"I work as an architectural associate at a residential design firm.
I am interested in learning how things work.
I like thinking about the philosophy of material re-use and craft,
how to build things and magnets."
While it seems that the digital format might offer a playground of iteration- an antithesis to the practical limits that keep most new architecture (in what is actually realized) so firmly unartful; that making a building is less an act of an experiment and more a ruthless distribution of aesthetic attempts (contempt?) and perverted senses of economy - its entrance into the field seems only to have cemented an emphasis on strange value engineering and efficiency. So much space and memory? For what?
My first assumption: true architectural experiment requires the actual making of the thing. No scalar or abstraction. Construction. Direct. With the scale of some architecture this has always been impossible, so the drawing or model becomes not only an outline or instruction for how to build, but also an outlet for “quick” rigorous experiment. In this way there has always been a sense of “virtual reality.” But believing this imagined reality to be only informed from the drawings and not also some embodied practice, understood in our own physical actions- drawing a literal line giving graphite to velum - watching that sharp edge dull- faster if the lines are longer… seems to leave us clinging to these provided coded lines- devoid of any thought or creativity…
What is this drawing for, this way of thinking? What is the type of bias that comes along with that origin- the plan, section and the elevation. That they are not, to the contrary of what senior year posters and enscape renderings and endless scrolling portfolios will have you believe, the final product. Maybe that separation has always been there…
Does the precision of the drawing- the perfect detail represent a beautiful, streamlined communication- or does it represent the devaluation of our human ability to communicate?
Less time perfecting drawings - more time understanding why we are drawing anything there at all. What is our medium anymore? Could you write a plan for a building? Could you paint it? Cook it? Televise it?
contact: nicholsonwork@protonmail.com