ABSTRACT
The 1980s witnessed a sudden rise of writing and thinking on architectural drawings and their conventions. At about the same time, there also emerged a trend of a new kind of presentational drawing in architecture—complex to the point of undecipherability, graphically sophisticated, and sometimes seemingly done for its own sake rather than to represent a particular architectural project. Reviewing the texts on drawings from this period leads us to two important insights about the use of presentational drawings in architectural practice and their relation to theory—that making of architectural drawings can constitute practice in its own right and that the drawings are not simply made to illustrate how particular theoretical doctrines are embedded within designs, but rather are means to formulate theory. Theory, in short, appears to lag practice and to respond to it. These insights open up some interesting lines of inquiry about changes in Korean architectural practice in the late 1980s and early 1990s of the last century.
Keywords: Drawing Conventions, Axonometric Drawing, The Essex School, The New York Five, Italian Neo-Rationalists, Robin Evans, Space, Architecture and Culture
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Sonit Bafna is associate professor of architecture at Georgia Institute of Technology, where he works on the visual and spatial morphology of buildings and its relation to human psychology and aesthetics. He is currently working on a book titled Imaginative Reasoning in the Shaping of Buildings.