Organizing Architectural Atmospheres

Abstract

The article outlines an alternative type of digital drawing technique for architecture called chromatic mapping. This new procedural drawing technique redefines the theoretical frameworks of digital design practice by manipulating the formal and spatial capacities of data captured in the image. The ensuing discursive and practical changes to architectural design practice deliberately leverage the ability of image-based software to gather, collate and modify real-world data. The pixel is central to chromatic mapping because it is the medium that translates form and space into color. This alterative definition of form as visual data contests the orthodoxy that only the line can delineate form and reactivates the issues surrounding the role of the image in architectural production. While maintaining digital architecture's ambition to reduce the procedural and formal consequences of postmodern semiotics, this new drawing technique recalibrates the part images play in architectural production by activating image data to foreground drawings that simulate architecture's atmospheric qualities.