Drawing Space / Marking Sensation

In this course, freehand drawing projects activate an awareness of spatial conditions. Exploratory assignments, often using charcoal, find visual strategies for representing perceptions of spatial dimensions that are palpable yet often go unremarked. Exercises to sculpt spatial form in 2D and to develop eye-hand communication focus on, for instance, negative space, shadows, tonal variations, and precise contours. Informal experiments bring attention to spatial proximities, intervals, and ambient pressures. Students can have any level of experience with drawing; the only requirement is a willingness to get messy. 

Fictional and theoretical texts add conceptual layers to the largely wordless experience of sensing a space. Zeynep Çelik Alexander has called this experience “kinaesthetic knowing” and notes that it has long been an undercurrent in design education and practice. Many terms can frame this real-time, physiological phenomenon (haptic perception, proprioception, spatial acuity, phenomenology); we will prioritize noting somatic responses to interior conditions and translating these responses into visual form. 

Visits to sites, museums, and/or archives complement the studio work. For the final project, each student will develop a “drawing research” portfolio to bring forward, investigate, and formally present the sensory and/or spatial dynamics of a project from another course. Altogether, visually articulating a sharpened sensitivity to spatial sensation aims to enrich any mode of design creativity — digital, conceptual, material, tectonic, etc.