Delayed Processes
This work presented in this paper is based on a set of pedagogical investigations that are based in the author’s simultaneous fascination and trouble with the wide spread use of digital media leading to seemingly complete and multi-faceted drawings which impose themselves as definitive, over-determined renditions of ideas. In the interest of slowing the process in the early design phases, where students are learning about developing design thinking, an effort has been made to make time still and slow, allowing for ambiguity, contradiction, deformations and distortions to unfold within the space of architectural thinking, before passing into more conventional forms of drawing. In attempts to stay away from the form-based and the process-oriented paths, the structure is set to use conventional platforms of digital drawing as the basis for the project. By focusing on the making of drawings at various scales and with different purposes, the studio is one that binds the design and drawing together and requires that the students navigate the process of creative thinking by making and assessing a large body of drawings. Embracing the idea of drawings that are of the project, and are not directly translatable to space, implies that in the space between the early ‘generation drawing’ and something that can intelligibly be recognized as architectural artifact/ space, there lies a gap within which withholding from getting to an immediate result yields both the most challenging and the most interesting architectural artifacts. The aim of the studio is to make drawing into a practice that is flexible and canny, able to adjust and responsive to multiple factors and forces introduced at different stages of the project.
Previously published at the 107th ACSA Annual Meeting, March 2019, Pittsburgh, PA
Pari Riahi is an Assistant Professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in the Department of Architecture. Prior to joining UMass, she taught in multiple capacities at RISD, MIT and SUNY Buffalo. Pari teaches design studios and gives theory courses and seminars centered on architectural drawings and representation and the contemporary city. Pari completed her PhD at McGill University in 2010. She is the author of Ars et Ingenium: The Embodiment of Imagination in Francesco di Giorgio Martini’s Drawings (Routledge, 2015). Her upcoming book is Architectural Drawing in the Post-Digital Era: Disjointed Continuity (Routledge). Questions related to contemporary cities in crisis and possible intervention and reuse strategies form a secondary track in Pari’s research. Pari’s work has been published in Journal of Architecture, Journal of Architectural Education, Interior Architecture and Adaptive Reuse Journal, and Architecture Boston. Pari is a registered architect and pursues projects that are at the confluence of landscape, urban, and architectural design. Prior to starting her practice in 2011, Pari worked for the offices of Machado and Silvetti and Martha Schwartz Inc. Her office focuses on small-scale built projects as well as large-scale hypothetical interventions within the confines of cities.