2009 symposium brochure11.indd


2009 Interstices Under Construction Symposium

Auckland, Friday 13 to Sunday 15 November

The Tracti on of Drawing

Manus Occulata in Andrea Alciato (1546) Emblematum libellus, Venice (negative)



Interstices Under Construction: 
“The Traction of Drawing” is 
jointly organised by the School 
of Architecture and Planning, 
The University of Auckland and 
the School of Art and Design, 
AUT University (Tina Engels-
Schwarzpaul and Ross Jenner).

The Traction of Drawing

Why raise the issue of drawing again? With 
the proliferation and maturation of digital 
technologies, what is the use of the hand and 
the traces it makes on clay, stone, wood or 
paper? This symposium seeks to examine the 
technologies of drawing – their marks, lines, 
scratches, furrows, incisions, touches, dots 
and dashes, inscriptions, string lines, stains and 
blotches; pencilled, inked, chalked, brushed, 
illuminated or erased on diverse grounds.

What is made in acts of drawing comes 
into being through the sapience of a facture, 
not through Cartesian processes of mathème. 
Conceived thus, drawing is based on an inti-
mate knowledge of material manifestations.
Tangible lines become carriers of fl uid and 
invisible links that guide intangible thought. 
Pulling in pieces of geometry, geology, phi-
losophy, politics, biography, biology, mythology, 
and philology from alien fi elds, one should 
write and draw with hesitation, discovering 
the multiple aspects of graphesis, a generative 
graphic process understood in its slow mak-
ing. The fruitful vagueness of graphesis comes 
from the line’s ambiguity. Lines are heuristic 
devices, as a line of writing, a line in a draw-
ing, or the pulling of a line on a construction 
site. Architecture results from their misce-
genation: images are written and words are 
drafted; cultural events and material expres-
sions cross. Graphesis is a course of actions, 
factures which actualize future and past.

The ink’s luminosity, graphite’s fatness, 
watercolour’s lightness, tempera’s density, the 
screen’s pixellation, the fl exibility or rigid-
ity of supports … readers of the drawings 
indirectly see and savour them all. They foster 
“inferences from facture”.  To consider an 
artefact in terms of its facture is to consider 

it as a record of its own having been made. 
“The Traction of Drawing” will examine the 
technologies of drawing and how they exte-
riorise the mind and emotions, makes present 
the invisible. How they forecast, predict and 
aim at a destination. How drawing throws 
itself forward in orthogonal or oblique lines; 
how it severs, as in sections and plans. How it  
seeks enactment and how it translates: from 
drawing to building and building to drawing.  

The keynote address by Prof. Marco Fra-
scari (Carleton University, Ottawa), “Drawing: 
The Sapience of Facture and the Neurological 
Paradigm”, draws on his latest book, a study 
of the interface between traditional drawing 
experiences and contemporary digital exper-
tise during the conception of buildings. 

Assoc. Prof. Laurence Simmons’ (The Uni-
versity of Auckland) keynote address “Draw-
ing has always been more than drawing” will 
investigate the Italian artist Valerio Adami’s 
rendering of Jacques Derrida’s texts.



Friday 13 November

Opening Address
Jenny Dixon
Dean of NICAI,  The University of Auckland

Patrick Clifford
President Elect of the New Zealand Institute 
of Architects

Drawing Practice Today
with Jessica Barter, Pip Cheshire, Patrick Clif-
ford, Lynda Simmons, Simon Twose
Chair: Fleur Palmer

Drinks & Launch:
Interstices10: On Adam’s House in the Pacifi c

Introduction to 
Professor Marco Frascari
Ross Jenner

Drawing:  The Sapience of Facture 
and the Neurological Paradigm
Marco Frascari

Dinner
Vivace Restaurant, Level 1, 50 High Street, 
Auckland

4:00 - 4:30 pm

4:30  - 6:00 pm

6:00 - 6:45 pm

6:45 - 7:00 pm

7:00 - 8:00 pm

Design Theatre, Conference Centre
The University of Auckland

8:30 pm

Saturday 14 November

Presenting | Making Visible
1. Drawing Imagination and the Imagination 
of Drawing
Federica Goffi 

2. Seeing In Section
Shelley F. Martin

3. Summoning Daena
Stephen Loo

Morning Tea

Mediation | Intersection
1. “To Keep the Clay Moist”
Ross Jenner

2. Takohi
‘Okusitino Māhina

3.Tatau
Sēmisi F. Potauaine

Lunch
at the Conference Centre 

9:00 - 10:30 am

10:30 - 11:00 am

11:00 - 12:30 pm

12:30 - 1:30 pm

Design Theatre, Conference Centre
The University of Auckland



Saturday 14 November

Enactment | Translation
1. Against Drawing
Albert L. Refi ti

2. Previous Enrolments
Carl Douglas

3. a priori / a posteriori
Michael Milojevic

Afternoon Tea

Exteriorisation | Representation

1. Scale as the Representation of an Idea
Susan Hedges

2. Architectural Drawings Do Not Represent 
Anything
Mike Linzey

3. Drawing Distinctions
Linda Tyler

Drinks

“Drawing has always been more 
than drawing”: 
Derrida and disegno
Laurence Simmons

Dinner
at O’ Sarracino, 3-5 Mount Eden Road, 
Auckland 

1:30 - 3:00 pm

3:00 - 3:30 pm

3:30 - 5:00 pm

5:00 - 6:00 pm

Design Theatre, Conference Centre
The University of Auckland

6:00 - 7:00 pm

Saturday 14 November

Planning 619, School of Architecture and Plan-
ning, The University of Auckland

3:30 - 5:00 pm Graphesis | Facture

1. Drawing the Haunting
Philippe Campays & Stephanie Liddicoat

2. Blank Sheet: The pristine
Sou Muy Ly

3. The Limitless Field
Katica Pedisic

7:30 pm



Sunday 15 November

Techniques | Technologies

1.  Folded Space
Andrew Barrie

2. Maintaining the Abstract Critical Facility
Michael Davis

3. Diagnostic Imagings and Invisibilities
Christine McCarthy

ALR5, School of Architecture and Planning
The University of Auckland

Miscegenation | Migration

1. Entrails
Michael Chapman

2. Scratches in Space-Time
Kate Linzey

3. Fixed: Techniques of drawing 
Deborah Cain

Design Theatre, Conference Centre
The University of Auckland 

Concluding Comments
Marco Frascari

Lunch
Yum Cha at Dynasty Chinese Restaurant
57-59 Wakefi eld Street, Auckland

10:00 - 11:30 am

11:30 am

12:30 - 1:30 pm

Design Theatre, Conference Centre
The University of Auckland

Folded Space

Andrew Barrie

In Edo period Japan (1603-1868), con-
struction was carried out by family-based 
carpentry workshops. Building design was 
determined more by conventions and practi-
cal constraints than by the arbitrary design 
intentions of the carpenter. These conven-
tions were embodied in the kiwari systems 
of proportions and modules that guided 
traditional practice and a practiced builder 
could visualize and construct an entire build-
ing using a just a diagrammatic plan and his 
measuring tools; detailed architectural draw-
ings were not necessary.

The ruling elite, however, created certain 
building types for which the predetermined 
patterns were set aside and innovation was 
encouraged, notably those built in the sukiya 
style. The most important infl uence on sukiya 
architecture was the teahouse. These small 
spaces were intended to create a heightened 
sense of awareness in their occupants, and 
their design and construction demanded 
intense consideration and attention to detail. 
In order to consider and communicate such 
detailed design intentions, a new type of 
drawing emerged.

Okoshi-ezu—literally “folding draw-
ing”—were models made from sheets of 
paper cut to the shape of walls fi xed onto a 
detailed plan drawing. Holes were cut into 
the walls for windows and openings, and 
minor elements such as shutters, raised 
fl oors, and steps were sometimes fi xed into 
place on the walls. Drawn onto both sides of 
the paper walls were the various elements 
of the room—structural members, windows, 
shelves, fi ttings, wall surfaces and the like. 
Stored fl at, the models were erected by fold-
ing the walls up and fi xing them into place 

with tabs and slots. This resulting representa-
tion is at once a three-dimensional drawing 
and a collapsible, portable model.

This paper will trace the development 
of the okoshi-ezu technique, and examine its 
particular representational qualities, and use 
these as the basis for a reading of certain 
streams of development in contemporary 
architecture. 

Andrew Barrie is an Auckland-based prac-
titioner and Professor at The University of 
Auckland School of Architecture and Planning. 
After completing doctoral studies at Tokyo 
University in 2002, he spent several years 
working at Toyo Ito & Associates. On return-
ing to New Zealand, he worked at Cheshire 
Architects in Auckland, and is a regular con-
tributor to architecture and design journals. 
He has authored two books on the work of 
Toyo Ito.

10:00 - 11:30 am



Deborah Cain

The focus of this paper will be two artists 
who have used the process of tattooing as a 
way of engaging with diverse notions of mark 
making and its documentation. Specifi cally, 
Lisa Benson’s Twenty Minute Spin (DVD, 2006) 
will be juxtaposed with the digital presenta-
tions of Tagny Duff’s Living Viral Tattoos (2008) 
and her Cryobook Archives (2009). Both these 
artists provide opportunities to consider the 
techniques of drawing on bodies as vectors of 
information, and involve issues of technology 
and sculpture, of staining skin, and its display. 
While Duff’s initial production was located in 
the bio-technology laboratory and Benson’s 
work was done in the art gallery under tat-
too-parlour conditions, both are mediated by 
their complicit forms of exhibition, incorpo-
rating performative aspects that include shifts 
in space and viewing.

Benson’s work allows us to follow the 
rhythm of the tattooist marking the white 
line on a body part and mesmerizes the 
viewer into spending time watching the DVD 
fi lm footage. In contrast with this, Duff’s work 
with living tissue involves bio-technologies 
and the imprintation of viral cells. Looking at 
such work in its digital form is different to 
‘being-there’ in the presence of pathogens as 
when Duff moves from the lab to the exhibi-
tion space. Whereas, the sterile environment 
of the tattooist is temporarily moved to the 
gallery for the making of Benson’s Twenty 
Minute Spin.

Rather than technologies of digital 
manipulation, both these art works concern 
the archival format for their imaging, but are 
different in their temporal outcomes. And, 

although fi xed at a point in their production 
on skin, they are differently prone to the 
natural elements of fading and decay. The rela-
tions of skin, technique, and tattoo, to further 
conceptual ideas about dermagrapisms are a 
key part of my discussion.

Deborah Cain teaches in Foundation Stud-
ies at the University of Waikato. She was 
awarded her doctorate in Art History by The 
University of Auckland in 2007, for a thesis 
titled Semiotics of Self: Refl ections on the Work 
of Louise Bourgeois. She has published articles 
in Third Text, SITES, Art New Zealand, and other 
locations, and has produced an experimental 
video on the artistic and poetic work of John 
Pule. 

Fixed: Techniques of drawing on skin, and other surfaces Drawing the Haunting

Philippe Campays & Stephanie Liddicoat

Haunted spaces can be defi ned as places that 
hold high emotive content. This paper argues 
that the process of drawing the invisible 
conditions of architectural space, such as air, 
temperature and moisture, can be employed 
as a strategy to develop knowledge about 
the concept of mood. This paper examines 
one project of visual representation of mood 
determinants in the haunted space. In this 
exploration, the creation of visual images 
engages the viewer in the experience of the 
haunting itself. This then promotes a greater 
understanding of such phenomena. Overall, 
the project’s intention is to fi nd ways of 
mapping, decoding and eventually translating 
scientifi cally collected environmental data 
acquired from this ‘spirit of place’ into archi-
tectural representation. 

Initial fi ndings from this interdisciplinary 
project link the concept of mood and ghost 
to emotion, interiority of body and space 
and to the notion of time. This relationship 
then becomes central to the representational 
investigation of the embodied emotional 
experience in the haunted space. The project 
generated representations of the surveyed 
haunted environment as an experiential 
system. Multiple screenshots were projected 
to transport the viewer to the different sites 
and time frames where emotional convey-
ance was refl ected by solidity of form. Metric 
data governed the solidity of the geometry. 
As a result of this process, an aura of the rep-
resented space appeared. The authenticity of 
the aura oscillated between an archaic form 
resulting from a subconscious process and a 
designed spectacle. 

The power of drawing aesthetics on the 
emotional experience that it can trigger is an 
issue raised in the abstract expressionist tra-
dition. In this project, the drawing, originally 
a tool of interpretation and understanding of 
mood in the domain of ghost, appeared itself 
as a representational artifact. It became the 
embodied haunting, objectifi ed. This project 
therefore questions whether the viewer’s 
experience of visual images can lead to the 
experience of the haunting itself. 

Philippe Campays received his architec-
tural education in Paris at the Ecole Speciale 
d’Architecture. In 2001 he was awarded a 
Masters degree by thesis from The University 
of Auckland. He is currently lecturer at the 
School of Architecture at Victoria University 
of Wellington. Philippe has lectured in Paris, 
Auckland and Wellington and has practiced 
architecture in Burundi, Africa, throughout 
the South Pacifi c, Australia and New Zealand.



Entrails: Drawing and architectural space 
in the transgressive experiments of Dada
Michael Chapman

George Baker argues that the well-known 
Dada experiments with drawing were 
conscious and deliberate movements away 
from the medium of drawing; an attempt, in 
the work of Francis Picabia in particular, to 
escape the confi nes and values attached and 
specifi c to the medium of drawing. There is 
a fascination, to the point of obsession, with 
architectural space in the drawings of the 
Dada movement: from the crude scratchings 
on the walls of the Cabaret Voltaire to the 
projected shadows and tracery of Duchamp’s 
Large Glass, architectural space serves as the 
primary canvas through which Dada experi-
ments with space were explored and articu-
lated. In the Dada forays into drawing, the line 
no longer resides passively on the edges of 
architectural space but assumes an instru-
mental role in shaping and conditioning it.

Baker associated Dada practices with a 
“libidinisation” of the act of drawing which 
provided a framework through which desire 
was integrated into artistic production. As 
part of the recent re-evaluation of the infl u-
ence of the historical avant-garde (and in 
particular the transgressive avant-gardes of 
Dada and Surrealism), the relationship be-
tween space and drawing in Dada provides an 
important bridge that connects these prac-
tices with architectural space and a broader 
discourse about spatial representation.

