Tableaux Vivants: Tables and Stages of Architectural Striving

Abstract This essay explores the worktables of architects, especially architecture students, as crucial sites of dramatic knowledge construction. More than an instrumental platform for drawing operations, the space and occasion of worktables provide an immersive, allusive, and speculative environment for rehearsing architectural performances, negotiating divergent desires, and conjuring meaningful worlds. As this essay argues through a demonstrative matrix of examples, the architect’s worktable serves as a miniature theater: a physically intimate place, which – when inhabited imaginatively – suggestively opens up as an expansive social space of dramatic transformation, mediation, and revelation. Moreover, the table surface and setting perform as in-situ archives, preserving – through traces of interaction and circumstantial evidence – a partial record of the very design practices they support.