Erosive Cartographies

Our objective with this studio was to invent new techniques for observing,recording, analyzing, and synthesizing the inexplicit histories of architecturalweathering and properties of erosion within the city. Linking the past to thepresent within the activated media of drawing is one way that students canstart to synthesize cultural aspirations with the formal desires of architecture.The drawings from this studio show that it is possible to communicate etherealand intangible qualities of erosion using the explicit media of architecture.Decay is ever-present. The perpetual modification of our civic fabric is legiblein the detailing of joints for amendment, remediation, or erasure. The workfrom this studio investigates the positive potential of decay in the productionof architectural joints through layered drawings with special emphasis givento marginal details. Marginal details are authored by the non-architect participantsthat engage with our built environment. Qualities such as stains, time,erosion, vandalism, decay, and general wear are all types of marginal details.Potentially, such details can register continuity within the city’s fragmentedhistoric episodes of wear. Manifesting strategies of improvisation and multiplicity,these fragments define contemporary issues of reuse and renewal andmay range in scale from the micro to the room to the city-landscape. A recordof student research gradually accrued in a series of drawings that describeand reconcile material, chronological, compositional, and programmatic differencesin prominent and discrete joints. Drawn at multiple scales, this drawingseries was developed in a manner similar to the intentional and improvisational,the technical and conceptual, and the explicit and implicit qualities ofour world’s marginal details.Our goal was to challenge the disciplinary assumptions about the instrumentalityof decay by gradually uncovering a new aesthetic of sustainableethics where the tangible and intangible are linked through the agency ofslow drawing. Questions we sought to respond to in this studio include: whatis the productive potential for decay? What is the effect of erosive propertieson inner and outer worlds? Furthermore, how do we communicate the natureof such forces that many times are invisible or evident only over long periodsof time? In terms of architectural consequences for the city, the projectsin this paper show that from the fantastic to the everyday, the destructivepower of erosion can be harnessed for its productive potential.

Volume Editors
Martha Thorne & Xavier Costa

ISBN
978-0-935502-83-1