Dismantling the Built Drawing: Working with Mood in Architectural Design.

Abstract

From the late Middle Ages onward an emphasis on the rational and the technical aspects of design and design drawing gained hold of architectural practice. In this transformation, the phenomenon of mood has been frequently overlooked or seen as something to be added on to a design; yet the fundamental grounding of mood, as described in Martin Heidegger's philosophy, is anything but secondary to our experience of the world. In fact, other facilities such as embodied experience, tactile and spatial awareness, and temporal perception all spring from the basic encounter with mood. In this article I describe how a lack of attunement to, and limited ability with, the various manifestations of mood perpetuates a disconnection between the architectural drawing and real buildings. I argue that as long as educational frameworks relegate the emotional and experiential to the place of a supplement, then our design processes will continue to unconsciously promote environments of thinness and superficiality.