This paper will look at drawings and 
processes of three artists from the Dada 
movement and demonstrate the importance 
of architectural space to their radical ap-
proaches to line and drawing. Focussing on 
selected works by Max Ernst, Francis Picabia 
and Marcel Duchamp, the paper will demon-
strate how space functions as a 3-dimensional 

canvas through which the medium of drawing 
is transgressed. In each case architectural 
drawing techniques, as well as the spe-
cifi c foreshadowing of architectural space, 
provides a framework for interpretation and 
integration within the broader history of 
architecture. 

Michael Chapman is a Lecturer at the Uni-
versity of Newcastle where he teaches archi-
tectural design, history, theory and research 
methods. He is currently fi nishing his PhD in 
architecture concerned with the relationship 
between surrealism and architectural theory. 
His research has been published in journals 
such as ARQ, Architectural Science Review and 
Form/Work and has been presented at confer-
ences nationally and internationally. Together 
with Michael Ostwald and Chris Tucker he is 
the author of Residue: Architecture as a Condi-
tion of Loss, which was published by the RMIT 
Press in 2007. 

Maintaining the Abstract Critical Facility in Post-digital 
Drawing Practice
Michael Davis

While drawing exists at the core of post-
digital architectural design practices, it does 
so in a signifi cantly altered state relative to 
pre-digital disciplinary understandings. This 
situation presents the imperative of scholarly 
discussion, an imperative compounded by the 
need to bring balance to the weight of techni-
cal hype that has shrouded digital media. This 
paper seeks to address the problem of how 
to maintain the abstract critical facility of 
drawing in a post-digital design environment 
– a space containing a plethora of devices 
geared toward the ‘effi cient’ production of 
images. What is drawing in this environment 
both in an abstract sense and as an instru-
ment?

The paper will argue that post-digital 
drawing practice operates across an expand-
ing range of techniques and media in increas-
ingly fl uid relationships. The craft of drawing 
has shifted from protracted accumulation 
in a single medium to the quick production 
of multiple entities through multiple media. 
Mastery in this model of post-digital design 
practice has to do with the application of 
multiple tools, each producing fewer effects, 
and (perhaps more signifi cantly) the manage-
ment of the relationships between tools and 
effects. It is these relationships that facilitate 
the shifting of design entities between media, 
and it is the nature of these shifts which pro-
pel the development of design as much as the 
focused crafting of any individual entity. 

Stan Allen presents post-digital design-
ers with imperatives to be critical of their 
technique, and to maintain the abstract 
qualities of drawing. This paper will argue 
that the critical application of the expanded 
range of techniques and media facilitates 

greater levels of control and awareness of 
abstraction in drawing practice. The argument 
will be demonstrated through a drawn case 
study project for a new industrial complex 
for Ecostore, a producer of environmentally 
sound household products, on a brown fi eld 
site in Avondale, Auckland.

Michael Davis is a registered architect and 
lecturer at the School of Architecture and 
Planning, The University of Auckland, where 
he teaches architectural design and archi-
tectural media. His research focuses upon 
the instrumentality of media in relation to 
generative design techniques. He holds a 
Master of Architecture from the Architectural 
Association’s Design Research Laboratory, 
London. He is currently undertaking PhD 
studies at RMIT, Melbourne, Australia.



Previous Enrolments: Drawing as collective formation

Carl Douglas

This paper presents a close reading of a 
drawing by Preston Scott Cohen, Rectilinear 
Spiraculate (1998), and a drawing by Enric Mi-
ralles of his Apartment Calle Mercaders (1995). 
The two drawings are characterised by their 
crowdedness. In each case the drawings are 
densely packed with lines. Projection planes 
are fragmented: elements of Miralles’s plan 
are elevated in place, while Cohen’s nominally 
perspectival drawing is a mess of vanishing 
points and picture planes.

Analysis of these drawings will explore 
the proposition that architectural drawing 
can be analysed as a collective formation, in 
the sense derived from sociologist Gabriel 
Tarde, who, in Monadologie et sociologie, wrote 
of collective formations like crowds that 
individual elements, “soldiers of those various 
regiments, provisional incarnations of their 
laws ... escape from the world they consti-
tute”. Tarde describes individual elements as 
always having “other leanings, other instincts 
coming from previous enrolments”. 

Lines, marks or gaps may be enrolled into 
fi gures, but this enrolment does not exhaust 
them. They are unruly, they compete and col-
laborate, have other allegiances, enrolments, 
potentials. Bruno Latour argues that acting 
is not an exclusively human capacity. A glass 
‘holds’ water, a balustrade ‘prevents’ falling, 
a line on a page ‘divides’ it—and saying so 
is not merely engaging in anthropomorphic 
metaphor. According to Latour, describing 
any state of affairs is tracing a network of 
interactions between actors. A drawing, then, 
could be understood as an active, intensive 
fi eld of interacting actors rather than a static 
transcription of thoughts residing elsewhere.

A drawing, according to Cohen, is a scene 
for calculating and resolving contingen-
cies. Cohen’s and Miralles’s drawings will be 
examined for the traces of this contingency 
and unruliness which expose the drawing as a 
crowd of active participants.

Carl Douglas is a Lecturer in Spatial 
Design at the School of Art and Design, AUT 
University, where he teaches spatial theory 
and studio (concerned with the intersections 
of architecture, interior, landscape, infra-
structure, and urbanism). Recent research 
has addressed the Parisian barricades of the 
nineteenth century; theorised lateness; and 
explored the spatiality of archaeological sites. 

Drawing Imagination and the Imagination of Drawing:
The role of ambiguity and the unfi nished
Federica Goffi 

It is a mistake to believe in photo renderings 
as the best way of accessing a building. It is 
possible to enter a building through ambigu-
ous imagery and unfi nished representation, 
experiencing a kind of real transitus that 
religious icons allow. Tiberio Alfarano’s 1571 
hybrid-drawing of St. Peter’s Basilica in the 
Vatican, combining traditional architectural 
drawing with decoupage and representation 
techniques typical of icon paintings, goes well 
beyond representing a one-time likeness, pro-
viding a metaphysical gate into this building. 

He draws a plan as transparent veil, 
exploiting the ambiguity of metaphoric 
transparency. The ichnography allows ‘multiple 
readings’, detecting literal and metaphorical 
presence of a building within another building 
and is a ‘track-drawing’, providing memory 
traces on the ‘drawing-site’. Through unique 
colour renderings the ichnography makes 
the passage of time visible, revealing differ-
ent time-layers, and the meaning of drawing 
as unfi nished palimpsest in-the-making. The 
signifi cance of colour in Alfarano’s drawing 
has never been discussed in scholarly litera-
ture. By blocking out the element of colour, 
scholars have focused on one predominant 
element, i.e. geometric form, thus eluding the 
question of iconographic signifi cance. Alfarano 
factured a bi-stable image, revealing the 
presence of Old St. Peter’s within the new. 
The ambiguous reading of two plans forms a 
‘double-image’ enhanced by colours, which 
facilitate switching the reading, making the 
viewer an active participant. 

Currently the practice of conservation 
— once a form of invention and imagination 
where memory was not simply an archive for 
posterity, but was always in-the-making — has 

turned conservation into a form of ‘still-pres-
ervation’. Alfarano interpreted drawing as a 
window through time, allowing insight into 
the ‘multi-temporal’ dimension of architec-
ture, experienced as memory of the past and 
revealer of future presence. This offers the 
possibility to critically reassess architectural 
conservation in present practice as a form of 
invention and imagination.

Federica Goffi  is Assistant Professor, 
Azrieli School of Architecture and Urbanism, 
Carleton University. Her research concerns 
relationship between music and architecture; 
technologies of wood construction; research-
ing material imagination and representation; 
restoration of historic timber structures; 
restoration and rehabilitation projects.



