Call for Papers: Drawing (New) Stories (SAH Session at CAA 2023)

There is an established discourse on how disciplines outside of architecture, such as cartography, painting, or sculpture, have impacted the construction or meaning of architectural drawings. This session seeks to reverse the direction of this discourse by asking how architectural drawings have impacted other disciplines. We seek instances when architectural drawings have forced reconsideration of established practices or have led to the creation of new ones.

The aim is to ask new questions that encroach on the conceptualization of architecture, such as, how are we to understand what makes a drawing “architectural” and how do particular contexts impact how we understand them as such? What is specific to architectural drawings that may provoke responses different than other forms of representations or ephemera? How do these concerns and effects modulate broader concerns regarding architecture’s disciplinary and discursive boundaries, and how do we set about defining them?

Implicit in this—and what this session proposes—is to understand drawings as objects with agency and not as passive and complicit in the places where they appear. It is the session’s aim to interrogate through contemporary and historical examples how histories of drawings as objects with an active, formative role unfold in practice and discourse outside of architecture. The session will unveil histories that reveal broader influences and trajectories, as well as ones that query architecture’s own disciplinarity, and thus open questions fundamental to architecture’s effects writ large.

Field of Study: