Art » Turrell’s multiple retrospectives » Michael Heizer re-appearing on the scene » Piero Della Francesca drafted

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AG. For the inaugural issue of Captions, TD has invited Hans Tursack to discuss the work of three drawings jointly selected from the Archive. We’re beginning with a drawing from Hugh McEwen’s set—to get us started, what’s your first impression?

HT. Architects are usually so afraid of color, and The Ayles bury Town Hall: Perspective study of Canteen and Entrance to Records Department has gone full “yellow submarine.” It speaks less to a predetermined color scheme than to an improvised celebration of the spectrum: the kind of 60s psy-chedelic sensibility you find in Pop painting (Lichtenstein, Rosenquist, Hamilton) or the 80s Neo-Geo crowd (Peter Halley or Jeff Koons’ recent paintings). The unfiltered qual-ity of Perspective’s color range makes it read like a disso-nant collage, whereas Modernist color theory in the manner of Albers or Kandinsky was all about creating harmonies. It’s patterned sensibility and anything-goes color scheme also makes one think of the late, expansive perspectives of Al Held.

AG. How does this drawing’s dissonance, a sense of collage and an expansive, unfiltered color spectrum affect some proposed architecture?

For instance: I’m not sure that this is an accurate per-spective with a single horizon line or station point. If it isn’t, the underlying structure of the drawing would match up well with the medium’s imprecision and even the color’s ex- tremism. Even if the perspective is accurate, I think it’s safe to say that this drawing isn’t interested in proportion or measure—the scale of windows and doors in comparison to other known and unknown objects are somewhat in flux. This would reinforce the irrelevance of a geometrically certain perspective. Maybe this is an important correlation between medium, a palpable dissonance, the irrelevance of typical drawing techniques, and the relationship of sur-faces in the architecture—curves, floor planes, and corri-dors are interwoven and thwart a coherent understanding of scale—spatial relationships, and if not the entire scene, which parts of it are proposed and which are existing.

HT. Frankly, pastel is a weird choice. Few contemporary artists (even painters) are experimenting with pastel. Fred Sandback made some brilliant works on paper with pastel as studies for his installations, but they were minor works. For whatever reason the medium never shook it’s Impres-sionistic ties (I’m thinking of Neo-Impressionists like Wolf Kahn). Oil painting, graphite drawings, even gouache and watercolor have been re-invented several times over in the past century. Pastel is one of the few mediums, like etching,

that still feels impossibly weighed-down by the baggage of European easel painting.

When I first saw Perspective, I thought it was colored pencil given its sharp edges and hard lines. Pastel is at its best when blended, but maybe it’s better to talk about my first impression—I immediately thought of Michael Graves’ amazing elevations from the 70s and 80s. He drew in color because his elevations were about color; albeit artificial, surface coloration. Po Mo was all about imaging architecture and I think Perspective evinces an awareness of that history.

AG. “Imaging” architecture is definitely something we’re going to have to come back to, following my previous com-ments about the visual and spatial dissonance reinforced by using a medium that doesn’t lend itself to sharp edges or fine points, Perspective also neither abandons a sense of reality (shade and shadow are believable), nor does it follow it through. Flat color, a shaking hand, confusing spa-tial depth, and ambitious layering of volumes encroaching overhead—all suggest a greater interest in this drawing’s rhetorical focus. Unlike Graves’ elevations, there is nothing in this particular drawing to suggest the author intends or desires to have this built.

HT. I mentioned the Post-Modern allusions, but I think there is more to the fantastical utopian quality of space in Perspective. The exuberant patterns, technicolor palette, perspective games, and stage-set quality of the architec-ture reminds me more of Nintendo 64/Playstation graphics than Charles Moore.

AG. Where does this “fantastical utopian impulse” appear in the the specific qualities and techniques of drawings? I tend to find that appeals to “Utopia” and this “stage-set quality” always exist together.

HT. Well first, it evokes the utopian because of its urban scale: it seems to be zooming into one moment of a broad-er townscape. This seems evident not only because of the layers of volumes or how it is cropped, but in the ambi- valent relationship between indoors and outdoors. And so second there is the use of the ground plane—the expan-sive grid that extends through a threshold into a building’s enclosure, something which couldn’t or maybe just wouldn’t happen if the project weren’t conceived as a larger whole and in a way that transgressed property boundaries. This indoor/outdoor ambiguity also evokes something of an outdoor mall or a town square in a planned community. And then there are the lollipop colors that also evoke theme

parks and a sense of the fantastic; we might be looking at a scene from Celebration, Florida.

