Abstract

This thesis examines drawing’s potential to revive the role of the body in architectural practices, by unveiling forces and processes that compose our bodies and intertwine with the corporeality of architecture. It establishes drawing as a form of dance and notation capable of inscribing the kinesthetic vitality of the live body into architecture. It looks at Frank Gehry’s sketches as dynamic tracings of embodied gestures that mediate body and landscape, interior and exterior. The sketches are addressed as the residue of forces generating potential bodies of space, as well as formative diagrams that operate as a prehension of the coming into being of building. Drawing’s heuristic role is substantiated by pedagogical and epistemological theories of dance, drawing and architecture education, which situate the affective/haptic kinesthetic body at the center of all in-corporeal experience, perception and conception. The thesis concludes by advancing potential heuristic approaches to embodied drawing in architecture education that could inform processes of conceptualization and enrich the act of sketching as a vital interface between body and architecture.