Vaults versus Memorials: Evoking Fiction in the Architectural Drawing

Abstract

Part of a comprehensive studio design project, the exercise presented in this paper is a vehicle to investigate design thinking processes and how students construct intentions. The theme is the book and media. The semester’s project begins with seminars on the history of books. The discussion delves into a book’s craftsmanship and as a symbol for embodied knowledge and progresses to the roles books have played in society. Expanding the theme, discussion leads to the question of a book’s preservation (vault) or its destruction in a digital society (memorial). The exercise is contingent upon the opposition created between the two spheres inherent to the title, Vaults versus Memorials. It positions the student in a manner that resists allocation to one sphere or another, an impetus for restructuring specified spheres according to new schemas. Written texts play an interlocutory role during the production of students’ drawings. Each of the assigned texts offers an entry point to a tacit learning situation and a restructuring of semantic fields. With reference to Paul Ricoeur’s research on interpretation theory, a mental distancing between text and drawing exposes students to ambiguities and the realization that prejudices play a role in understanding and interpreting meaning in the production of a visual work. The act of drawing produces its own frame of reference that we trace in three modes of production. These can be categorized as metaphoric interaction, textual dissection, and the guess. Vaults versus Memorials establishes a dialectical situation between explanation and understanding which lends itself to an open investigation process. With the expansion of theme through drawing and by the depth of inferred meanings, students can speculate as to which interpretation is the most plausible fiction establishing probable, subjective criteria to carry forward later stages of the design.