AG. Why does Utopian tend to mean fantastical? I don’t think that there is any reason they ought to be so nearly synonymous. The inability to construct such a non-place is beside the point—the utopias ought to influence reality. And while the fantastical utopia is one way to do this, it is only one rhetorical strategy among many.

The title of this drawing claims a fairly banal scene: a perspectival view inside one part of a larger design pro-posal, as if the author wanted to show what the project would be like there. But, this is only in reference to the title; and, without it, the drawing carries more weight. Given the difference between drawings that describe a project—that come after the project has been designed—and drawings that design a project or help to flesh-out during the design process, where does Perspective fall?

HT. This drawing is working to flesh out the project. But to go back, there is a certain cynicism in the fantasy of this drawing and the use of computer-inspired graphic space. The image terminates in an ominous black doorway that’s very 19th century macabre. And with its seeming lack of in-tention to lead towards construction it has a cynical humor to it that acts more like a comment on Utopian schemes than a proposal for one.

Perspective carries a reference to surrealism with the open plaza terminating in the house with the black doorway that is evocative of De Chirico’s paintings of vacant space. And then there is this purple, Henry Moore-like object in the middle ground—I’m unsure what it’s doing there. Be-yond the surrealist tropes, Perspective also has food carts: prosaic additions to the scene that are all the stranger since, again, they appear indoors.

Paper architecture has historically had a curious rela-tionship with Surrealism and Early Modernist abstraction. I’ve always found it strange for example, that Cooper [Union]’s program, under Hejduk, developed an entire pedagogy in the 1960s and 70s by looking at European ea-sel painting from the first half of the 20th Century. It’s es-pecially strange when you consider all that was happening in New York, and specifically in Lower Manhattan during that time (right at the school’s doorstep). Koolhaas revis-iting Dali in the 1970s was a similarly bizarre example of an architect making a speculative project with hackneyed painting references.

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AG. Let’s move onto to another drawing and try to draw out some comparisons and parallels.

HT. Peter Jellitsch’s drawing set caught my eye when look-ing through the Archive as another group of outliers. How-ever, moving from McEwen’s Perspective I’m wondering if the gulf might be too large to consider the STB drawing series as part of a coherent conversation. The obvious ar-chitectural distinction between the two sets would proba-bly have to do with the two dominant analogies in post-war academic discourse—the linguistic and the biological. I see McEwen’s set through the lens of Post Modern archi-tecture’s exploration of vernacular semantics and the game of weaving cultural/historical references into facades. The STB series seems to belong to a biomorphic understanding of form generation. I’m certainly no expert on this history (or the crowd surrounding the early “paperless” studios at Columbia), but I sense a certain sympathy towards recent pseudo-scientific conversations around figures like D’Arcy Thompson; form as a diagram of forces and whatnot.

I’m interested in the way the drawings privilege a kind of fetal stage - the figures seem to be frozen in a state of becoming. Again, members of the Surrealist camp creep into the conversation as do some Futurists; Yves Tanguy, Joan Miro’s Lunar Bird series and Umberto Boccioni come to mind.

AG. I can’t help but think its funny that today we can see diagrams of arrows and think biomorphism, but maybe it only speaks to a popular appropriation of scientific dia-grams not just in architecture.

HT. The dark side of architecture’s love affair with the dia gram has more to do with data visualization than descrip-tions of formal processes. In a very dumb sense I would argue that the one convention is conducive to proper architectural propositions, while graphs and charts (in the manner of Edward Tufte) are more about convincing the viewer that some body of legitimizing, extra-architectural research has been amassed. One of my studio professors pointed out that we generally make posters more than drawings in architecture school today. I can’t imagine a more bureaucratized representational medium than the poster, but it goes hand in hand with the pressure to represent our architectural ideas as something more scientifically than aesthetically motivated.

I wouldn’t want to romanticize material-based representational techniques for their own sake, but I would advocate any medium that makes room for the calculated ambiguity that you find in drawings and certain model- making processes. I’m optimistic about the possibility of

staging randomness and open ended processes in computers. Pairing material and digital representational con-ventions, or better, setting them against one another also seems like a worthwhile project. Wade Guyton and Kelly Walker’s collaborations take advantage of sketchy trans- lations from Photoshop to canvas in productive ways. For architects, opening up the design-end of software seems like another way to approximate the freedom of material experiments—anything to allow for errors, glitches and emergent images.

It’s worth pointing out that STB’s diagrammatic qualities, and the current fetish for the scientific diagram in archi-tecture at large are not somehow outside of art-historical lineages. The look of the diagram in the STB series, be it of weather, traffic patterns or finite element analysis, gives the drawings an air of objectivity, but they’re not without a gestural expressivity.

