Axonography: Artistic interpretation and representation through axonometric drawing
Methodology : axonometric drawing
In The Image of the City, Kevin Lynch describes how individuals perceive and recall features in urban spaces. Lynch’s approach has stimulated research into spatial cognition, urban design and artificial intelligence, and still represents an essential pillar in the analysis of urban dynamics. To understand the layout of a city, people make individual mental maps which contain mental images of the city’s constraints. Using the city of Chicago as a vehicle of architectural speculation and representative form, the city is recognized as a dense set of layers comprised of both the inhabitants and their physical and emotional makeup, and the built and natural environments with which they interact. In this series of drawings, I attempt to utilize the axonometric drawing method, often underutilized in architectural speculation and better suited for pragmatic uses, to convey our ever-present emotions tied to the everyday spaces of each city, and, moreover, to illustrate how the functional experience of contemporary society can capture people’s hidden motivations, desires, and expectations in its architecture. Scales will shift from the individual to the city and infrastructural scale in hopes of deriving new perspectives which can lead to new ways of describing the city through unveiling of emotions that mixes the unseen with real surfaces of the city. Since the first city of which I attempted to draw axonometric drawing series was Chicago, it is personally significant to get a chance to exhibit these drawings at the 2019 Chicago Architecture Biennial in December.
Axonography : a new way of exploring the world
Axonography depicts the world through axonometric parallel projection, a drawing method which preserves all scales and dimensions and is often used in mechanical drawings. In my use of axonography, however, I subvert this notion of functional drawing to expose various layers of emotions, experiences, and memories through the juxtaposition of scales and figures, instead of showing and describing cities with data and texts. Axonography takes familiar everyday scenes and transforms them to various scales—big, small, stretched, distorted—to elicit new meanings and hidden stories from everyday appearances. Sometimes speculative, sometimes whimsical, these drawings allow us to express feelings and emotions about our spaces. For example, how do we express ourselves to another person? How do you describe your daily life? An individual series of drawings helps us think about what we do and how we spend a day. It includes biography and time scenes through morning, afternoon, evening, and night. An emotional series also portrays a story of our daily encounters in the city by exploring joy, sadness, fear, disgust, and anger to highlight our emotional experiences of the city or our lives. These drawings of our daily lives allow us to express things we haven’t really thought about before. Finally, because of axonometric drawing’s familiar role as functional drawing, it lends validity and credibility to the illustrations. With this understanding of city spaces and people’s everyday lives, I can bring benefit to anyone seeking to comprehend the status of America’s cities and our communities.
Progress : for students and the school
The study of architectural design, digital computation and artistry are meant to be evenly balanced, but I believe that technical skills are now being too highly prized in architectural schools, at the expense of artistic exploration. It is important to explore the artistic and expressive usage of technical drawings to connect architectural design skills to artistic imagery. I am continually working on this research through Comprehensive Design students at Indiana University.