Scale As the Representation of an Idea, 
the Dream of Architecture and the Unravelling of a Surface
Susan Hedges

Scaled drawings can demonstrate an archi-
tectural idea, when the architect attempts to 
fi x fragmented dreams in logical sequences, 
building understanding step by step. In a 
system of scaled logic, eventually the nature 
of forms that are too complex to be seen 
at a single glance becomes clear. The scaled 
drawn detail becomes an act of clarifi cation, 
of unravelling, a visualization of the imagined. 
In his book Invisible Cities, Calvino’s version 
of scaling relies on procedures of partial 
seeing, scoping, rescaling and extending. A 
single work can appear at once assured and 
ordinary, or near and yet strangely remote, it 
may affect vast areas, yet simultaneously seem 
in danger of disappearing. A drawn detail 
can be at a miniscule scale or at a 1:1 detail, 
the dimensions of a future building. Focusing 
on a single object may change the sense of 
scale and require imaginative scale shifting 
to show the relationship between the drawn 
and its link to ideas. Scale also invites the 
inhabitation of a drawing, the anticipation of 
occupation. 

Architectural drawings are considered as 
a medium of thought and can be understood 
as a primary clue to thought processes and 
ideas. The drawn is a tangible speculation 
that experiments with scale as the labour of 
the hand and eye attempts to bring dreams 
into the built world. Scale, it is argued, is the 
representation of a dream and the compli-
cating of a surface with which architecture 
comes into being. The drawing not only 
presents ideas of architectures past but also 
represents them through the un-built. This 
paper attends to the drawing archive of The 
Auckland University for Smith and Caughey 

Department Store (1927) and, in particular, 
two drawings of the elevations to the depart-
ment store. 

Susan Hedges is a PhD candidate at the 
School of Architecture and Planning, The 
University of Auckland. The thesis will address 
the notion of the narrative through a close 
study of preliminary and fi nished drawings 
focusing on issues of detail in relationship 
to wider spatial conditions in the drawings. 
Susan lectures in Interior Design at the De-
partment of Design + Visual Arts, Faculty of 
Creative Industries + Business, UNITEC.

“To Keep the Clay Moist”: Drawing as possibility

Ross Jenner

Jean-Luc Nancy has recently posited that 
“drawing is the opening of form”. It is, he 
argues, an opening in two senses: opening 
as a departure, origin, start, burst or raising, 
and opening as availability or capacity itself. 
According to the fi rst direction, it evokes 
more the gesture of drawing than the traced 
fi gure; according to the second, it indicates 
an essential in-completion, a non-closure or 
non-totalisation of form. Either way, the word 
‘drawing’ keeps in itself a dynamic, energetic 
and inchoate value. The words ‘painting’ or 
‘fi lm’ or ‘cinema’, for example, he notes, do 
not. Words like ‘music’, ‘dance’ and ‘song’, 
by contrast, are closer to this dynamic or 
potential value. In drawing, act and power 
are mixed. The sense of the act, the state, or 
thing under consideration cannot be entirely 
detached from the sense of gesture, move-
ment, becoming: form in a state of formation 
and form forming. Yet in the word ‘drawing’, 
and perhaps even more , that of ‘sketching’, 
there is an essential suspense of completed 
reality designated. Mallarmé, Valéry (and even 
Ruskin) had probably already expressed as 
much in their theorisation of drawing.

With this in mind, we will examine works 
from two periods. First, the Italian Rationalist 
exhibitions and installations, the allestimenti 
(a word which itself implies form ‘suspended 
between construction and representation’, 
a ‘preparation for an event’, an ephemeral 
process) of Albini and Persico, where a state 
of potentiality is evoked in the guise of 
‘building-drawings’. These installations take 
on the characteristics of drawings, retaining 
a sense of incompletion and form-in-process. 
Secondly, the work of Alvaro Siza, a master 
sketcher, who says about his designs that “one 

must, like a sculptor, keep the clay moist”. 
Such potentiality, it is suggested, may in fact 
be a Pathosformel of modernity.

Ross Jenner is Deputy Head (Research & 
Postgraduate) at the School of Architecture 
and Planning, The University of Auckland, and 
occasionally practises. He has a MS and PhD 
from the University of Pennsylvania under 
the supervision of Joseph Rykwert and Marco 
Frascari. He has worked in Europe, taught at 
various institutions in Australia and the U.S. 
and was Commissioner for the New Zealand 
Section of the XIX Triennale di Milano. He has 
chapters in various books (published by, for 
example, Routledge and Electa) and journals, 
including The Journal of Architecture, Lotus, 
Transition, Architecture Australia and Interstices, 
which he co-founded in 1990.



Scratches In Space-Time: 
Len Lye’s ‘Free Radicals’ and Temple Art
Kate Linzey

‘Particles in Space’ (1978) and ‘Free Radi-
cals’ (1958/1978) are animations created 
by scratching directly into 16mm Du Pont 
leader tape. Starting with the exposed and 
processed fi lm, which carried no images or 
frame registration, Len Lye made lightning 
white marks, to dance and vibrate through 
black space. One effect of the primitive hand 
animation, where each frame is individually 
and uniquely formed, is a juddering move-
ment evocative of Lye’s own description of 
atoms: “The facts of physical reality... nothing 
whatever exists at bottom in static form,... 
the identity of all forms and entities... is held 
together by countless electrons in motion.”

Despite signifi cant success, Lye an-
nounced later that he was ‘going on strike’ 
from fi lm making; an expression of his frustra-
tion with the conservative American fi lm 
industry. Behind this public declaration, how-
ever, Lye’s focus may already have shifted to 
making ‘tangible motion sculpture’ as, by 1961, 
the Museum of Modern Art in New York was 
able to host a solo ‘performance’ of several 
of Lye’s kinetic objects. He came to conceive 
of these at a massive scale, either mounted 
on the facades of buildings, as dry fountains in 
civic squares, or assembled in parks. 

This paper will ask of Lye’s work: what 
is the particular relationship between the 
scratched lines of his fi lm and the wild 
materiality of his sculpture? An architectural 
perspective will be brought to his work 
arguing that the scratch fi lms were actually 
studies for Art Mecca architecture. As archi-
tectural drawings these scratches can be seen 
delineating enclosures, creating the potential 
for occupation, and describing relationships 
between the enduring/static/inanimate of 

architecture and the transient /mobile/liv-
ing which inhabits it. Lastly, as architectural 
drawings these animations will be shown 
to fail, that is, to not-be the Art Mecca they 
preceded, nor, alternatively, to be merely 
complete as art-fi lms.

Kate Linzey is currently undertaking PhD 
study with at the University of Queensland. 
Her PhD topic explores the architectural 
implications of kinetic parks designed by Len 
Lye (1901-1980) between 1958 and 1970. She 
is teaching in the Centre for Creative Tech-
nologies, Weltec (Wellington, New Zealand).

Architectural Drawings Do Not Represent Anything

Michael Linzey

It is not uncommon that an architect’s draw-
ing reveals unexpected consequences; a new 
idea comes to light in a drawing which had 
previously been unintended. Drawings can 
take on a life of their own just as charac-
ters in a novel are sometimes said to lead a 
novelist into unexpected plot developments. 
Drawings do not re-present ideas, since the 
subjective ideas have not yet been presented 
to the world in any other medium. Drawings 
present objective ideas (along with possible 
future implications) to the world for the fi rst 
time. 