Here, the translation is from a digital-looking object to a handmade drawing. I’m curious what the value-added is in this situation. What should we make of a digital aesthetic becoming handmade?

AG. Asking how a digital aesthetic is materialized touches on the topic of fabrication that monopolizes the conversa-tion of contemporary digital representation, but it opens up the conversation from a very different vantage point. The fabrication of designs is a baseline in architecture; tech-nology is a means to our architectural ends, but isn’t itself architecture.

And so, particularly with such an interest being given to form and is supposed capacities, discussing fabrication via the aesthetics it assumes (and gleefully carries forward) opens up a line of criticism so far untouched.

HT. That a digital aesthetic is made by hand in both Per-spective and STB will hopefully turn out to be much more than a fetish and is definitely a common thread between these two seemingly polemical images. Perspective, as I mentioned before, appears more like the graphics from Nintendo 64 or maybe 2nd Life; whereas STB could be a screenshot from a Rhino model.

The strongest quality of Perspective, is that it isn’t a throwback and doesn’t wallow in historical references de-spite its medium. However, the outside edge of the draw-ing seems to say something like, “the drawing ends here, but you can imagine that it continues…” and for better or worse, this is something of a throwback. That edge aside, both Perspective and STB are able to use their method of drawing for the benefits they offer while jettisoning most of their baggage. It is important to play up what is useful and generative about a drawing method.

AG. Jellitsch also built this model for an exhibition on Bleeker Street. It speaks to our earlier conversation when you look at the photograph of the model from above.

HT. It’s a beautiful object. I wonder what to make of the triangulations. Perhaps this is another case of purposefully rendering a digital object in a physical material while preserving—even celebrating—the computational logics that it was originally built with. Stan Allen’s recent book Landform Building explores the aesthetics architectural simulations of landscape. Curiously, there are a number of projects with similarly barque triangulated ground planes. On the one hand triangulation is a fact of translating cur-ved surfaces into economically and technically feasible material constructions. On the other hand, it’s an aesthetic related to mapping and old scientific illustrations of crystals and mineralogy.

AG. How does David Lemm’s set fit into this context?

HT. I immediately associate these drawings with a history of collage practices. The pairings in Lemm’s set are beautiful, but they aren’t meant to disturb you or to short circuit meaning the way The Pictures Generation used collage. This kind of practice is more structural—building relation-ships between two disparate things and thereby suggesting emergent meanings. There was a show at Matthew Marks in New York last year of Terry Winters’ notebook collages that comes to mind.

We could have a whole conversation about the difference between collaging two objects next to one another on a pic- ture plane vs. overlaying images and using transparencies. But I don’t know what to make of the appropriation of mea-suring conventions and scientific imagery. That was also a theme in the Winters show. Alice Aycock’s drawings simi-larly suggest that science and mythology are not incongru-ous, just two separate systems…

AG. Lemm’s drawing, Fractalism, suggests a direct correlation between some cosmic organization and a scaled sky-line. As extremely rhetorical images these kinds of prints always imply many relationships—perhaps this is a testa-ment to David’s particular technique where he only needs to say a little in order to send us off in so many different directions all of which seem legitimate, or at least legiti-mate enough to continue talking about whether or not it’s meaningful.

HT. These are kind of retro—they might belong to the art discourse of the 1970s when everyone was reading Levi-Strauss and more popular figures like Joseph Campbell

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were trying to salvage the place of mythology in our increasingly technocratic culture. In the simplest sense, these figures were interested “overlaying” (this is Lucy Lippard’s word) the language of ancient, mythological thought onto the contemporary landscape. There has been a strange resurgence of Earth Art in recent years with Turrell’s multiple retrospectives and the anticipation surrounding the opening of Roden Crater. Michael Heizer re-appearing on the scene with his massive LACMA installation was another surprise.

AG. Let’s step back… Instead of interpreting Lemm’s draw-ings and discussing their potential meaning, let’s look at how they are specifically drawn and talk about how those techniques are relating these three drawing sets together.

What is it about their varying techniques that is leading us into different modes of interpretation? Before moving back to Hugh’s historical context, let’s consider this about the pseudo-scientific in Peter’s drawings. There is probably not anything rigorously scientific about these drawings.

HT. The STB drawings aren’t asserting themselves as scientific drawings so much as borrowing the aesthetics of certain scientific fields.

AG. Do you think they are looking for “accuracy”; is it something of a contemporary zeitgeist that a nude figure wouldn’t provide.

