Drawing the Room

Project description

 This installation couples projective drawings with post factum documentation – or creative post-occupancy data – of built houses by PAC Studio. Using motion capture technology, the movements of inhabitation are captured and translated to line work animations. The resulting drawings of inhabitation are projected full scale, exhibited in the space of the architectural office, the site of conceiving and production of both drawings and architecture.

Here, drawings return to the office, merging designed intentions with realised outcomes. The process of architects’ imaginative inhabitation – which involves both memory and intention, as embodied drawing practices – that is made explicit. 

This project explores contemporary performative drawing practices within architecture and considers the ways in which bodies and drawings interact. The fundamental importance of the line within architecture is highlighted, not as demarcation, divider or indexical reference, but as a trace of bodily movement.

Project Credits

This project is supported by funding from the Faculty of Creative Arts and Industries, The University of Auckland.

Artist Bios

Aaron Paterson (NZ): Aaron Paterson is a practicing architect and Senior Lecturer at the School of Architecture and Planning, The University of Auckland. In the field of residential architecture, Aaron is widely recognized in New Zealand, and widely published and awarded. His research is focused on non-normative architectural representation of fabrication and assemblage in practice. https://www.pacstudio.nz/

Sarosh Mulla (NZ): Sarosh Mulla is a practicing architectural designer and Senior Lecturer at the School of Architecture and Planning, The University of Auckland. His design work has been awarded by both the New Zealand Institute of Architects and the Designers Institute NZ. Sarosh is a founding member of design collective Oh.No.Sumo and co-designer of ‘Rainbow Machine’, a large-scale public artwork for the Auckland Council. https://www.pacstudio.nz/

Marian Macken (AU): Marian Macken teaches in design and media in the School of Architecture and Planning at The University of Auckland. She trained in architecture, landscape architecture and visual art. Her work has been acquired by international public collection of artists’ books, and she published Binding Space: The Book as Spatial Practice (2018), as part of Routledge’s Design Research in Architecture series. https://unidirectory.auckland.ac.nz/profile/m-macken

Jacky Ziyi Zheng (NZ): Jacky Zheng is a freelance designer and research assistant. He is currently completing the MArch(Prof) degree at the University of Auckland and specializes in the field of mixed reality architecture. He operates in the fields of cutting-edge technologies and seeks to implement technological experimentations into the fields of architectural designs. 

Maito Akiyama (NZ): Maito Akiyama graduated with a MArch(Prof) (Hons I) in 2019 and was a finalist in the 2019 New Zealand Institute of Architects Student Design Awards with his thesis ‘Happy Hour at the Grogzone: Architectures of Alcoholic Aotearoa.’ He is currently a graduate at Architectus and interested in analysing the regulatory constraints of architecture by exposing the role which design plays within spatial politics.