The paper argues that drawings are what 
Heidegger called the being of an architec-
tural experience, the horizon, the boundary, 
the delineation which bring meaning into 
presence in time, for the fi rst time. Vitruvius 
was more sanguine: he said that drawings 
are the ideas of an architectural discourse. 
Vitruvius conceived of architectural ideas as 
drawn objects in a Popperian sense rather 
than representable subjective entities in a 
Cartesian sense. According to Karl Popper, 
architectural drawings are objective products 
of the kind of human experience that we call 
architecture; architectural drawings either 
are or contain objective knowledge. But ever 
since Descartes we have been persuaded that 
ideas are equivalent to subjective thoughts, 
they exist only as the contents of some mind. 
Provisionally, therefore, we have to posit 
two possible kinds of ideal entity: subjective 
ideas as usually understood in the humanist 
tradition, and post-humanist (Popperian and 
Heideggerian) objective ideas. 

For Martin Heidegger, the kinds of 
aesthetic experiences that he called think-
ing are inescapably in the world, linked with 

(and simultaneous with) dwelling. The paper 
discusses a hypothetical set of drawings that 
Iktinos may have prepared for the Parthenon 
and presented for the fi rst time to Pheidias. 
When a discourse about temples, gods, earth 
and truth is located in the time of the draw-
ing, Heidegger’s existentialist poiesis is shown 
to be integral with Popper’s view of objective 
knowledge.

Michael Linzey is a senior lecturer at the 
School of Architecture and Planning, The 
University of Auckland. He has been engaged 
in aesthetic theory since midway through his 
PhD at Melbourne University. From 1979, he 
applied aesthetic theories to Māori and Poly-
nesian architectural forms and developed an 
interest in the cultural philosophy of Korean 
traditional architecture and Japanese Medieval 
teahouse architecture. Since about 2000, a 
succession of papers dealt with the classical 
roots of aesthetic theory in Greek and Ro-
man architecture.



Summoning Daena: Drawing the parallel

Stephen Loo

To draw is at once productive of lines, replete 
with potentiality, which call into visibility 
that which is to-come. This sense of drawing 
is more often than not romanticised as the 
stroke(s) of genius that summons the mate-
rial world and incarnates the spirit to form 
a continuous landscape of possibilities. The 
persistence of this sense of drawing means its 
corollary sense as incision, a cut in the sense 
of starting into something, is symptomatically 
forgotten. In fact, drawing is etymologically 
related to traction, a movement or passage 
that is perhaps violent as it involves a wrest-
ing or tearing away (as in to draw-out or to 
draw blood). 

It is argued that such an incision is how-
ever not an intersection but the delineating 
diagram is the parallel, and Heidegger’s image 
is the furrow. Drawing is an incision by which 
a non-dialectical separation between two 
conditions (for Heidegger they are think-
ing and poetry) is set out and the drawing 
can only draw itself, is itself, as it performs 
this demarcation. This paper outlines the 
implications of the parallel as the diagram 
of drawing in the aphoristic works of the 
Italian Rationalist Massimo Scolari. In Scolari’s 
drawings, the parallelism of instrumental and 
imaginative universals de-monstrates what 
Marco Frascari sees as the “transmutation of 
angles into angels”. 

To attempt the study, this paper performs 
a close reading Giorgio Agamben’s concept 
of ‘genius’ as an impersonal but inseparable 
pre-individual component to being human. 
Drawing work is not the human soul bearing 
witness to genius, but is performed in order 
to become impersonal. To Agamben, genius is 

not in the image of Christian guardian angels 
(one good and the other evil) but the Iranian 
angel Daena, the heavenly archetype in whose 
likeness the individual has been created, but 
whose face changes with the individual’s 
every gesture, word, and thought.

Stephen Loo is Associate Professor of 
Architectural Design, School of Architecture, 
University of Tasmania. His research is located 
at the intersections of philosophy, architec-
tural theory, contemporary visual art and ex-
perimental digital practice. He has published 
in International Journal of Humanities, Architec-
tural Theory Review and Interstices. Stephen has 
practised as an architect in Australia, Malaysia 
and the South Pacifi c.

Blank Sheet: The pristine

Sou Muy Ly

There is something about a clean sheet of 
white paper, the crispness of the white, pure, 
alien, so completely and absolutely without 
colour, untouched, precious, uncontaminated, 
and utterly powerful in its untainted whole. I 
cannot bring myself to touch it, to press the 
tip of my pencil against it, or drip that tiny 
drop of ink on its smooth surface. My fi ngers, 
my hands, my body, repelled from it, I stare at 
it mesmerized. I cannot muster the strength 
to taint its untarnished surface. There is some 
invisible force, daring me, challenging my 
bravery, asking me make that fi rst move, to 
be the fi rst to breach its deathly whiteness. 
The blank sheet, white, without touch, asking 
for my acquaintance. It is too painfully and 
strangely familiar to be trustworthy.

This paper is a refl ection upon this 
encounter with the white blank page. It is 
through this blank page in which we explore 
the pristine in drawing and architecture. This 
is to be examined through the bodily experi-
ences of both the act of drawing and the act 
of experiencing that which lacks the human 
touch.

In order to do so, the essence of pristine 
is looked at as that which is both ‘of some-
thing natural’ and ‘of man-made objects’. Pris-
tine is a condition describing such a ‘thing’ to 
be of untouched pure state, and thus suggests 
that which is characteristic of an earlier time 
or condition. The pristine is intertwined with 
complexities of its own, and in depicting the 
blank page, suggests a convergence of both 
natural and manufactured. 

This paper proposes an understanding 
of the dialogue between body and pristine, 
natural and manufactured, corporeal and ce-

rebral, presence and absence. It is an interplay 
of these paradoxical thoughts, to identify why 
this mysterious ‘act’ of ‘non-act’ plays a role in 
our everyday material practices.

Sou Muy Ly has a BAS and a BArch (Hons). 
She is currently undergoing her research in 
the Masters Program in Architecture at The 
University of Auckland, New Zealand. She 
also tutors design at the School of Architec-
ture, The University of Auckland.



Takohi: Drawing in Tongan thinking and practice

Hūfanga ‘Okusitino Māhina

The Tongan concept and praxis takohi, 
translated as drawing will be critiqued in the 
broader context of the new general tā-vā, 
time-space theory of art, a derivative of the 
tā-vā, time-space theory of reality. Philosophi-
cally, a general tenet of this theory of reality 
states that all things, in nature, mind and soci-
ety, stand in eternal relations of exchange, giv-
ing rise to confl ict or order. These ever-lasting 
exchange relations formally and substantially 
exist in physical, psychological and social 
terms, such as intersecting lines, opposing 
ideas and competing human demands.

Art can be generally defi ned as tā-vā, 
time-space transformation, where confl icts 
in the form (fuo) and content (uho) of things 
are symmetrically arbitrated in the creative 
process. As a tool of line-space intersection, 
takohi will be refl ected upon, in terms of both 
its varied abstract and concrete manifesta-
tions, with specifi c examples drawn from 
across the three divisions of Tongan art, viz., 
material (tufunga), performance (faiva) and 
fi ne (nimamea`a) arts.