HT. Well, historically the artistic appropriation of the diagram is a technique that conceptual artists in the 60s and 70s employed in order to get out of romantic notions about drawing which suggest that visual forms can ap-proximate inner states. In psychoanalytic terms, there was this idea that the drawing could act as some sort of vessel for expressions of the unconscious. The generation after Abstract Expressionism came down hard on these ideas (and Jungian notions of the soul) and they tried suppress individual expressionism by using deadpan diagrammatic techniques or otherwise de-authoring their drawings by way of automatic systems.

While Peter’s drawings are significantly more “authored” than works by the generation I’m referring to, they still evince a desire to get away from the romance of the ges-ture. It’s a move towards the cerebral and away from the expressive. Where he lands on the spectrum is neither here nor there; it’s in the language he’s speaking. There’s some-thing analytical about these that says that they are not meant to be read as expressions of psychological states.

AG. Richard Long wrote these poems during long walks both of which were based on very structured principles—for instance, he might write down a single word per hour during a 24 hour walk. For one particular project he exhi- bited a topographic map of 12 mountain peaks with the words “one hour” pasted over each summit. This implies that he spent 12 hours on 12 peaks—it’s oddly structural and analytic in execution and representation, but at the same time very psychologically evocative. One can easily imagine him sitting on a rock at each peak for an hour surrounded by all that space; meanwhile, you’re looking at a topographic map and the words “one hour.”

HT. And, that’s definitely not outside of 19th century no-tions of the sublime.

AG. Jellitsch’s series, A Moment Described by 100 Arrows in 5 Variations, reminds me of Long’s projects. It is as if he walked through a door, said, “hmm, that was an interest-ing moment; I wonder what that moment would look like in the way that I draw things?” And then after he drew it he thought he’d try it again. But then, this analytic representa-tion has five variations of the same moment.

HT. It looks like a nod to Sol Lewitt’s manual algorithms—an instruction set, but you make a good point. The mood of these drawings is more like a Philip Glass composition than early LeWitt. There is a certain structure that allows for a number of variations (very rigorous) but there is also curious push and pull between that structure and the mathematical sublime —a very real presence in much Con-ceptual and Minimal art. The rhetoric surrounding these movements was all about the end of metaphor, the process of de-authoring and staging unmediated experiences of material things; Frank Stella’s dictum “what you see is what you see” is the epitome of this attitude.

If you were to write a construction set for a Sol Lewitt drawing what you would see would be an algorithm. But then why is it so emotive…? I think this is where notions of the sublime come back in. Picturing the landscape of math- ematics... or something. Art historians often avoid this conversation because the work is super intellectual, but it’s very present here.

The relationship between Conceptual Art, Minimalism, Serial Art and the sublime spaces of science fiction is an undercooked narrative.

But to come back to Philip Glass for a moment, I brought him up as an example of someone working with systems and rigorous compositional structures who nevertheless makes very emotional work, even movie scores.

AG. Well that makes sense… Data crunching has the same incomprehensible terror as a massive, light-filled Thomas Moran landscape, except it’s completely internal, invisible, and always accruing…

HT. Science fiction novels can brilliantly render those land-scapes. I’m thinking of Neal Stephenson’s “Snow Crash” —have you ever dorked out and read that? It’s amazing, Stephenson imagines a “metaverse” much like 2nd Life. Figures move about in a massive landscape free from many natural laws, but property is still bought and sold by the square foot.

AG. Well that’s a perfect segue back to McEwen’s draw-ings. Do you follow an element of the sublime back into Perspective?

HT. I think it’s inevitable. I don’t think that I’ve ever seen a “cold” perspective.

AG. With his “direct method” of perspective, Piero Della Francesca drafted each of his figures rotating in space before he painted them. It’s exactly what NURBS modeling came out of, and the criticism of Piero’s paintings is that they are cold.

This is a tangent, but it speaks to the “objectivity” of analytic drawing techniques and their relationship to per-spective and whether or not perspective is a method of pic-turing that is so imbued with environmental concerns that it isn’t possible to make them purely objective.

For instance, when you look at Peter’s drawing and you look at David’s drawing there isn’t the assumption that they want you to know what it feels like to be there. Because there is no “there” in these drawings; they are primarily analytical.26 However, I would guess that Piero’s drawings are in actuality far more analytical that either Peter’s or Da- vid’s drawings.

But I cut you off. We were about the talk about Hugh’s drawings relationship to the sublime. I was struck by the endless perspective you described in Snow Crash.

HT. It’s sublime. It’s also banal. Snow Crash, written in the early 90’s, is uncannily similar to 2nd Life. There’s junk everywhere—the novel revels in the capitalist trash bin of cyber space. Ads all over the place. Your visual field is com-pletely saturated with signage.

