Abstract

The research-creation inquiry stems from years of experience, practical and pedagogical, and reflection on the role and potential of drawing in the discipline of architecture. In an era of ecological crisis and escalating media frenzy, it hypothesizes how drawing might contribute, on a molecular level, to shifting attitudes and concerns by inducing a greater collective openness, sympathy and awareness, and by infusing sensibility into responsibility, sense-ability into response-ability. Its underlying premise is therefore ethico-aesthetic. It begins by exploring through an ecological performance practice, how drawing might reveal, in-form, and be in-formed by lived spacetimes ecologically or, following Guattari, ecosophically. The practice is the motive force generating, inflecting and sustaining the research and creation throughout the thesis. It operates transversally across drawing and architecture and concurrently across body, architecture and environment, bringing them together and generating openings for rethinking drawing differently.
The thesis is also a transdisciplinary endeavour that advocates experimentation and improvisation to induce novelty. It itself tentatively explores the straddling of multiple domains, modes and media, theories and practices, the micro and macro, as it co-composes transversally across writing, drawing, dancing, sounding, performing, filming, and architecting, its own generic process of (re)emergence. But the force that traverses and conjugates them all is of the movement of drawing. In so doing, drawing in-folds certain operative attributes and transduces them into potential for generating and creatively modulating affect. Drawing ultimately seeks to open itself up to becoming a singular immanent force of architecture, whereby what would continue to resound in architecture is its virtual power, its capacity to reawaken the virtual in the actual, the thinking in movement,with its pathic refrains and trigger affect.