Both takohi and tatau (the English 
equivalent of symmetry) are constitutive of 
temporal and spatial entities, demonstrating 
that time (tā) and space (vā) are indivisible 
in mind as in reality. The separation of mind 
from reality, spatio-temporality or four-sided 
dimensionality amounts to dualism of the ra-
tionalist, idealist and relativist sort. However, 
the term takohi can be generally accounted 
for as the tempo-marking (tā) of space (vā) 
by means of lines. Specifi cally, the word takohi 
points to the rhythmic production of images 
(`ata) through line-space intersection. The 
temporal production of images involves the 
mediation of opposing formal and substantial 

tendencies at the interface of line and space. 
By symmetrically mediating tensions in the 
creative process, they are spatio-tempo-
rally transformed from a condition of crisis 
(felekeu) to a state of stasis (maau). This 
sustained state of harmony (potupotutatau) is 
itself beauty (mālie).

Hūfanga `Okusitino Māhina holds degrees 
from The University of Auckland and a PhD 
from The Australian National University. He 
taught at Tonga’s `Atenisi University and 
Auckland’s Massey University before he was 
appointed at UoA 1994, where he taught 
Pacifi c political economy and Pacifi c arts. Dr 
Māhina is Founder-Director of Vava`u Acad-
emy for Critical Inquiry and Applied Research 
(VACIAR) where he is Professor of Tongan 
Studies. 

Seeing In Section: 
The practice of the photogrammatic drawing
Shelley F. Martin

Laszlo Moholy Nagy’s initial material practice 
of recording the form of light revealed a 
surface constructed solely by means of 
drawing. Nagy was the fi rst to produce the 
photogram as a “diagram of forces”, an act 
that inscribed tangible and intangible qualities 
of light, surface, and profi le. Sectional records 
present the instrumentality of light by moving 
between technical and imaginative states 
of lines and spatial occupation, continually 
recording, regulating and propagating material 
illuminations.

This paper considers the material record 
of light as a programme for drawing, and 
examines drawing as a vessel for veridical and 
non-veridical modes of thought and material 
inquiry. Moving between Richard Wollheim’s 
“seeing-in” and a type of non- veridical 
imaginative resurrection of what already may 
exist, the photogram considered as a basis for 
drawing understands the sectional projective 
action. In this photographic space, drawing 
studies the transformation of the original 
object, and seeks to materially express both 
interior and exterior, volume and profi le, and 
to engage construction as a fi eld of inquiry. 
A new space of drawing is made where light 
records the consequence of sectional space 
prior to material existence. This record is 
not based on technical correspondences, but 
instead continually constructs and re-con-
structs an interplay within the picture and the 
line, the gramma, and the gramme. 

Just as principles of photogrammetry 
mine geometric properties from photo-
graphic records and project them as formal 
gestures, the direct transposition of a three 
dimensional object onto a surface examines 
light as a tectonic object, and produces a fi eld 

of inquiry rich in spatial consequence. The 
instrumentality of drawing acts as a carrier to 
read these consequences through the graphic 
processes of construction, and the produc-
tive nature of drawing acts as a speculative 
venture that moves the act of drawing from 
the form of poetry to that of prose.

Shelley F. Martin is Associate Professor in 
the School of Architecture + Design at Vir-
ginia Polytechnic Institute and State Univer-
sity. She teaches architecture studios, theory 
seminars and an introductory architecture 
course. She writes on the practices of image 
making in architecture and produces photo-
graphic studies and 16mm fi lms investigating 
material properties and sectional dimensions 
of landscapes as propositions of form and 
shape.



Diagnostic Imagings and Invisibilities: 
Medicalisations of the architectural section drawing
Christine McCarthy

Medical imaging of the architectural section 
has a long and invasive history situated as 
analogous to anatomical dissection by writers 
as diverse as Ackerman, Bloomer, Derrida, 
Frascari, Tavernor, Wang, Powell and Leath-
erbarrow, and Roberts and Tomlinson. The 
architectural section has variously been de-
scribed as a cut, the “drawing pen ... a knife” 
(Frascari), and drawing as surgical (Derrida); 
the building implicitly a body: animal or hu-
man. 

This paper will re-examine this meta-
phorical dependence and propose that 
images made from more recent, and less 
explicitly invasive medical visioning apparatus: 
the x-ray, ultrasonography (ultrasound), Com-
puted Tomography (CT), Magnetic Resonance 
Imaging (MRI) and Positron Emission Tomog-
raphy (PET), challenge the persistance of the 
sectional discourse within the rhetoric of a 
simplistic and physical dissectional removal. 
Bloomer’s suggestion, in “Vertex and Vortex,” 
of the section as: “a screen or window for 
seeing through” is rethought with this ex-
amination of the section as a technologically 
enabled and displaced view of the inside of 
building.  

In contrast to dissection, contemporary 
medical imaging produces avisual sectioning 
to extract vision from the physical character-
istics of the body, which are instead reinter-
preted by VHF sound, radiation, and nuclear 
magnetic resonances. Vision is thoroughly me-
diated. Gradations of visibility and invisibility 
place the viewer to imagine an occupation of 
the non-spatial materiality of architecture; an 
experience or anticipation - a pre-occupation 
- of architectural intimacy. 
 

The paper will consequently argue that, 
rather than a dissection of an architectural 
body, the section drawing is a mechanism of 
the selective, and speculative boundary-mak-
ing of the visible and the invisible. Equally, 
the architectural section drawing insists on 
a more intimate relationship to the human 
body, rather than proposing the drawn build-
ing is a body. 

Christine McCarthy teaches interior archi-
tecture at the School of Architecture, Victoria 
University, Wellington, New Zealand.

a priori / a posteriori: Elin and Carmen Corneil’s 
drawings for Vestmannaeyjar and Kashagawigamog
Michael Milojevic

The Canadian-Norwegian architects and 
teachers Elin and Carmen Corneil draw on 
an exceptionally wide range of formats, ma-
terials and techniques enriching their parallel 
and collaborative transAtlantic practices 
in Trondheim and Toronto. Their reticence 
is very noticeable; through drawing they 
communicate wordlessly. For the Corneils 
drawing and dislocation are complimentary: 
they have done eleven competitions from the 
critical distance of the opposite side of the 
Atlantic. By drawing at a (critical) distance 
they take the time and space to respond in 
such a way as to make sense of their physical 
dislocation and cultural distinction.

The Corneils’ Vestmannaeyjar competi-
tion boards [Skjalasafn Bókasafn Vestman-
naeyja, Heimay] are an immediately engaging 
and detailed reading of the status quo of 
the town’s surviving urban fabric following a 
catastrophic volcanic eruption. For a site the 
architects had not actually visited their all-
encompassing urban narrative included: large-
scale fi ne-grained geological and archaeologi-
cal reliefs showing both the land and building 
as one; abstract charcoal sketches of the new 
volcanic landscape and surviving structures; 
superwide fi sh-eye perspective panoramas 
of urban vistas; detailed shop drawings for 
hexagonal street pavers and street light bol-
lards. Stitching modest interventions closely 
into the damaged urban fabric, indeed by 
drawing Vestmannaeyjar together as it were, 
the Corneils submission was a totalising a 
priori vision.

