Inhabitation, difference, performance: Architectural linearity in three movements

Abstract

This article questions the temporal and material limitations of architectural representation, as they emerge through the problematic relationship between architectural drawing, considered as a static object of fixed convention and space as an inherently kinetic domain. It reflects on the large-scale drawing Weaving Lines/Looming Narratives (WL/LN, 2013), to propose a way of bringing together the kinetic dimensions of architectural space and architectural drawing. The city is a territorial condition that, since modernity, has come to define a kinetic field of spatial and temporal complexity. The challenges that this complexity entails for architectural drawing are used here to question the fixity of drawing conventions, and expand architecture’s range of concerns to the transitory conditions of space that emerge between the stabilizing effects of order(s) and the spontaneity of events. The question of kinetic space places under new light the discrepancies between the real and the representational by underlining the mobility of both viewer and environment; spectacle and spectator. This article interrogates architectural linearity to propose ways of transversally representing the web of movements that form the contemporary city as well as the making of architectural drawing. Following the deconstructive approaches to the production of meaning of the late twentieth century, and drawing form Catherine Ingraham’s study of architectural linearity, the article frames drawing as a performative practice rather than a systematic language, and a representational field of action rather than order.