Drawing Codes - Just Numbers

Some of our visual investigations on 3d scanning technologies, survey methods and design practices have been included in the book Drawing Codes edited by Andrew Kudless and Adam Marcus.

Emerging technologies of design and production have transformed the role of drawings within the contemporary design process from that of design generators to design products. As architectural design has shifted from an analog drawing-based paradigm to that of a computational model-based paradigm, the agency of the drawing as a critical and important form of design representation has shifted. ‘Drawing Codes: Experimental Protocols of Architectural Representation’ examines the effects of this transformation on the architectural discipline and explores how architects have critically integrated procedural thinking into their drawing process. The book contains 96 commissioned drawings by a diverse range of architects that investigate how rules and constraints inform the ways architects document, analyze, represent, and design the built environment. The publication features essays by architects and theorists offering diverse perspectives on how computational techniques and, more importantly, computational thinking, can revitalize the role of architectural drawing as a creative and critical act.

Each drawing responds to a shared conceptual prompt developed by the authors and conforms to a standard size and format. The intent is for this consistency to elicit a wide range of approaches to questions of technology, design, code, and representation. The book documents how computational processes such as procedural drawing, digital simulation, automated production, and machine learning can contribute to a new understanding of what drawings are and how they are created. The result is a considerable diversity of medium, aesthetic sensibility, and content, demonstrating how conventions of architectural representation remain fertile territory for invention and speculation.

Media Interference in 3d scanning workflows

Imaging technologies place points as central elements in the construction of contemporary visual languages - deploying them as spatial coordinates, material realities, RGB color values, UV mapping coordinates, and surface intensities. Rather than accepting the depiction of the point cloud as an obedient representation of a single, monolithic truth, perpetuating views of the dominant culture within architecture’s discussions around digital imaging technologies, this drawing examines the potential of clouds as they begin to redirect our focus to the space created in-between each surveyed data point. This space most directly accounts for the flickering reading of point clouds as one of the most abstracted forms of visual communication - vaporizing wholes into infinitesimal attributes - while simultaneously recuperating old tropes of scientific realism associated with the photographic medium. In this drawing, points become coordinates as text forming a clouded figure of the surveyed artifact.