The McMullen Summer House project 
record [Corneil Fonds, Canadian Architecture 
Archive, Calgary] shows the Corneils engag-
ing drawing as both a participatory tool and 

as diagrammatic guidelines for play and as-
sembly. Their building store process rejected 
the traditional role of the architect’s docu-
mentation of working drawings and specifi ca-
tions. To initiate the process the client was 
given a set of large plain playing cards to 
decide the building footprint automatically by 
throwing them down onto a surveyor’s site 
plan. The builders were left to assemble the 
building freely working at 1:1, the Corneils 
asked only occasionally for ‘rules’ interpreta-
tions and ‘refereeing’ faxes from Norway. 
Building plans and elevations were only drawn 
a posteriori for publication.

Michael Milojevic is a Senior Lecturer 
at the School of Architecture and Planning, 
The University of Auckland, and specialises 
in ancient and medieval architecture and 
the architecture of Canada. He is a regular 
contributor to the Annual [North American] 
Byzantine Studies Conference and the annual 
conferences of the Society for the Study of 
Architecture in Canada. He has recently cu-
rated the travelling exhibition e+c architecture: 
the work of elin and carmen corneil 1958-2008. 



The Limitless Field: 
We are in the midst of reality responding with joy
Katica Pedisic

In light of the increasing uptake of digital 
technologies in architectural drawing, this 
paper considers the apparent paradox occur-
ring in certain recent drawing practices. Ar-
chitects Sotirios Kotoulas and Matthew Shlian 
and artist Silke Schatz give emphasis in their 
drawn work to an artifi cially digital aesthetic 
and a repetitive work process verging on the 
mechanistic. Attained, however, not through 
the use of digitally enacted drawing or digital 
software, but laboriously by hand. Evoking 
the precisions and perfection of line found 
in digital technologies, these architects and 
artists turn away from the imprecise mark of 
the hand, towards an exploration that seems 
to esteem the standardised line-work offered 
by the digital as drawing tool.

This paper explores these moves in refer-
ence to and draws parallels with the drawings 
of Agnes Martin of the early 1960’s to the 
late 1980’s. Martin’s drawings are almost 
exclusively based on the format of a grid. The 
relationship between Martin’s grid drawings 
and digital architectural drawing emerging at 
the time are re-examined with reference to 
Rosalind Krauss’ writings on the grid and He-
lene Cixous’ writings on the emotive force of 
the drawn line. It suggests that the rigidity of 
such work and its repetitive nature provides 
a vehicle by which artists and architects can 
explore the inherent vulnerability and imper-
fection of the hand and the marks it makes. In 
Martin’s grid drawing, for instance, the marks 
of her hand emerge almost imperceptibly 
at the edges, where the grid breaks down 
and destabilises the framework of the work. 
Accepting the limitless fi eld, situated in the 
midst of its reality, Martin makes implicit in 

the grid the intimations of human expression 
in the hand, the inherent gesture of the hand 
drawing, the delicate sense of frailty.

Katica Pedisic is a registered Architect who 
has worked as an associate at Con Bastiras 
Architects in Adelaide. She established her 
own practice, antidote, in 2008, specialising in 
small-scale high-end residential and commer-
cial projects with an emphasis on interdisci-
plinary collaborations, intense research and 
process-based conceptual, contextual and 
formal explorations. She has lectured in Ar-
chitecture at the University of South Australia 
(2008-9) and is currently undertaking a PhD 
by project at RMIT.

Tatau: 
Symmetry as confl ict-mediation of line-space intersection
Sēmisi F. Potauaine

This paper deals with the Tongan concept and 
practice of tatau (symmetry, mirror-image, 
image, copy, same and equal). My theoretical 
inquiry into tatau revolves around the tā-vā, 
time-space theory of reality, which basically 
recognises the philosophical fact that all 
things in reality stand in eternal relations of 
exchange, giving rise to order or confl ict. The 
theory also takes into account that, by virtue 
of these never-ending exchange connections, 
order and confl ict are of the same logical 
order.

Relations of exchange between all things 
across nature, mind and society are ex-
pressed in terms of time (tā) and space (vā), 
on the abstract level, and by way of form (fuo) 
and content (uho), on the concrete level. The 
unending exchange relations between things 
exist by means of intersection, where spatio-
temporal, substantial-formal (and functional) 
confl icts, on both the abstract and concrete 
levels, are symmetrically reconciled by means 
of tatau. This state of noa (zero-point), i.e., 
order, is a counterbalance of equal and op-
posite forces. 

The use of tatau as a mediation of con-
fl icts at the crossing point of things applies 
as much to the colliding objects in nature as 
to the opposing ideas in mind and competing 
demands in society. In abstract ways, these 
contradictory tendencies are expressed at 
the shifting interface of line (kohi) and space 
(vā), such as the mediation of intersecting 
bodily movements (vaa`ihaka) in dance, inter-
lacing tones (vaa`itā) in music and confl icting 
human meanings (vaa`i`uhinga) in poetry, on 
the concrete level. My paper will deal with 
the intersection of kohi and vā, line and space, 

where the mediation of contradictions are 
done by means of tatau (symmetry). I will 
critically examine specifi c instances of tatau, 
such as wringing (tatau), hanging (tautau), 
role-modelling ([faka]tatau) and saying-good-
bye (tatau), all of which are connected with 
the mediation of confl icting tendencies.

Sēmisi Fetokai Potauaine was born and 
bred in Tonga, in a rich cultural environment, 
where he had an early exposure by way of 
“critically lived experience” to a number of 
Tongan material, performance and fi ne arts. 
He left Tonga for New Zealand in pursuit 
of tertiary education and holds a NDAT 
diploma in architectural technology from 
Unitec (2000), BAS and BArch degrees in 
architectural studies and architecture from 
The University of Auckland (2007), where he 
is now an M.Arch student.



Against Drawing: Line-making and the Tufuga guild

Albert L. Refi ti

This paper will examine the Samoan builders 
guild, the Tufuga-fau-fale motto of “leai ni 
tusiga-ata” – there are to be no drawings – in 
their opposition to graphic representation as 
a mode of outlining, conveying and demarcat-
ing a building before it can be made. These 
architects are direct descendants of the 
progenitor Tagaloa-a-lagi and are therefore 
considered the companion of the gods (agai o 
tupu). Drawings as ata or graphic representa-
tion were not tools that existed in their craft. 
This was because graphic representation in 
Samoan thought came under the category 
of ata or becoming-shadows, which had an 
important relationship to light, ancestor 
worship and their place in the structure of 
knowledge as predicting a future, therefore it 
was forbidden to be drawn or ‘marked-down’. 

If there were a relationship between the 
Tufuga guild and drawing, it would have to 
do with line-making: moving lines around by 
drawing-out and unfolding materiality and 
form, by hands and feet: a body practice. 
This type of line-making had little to do 
with a representative line that predicted an 
outcome. This type of body practice is a form 
of graphism. Graphism is bound up with tech-
niques of the body, which is part a memory 
system that the body makes active by storing 
them in activities such as storytelling, song 
and dance. These body performances as 
mnemonic techniques were crucial in mak-
ing the body pliable to ‘take-on’ and shape 
physical matter. These can still be seen today 
in the way buildings are made in Samoa and 
the Pacifi c. 

The paper will also explore the idea that 
an epiphylogenetic system emerged with the 
absence of drawing as representation. An 

exposition of the use and worship of tools by 
the Tufuga guild will be established via a read-
ing of Bernard Stiegler’s theory of epiphy-
logenesis as an external artifi cial mnemonic 
apparatus that humans and tools share. 

