Undergraduate Thesis - Virginia Tech
Thesis Advisor: Paola Zellner-Bassett
2013-2014
Architectural drawing occupies an ambiguous territory between imagination and actuality. The thesis takes advantage of this position, and considers the drawing as an active manifestation of space that is independent from the efficiencies of building. This freedom affords the architect a unique opportunity to explore spatial experience through the drawn image, rather than delaying the experience to the moment of construction or actualization.
The series of twelve compositions tests the spatial limits of drawing in perspective, plan, and axonometric representation. They attempt to hold the viewer in the space between imagination and actuality. The drawings themselves are large and occupy actual space, inviting engagement. The drawings challenge default understandings of pictorial space by resisting conventions of scale, color, transparency, and shadow, instead using intuition and play to arrive at an engaging architectural image. The resulting drawings delay familiarity with a knowable whole, embracing the distortions and ambiguities that sustain spatial experience.
DRAWINGS
Study No. 2 (Perspective). 48"x60"
MEDIUM
The thesis explores the possibilities of the interaction of the medium, the hand, and intuition. The pastel provides a tangible, textured field that produces an atmospheric quality of color and transparency within the composition. The hand-produced constructs enable a process of making that defies cognition, instead attempting to draw out the experience of space through the medium itself. Shaving and smudging the pastel produced an array of colorful palettes that record the process of drawing. This project was awarded the Ellen Braaten Media Award in 2014.
