March 28-30, 2019

Carnegie Museum of Art & Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburg

Drawings of Bartertown: A Game of Social Resilience were exhibited at Drawing for the Design Imaginary, curated by Jeremy Ficca, Amy Kulper and Grace La as part of the 107th Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA) conference in Pittsburgh.

Drawing for the Design Imaginary [https://www.acsa-arch.org/programs-events/conferences/annual-meeting/107th-annual-meeting/call-for-drawings]: Drawing has long held a robust and central position within the discipline, serving as an investigative device to glance into the future, a discursive tool to convey meaning, and a notational convention to facilitate the translation of design intent into built reality. A survey of the past decade reveals voluminous discourse, and occasional anxiety, surrounding the subject, protocols, and future of drawing as an instrument in the profession and the academy. While the operative and representational basis of drawing retain prominent positions within the discipline, the increased reliance upon simulation and information modeling are reshaping how one designs, thinks abstractly, stimulates potential, and communicates. Furthermore, the universality of the live virtual model coupled with a growing arsenal of digital techniques has blurred distinctions between image and drawing to sponsor an expanding field of possibilities while challenging the language of architectural representation. Throughout these shifts, drawing has revealed a remarkable durability. If as Mario Carpo states, “drawings probe and test the limits and constraints of architectural representation itself”, then perhaps drawing is ideally situated in our post-digital circumstance.

Building upon the conference’s theme on the current state of architecture’s core, this exhibition explores the role of drawing as pedagogical instrument.