Albert L. Refi ti is currently enrolled in a 
PhD at AUT University, where he is Head of 
Department in Spatial Design. Apart from 
working in architecture in Auckland and 
London, Albert has taught at The University 
of Auckland, Manukau School of Visual Arts 
and Unitec School of Architecture. Albert has 
published his research in a number of books 
and journals for the last ten years with a 
focus on Pacifi c architecture and art.

Drawing Distinctions: 
Ernst Plischke’s line drawings for Design and Living
Linda Tyler

Caricature is a term used to describe an ex-
aggeration, a skilfully stretched and intention-
ally deformed alteration of a familiar form. 
Plischke’s Design and Living, a book published 
under the auspices of the Department of In-
ternal Affairs in 1947 in Wellington used cari-
cature to show how existing New Zealand 
cities were a pastiche of architectural styles 
so badly planned as to be beyond remedy. 
Plischke caricaturing of the moderne plays 
an important role in the drawings for Design 
and Living. His caricature deformations rest 
on the notion of Art Deco as a degradation 
or perversion of a “healthy” original form, 
which is his own version of modernism.

A relationship is indicated between the 
drawings in Design and Living and the work 
of the popular British humorist Osbert Lan-
caster whose illustrated books exaggerated 
the characteristics of different architectural 
styles for comic effect. The similarities of style 
and approach are suffi cient to suggest that 
Lancaster’s Pillar to Post (1938) and Homes 
Sweet Homes (1939) offered Plischke a 
model for reaching a broad audience with re-
course to architectural caricature. However, 
while Lancaster uses line drawing to amuse 
and entertain, both Design and Living and a 
second design book published in 1947 D.E. 
Barry Martin’s more prosaically titled Modern 
Decoration and Furnishing are intended to 
instruct in good taste. 

Plischke set out to celebrate modern-
ist form at its most existential level in his 
drawings for Design and Living. He uses 
caricature as a medium of expression that is 
subtle, implicit, connotative and indirect, yet 
powerful, expressive and emotional. Because 
of the highly connotative nature of Plischke’s 

caricatures, their power lies not only in the 
presence of formal architectural features but 
also in the subtle argument presented by 
their absence.

Linda Tyler is Director of the Centre for 
New Zealand Art Research and Discovery at 
The University of Auckland. Previously, she 
was Curator of Pictorial Collections at the 
Hocken Library at the University of Otago. 
She is co-editor of a recently published 
compilation entitled Treasures of the Hocken 
Collections. She now administers The Univer-
sity of Auckland Art Collection (including 
the former Auckland College of Education 
Collection).



Drawing the Lines of Theory: 
Francesco di Giorgio’s imagination at work (Poster)
Pari Riahi

While the quick spread of digital media 
has led to an alienation of drawing by hand, 
understanding the potentials of manual 
drawing becomes more critical than before. 
It appears that the change lies in the medium 
itself (computer vs. hand), but the intentional-
ity and the ultimate use of drawing are also 
undergoing major changes. The present paper 
intends to examine the work of Francesco 
di Giorgio Martini, Renaissance architect and 
theoretician, who demonstrated a precocious 
and unique understanding of drawing not only 
as a medium for representation, but also as a 
vehicle carrying forward architectural thought 
and its proliferation. Such an investigation is 
instructive as Francesco’s modes of operation 
might be relevant to modes of drawing in 
digital media.

Francesco di Giorgio’s main body of 
work, Trattati di architectura, ingeneria e arte 
militare, provides the fi rst systematic pro-
totype of an architectural theory wherein 
drawings are equal to the text. Francesco 
believes that drawing is an infi nitely inven-
tive medium that looks at nature and draws 
from the mind while fusing past, present, 
and future. His emphasis on the importance 
of the reader’s active imagination in under-
standing the drawing indicates an ‘embedded’ 
time, dormant and yet actively present, in the 
body of drawing. Thus drawing becomes an 
open ended process rather than a fi xed one. 
The most signifi cant feature of Francesco’s 
work is, however, the linkage between theory 
and practice through drawing. His widely 
diverse drawings reveal and present notions 
of architecture that can be accessible only 
through images. This is what matters most in 
establishing our rapport with digital media 

wherein the predominant trends, focusing on 
using the media through a specifi c ‘process’, 
have undermined a deeper attachment to a 
given ‘theory’ of architecture. 

Pari Riahi initiated her architecture studies 
in Iran, continued in France and eventually 
moved to Montreal, where she received 
Bachelor, professional and academic Masters 
Degrees from McGill University. She is a 
PhD Candidate at McGill University. She is a 
registered architect and has been teaching at 
Rhode Island School of Design since 2007.

The Inter-relationship between Drawing and Film
(Poster)
Simon Welch

Drawing and the origins of fi lm are related 
through the camera obscura and the audio-
visual fi eld involves drawing in various ways. 
Most movies are based on storyboards and 
rely on costume and set design. Thus it could 
be argued that fi lm is as dependent on draw-
ing as a preparatory tool as painting is.   

Film is the best medium for recording the 
activity of drawing. Numerous documentaries 
have recorded artistic activity and drawing 
often features in fi ction fi lms in which it is 
employed to important narrative and aes-
thetic ends. In The Draughstman’s Contract by 
Peter Greenaway, the hands of the director 
are shown drawing sketches of a house and 
garden which reveal important clues pertain-
ing to the plot. 

The relationship between perspectival 
drawing and cinematic representation is 
explored in The Seven Samurai where ancient 
Japanese norms of pictorial representation 
inform the manner in which Kurosawa fi lms 
various scenes. Drawing plays a major role 
in the fi lms of Michael Powell such as A Can-
terbury Tale, I Know Where I’m Going and Black 
Narcissus whereby the past evoked in draw-
ings is transformed into a cinematic present, 
facilitating the transition in time and space 
between scenes. Similarly, a print, in Last Year 
in Marienbad by Resnais, is used to create a 
mise en abîme in that it depicts the setting for 
the fi lm.  

The use of geometric drawing helps 
to set particular visual themes during the 
opening credits of various Hitchcock fi lms. 
Hitchcock began his career as a title card 
designer and mostly considered the plan-
ning/storyboard phase of fi lmmaking to be 
the most interesting part of the process. 

This conception of fi lm reveals the extent 
to which Hitchcock’s approach to fi lmmak-
ing was a form of mental drawing process.   
Using the above examples of issues arising 
from the interface between drawing and fi lm, 
my intention is to examine the ontological 
implications for both media. 

Simon Welch lives in Strasbourg, France, 
where he teaches Video & Cinema Studies at 
the University of Strasbourg. Having obtained 
a BA in Fine Art at Liverpool Polytechnic in 
1988, he pursued his studies at Strasbourg 
University where he was awarded a Masters 
in Visual Art in 1997 and a Doctorate in Arts 
in 2005. Simon Welch regularly publishes 
articles and has participated in academic 
conferences and fi lm and video festivals and 
exhibitions.



We gratefully acknowledge receipt of The University of Auckland Distinguished Visitor’s Award, 
as well as the contributions made by the Universities of Melbourne, Adelaide and New South 

Wales to Professor Marco Frascari’s airfares.

Our thanks to all who have generously contributed advice and time: Arlette Galich, Azadeh 
Emadi, Emily Priest, Gunhild Itergen, Judy Cockeram, Leong Kim Choo, Lin Ma, Linda Tanoai, 

Megan Ritchie, Petelo Esekielu, Sara Lee and others.

Marco Frascari (2009) Architect as a Neuro-Demiurge