His vision of the real-world LA in the near future is like a horrible theme park on steroids. Reading it I often thought of Benjamin Edwards and Julie Mehretu’s work; two contemporary painters interested in putting an image to invisible flows of information and capital and the infrastructure that

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facilitates that movement. McEwen’s drawings are definite-ly channeling a similar space. I find it a little depressing.

AG. Depressing in that he might be suggesting that this should be real and we should build urban spaces like this?

HT. Depressing in its anything goes collage mentality. I for- got who said it, but someone noted that Colin Rowe’s Col-lage City essay was really more of an apology for the way things are and not a suggestion of how things could be or a radically new way of looking at urbanism. Rather than difference and surprise and the pleasure of juxtaposition, visionary collage urbanists like Edwards see the future city as more Toll Brothers and KPF.

The details in McEwen’s drawings make the point—you find porta potties, food carts, guardrails, metal detectors, and too many competing patterns and colors. It’s all the infrastructure of a theme park or a shopping mall, but with none of the people. Programmatically his spaces seem gear- ed towards passive entertainment. As with most theme parks, the space looks, at first, like a really exciting montage of fantasies and desires, but you soon realize that there’s only one way to experience them and that’s passively. None of these spaces seem particularly conducive to different kinds of experiences.

AG. So much excess that whatever you do in that place it would be absorbed into the background

HT. There’s definitely something eerie about McEwen’s en-tertainment city. It’s not dystopian enough though. Where are the drones? The patterns are pretty unsettling. They seem detached even from the surfaces of the built environ-ment; like they were projected onto the architecture. If you ever had a Nintendo 64 you might remember the environ-ments from Extreme G.

AG. The common line we’ve drawn is that drafters have ta- ken digital aesthetics and drawn them by hand. This seems to be a relatively recent phenomenon in architectural draw-ing. The only reason to re-draw an existing drawing with another method is that you believe something will be added in the process of, in this case, taking the digital and passing it back through your hands. I love the details of Jellitsch’s drawings where he shows all of the arrows running into one another in the folds to the point that they become illegible. But, is this just fetish?

HT. No, Jellitsch is treating himself as a mediating device. He might have a subject represented in a computer, and then he runs it through his eye and hand as another pro

cess of translation. In this way, errors, shortcomings in technique and misreadings might produce something beyond his original model. Similarly, with David’s drawings, when you run an image through a printing process (silkscreening in his case), the material translation will mediate the drawing in a way you don’t necessarily expect—you’ll get ran- dom splotches of color, misregistrations, the image may fade; in etching you can run “ghost prints” with the ink left on the plate after one press.

Peter is thus experimenting with himself as a kind print-ing process (maybe), running the 3d model back through his hand and eye.

AG. And what about Hugh and his translation from a Sketch- up model to a hand rendered perspective?

HT. McEwen’s drawings strike me as more self conscious in terms of their medium and the fabric of historical references they weave. Sketchup, in this case, is probably more of a drafting aid. He could have just as easily made a physical maquette to figure the space.

I would guess that in the STB series, the artist is inten-tionally looking for errors or possibilities that emerge in his process. Some teachers say “don’t draw it unless you see it” and others suggest drawing as a means of “finding out.” The STB series has a Pontormo-ish quality of being unfin-ished—as though the debris and construction lines might lead to the next drawing.

I should be careful though, this is a lot of speculation about process.

AG. What I find so fascinating here—again touching back on fabrication—is that this foregrounds the connection between the digital and the physical world, which is a very contemporary and very real problem. Computers offer us a number of design and imaging possibilities, but the problem is always how to get it back into physical space. And oddly enough, these very practical concerns of trans-lation—that seem to be a fundamentally architectural issue—bring aesthetics back into the foreground of the conversation.

HT. The fabrication movement is a curious sub-genre in contemporary architecture. It participates in histories of sculpture and installation (and lends itself especially to cus- tom facade design) but I think most in the art world would see such constructions as outsider-sculpture; somehow lacking the criticality and historical awareness art students are supposed to posses. Whether this is a legitimate char-acterization of the movement (I’m thinking of practices like Aranda Lasch or figures like Marc Fornes or Brandon Clif-

ford) would be worth discussing. My personal view is that architects interested in fabricating with digital tools gen-erally undervalue certain stages in the process where the material exercise feeds back into the digital model; as though the sanded, primed and immaculately finished 3D- print was more or less always the endgame of the process. West Coast Minimalists used to be accused of a similar “finish fetish.”

I think a strength of the drawings we’ve been discuss-ing is their different approaches to process as something open-ended; the physical, the digital and the cultural and historical talking back to one another. When a viewer is invited to participate in the conversation as another com-ponent of the process, then you really have something.

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