Architectural Drawings as Investigating Devices

Architectural Drawings as Investigating Devices explores how the changing modes of representation in architecture and urbanism relate to the transformation of how the addressees of architecture and urbanism are conceived.

The book diagnoses the dominant epistemological debates in architecture and urbanism during the 20th and 21st centuries. It traces their transformations, paying special attention to Le Corbusier and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s preference for perspective representation, the diagrams of Team 10 architects, and critiques of functionalism.

There is also an examination of the upgrade of the artefactual value of architectural drawings in the works of Aldo Rossi, John Hejduk, Peter Eisenman, and Oswald Mathias Ungers. Additionally, the book explores the reinvention of architectural programmes through the event in Bernard Tschumi and the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA).

Particular emphasis is placed on the spirit of truth and clarity in modernist architecture, the relationship between the individual and the community in post-war era architecture, the decodification of the design process as syntactic analogy, and the paradigm of autonomy in the 1970s and 1980s architecture. It also addresses the concern about the dynamic character of urban conditions and the potentialities hidden in architectural programme in the post-autonomy era.

This book is based on extensive archival research in Canada, the USA, and Europe, and will be of interest to architects, artists, researchers, and students in architecture, architectural history, theory, cultural theory, philosophy, and aesthetics.