Abstract

This paper starts from the consideration of the drawings of architects and urban designers and how precisely they prefigure actual realised space. It will use Henri Lefebvre’s notions of constructions of space, the significance of drawing and the space within the medium itself. It will examine a number of architectural drawing projects, most significantly a travelling panorama rotunda (mechanically drawn), which will expand upon Lefebvre’s notions of space and will be transferable as an analytical drawing tool. The paper will use drawing to analyze the political and productive relations of space and the space of the drawing itself. It is constructed from the point of view that architecture and urban design are both a potential communication medium, and will explore the discursive space of this through the drawing and abstract representations of the space (the media of the design professions). It frames drawing as part of a process of encoding information and considers what the functions and knowledges of these drawings might be. One of the intentions of the drawing study has been to develop a new visibility of a space, including the social consequences (the flows of bodies in space) of urban design. Visibility in the drawings is concerned with the visibility of social relations.