Drawing the Impossible — The Role of Architectural Drawing in the Production of Meaning in Social Space.

Cubic Journal is a peer-reviewed, open-access journal. All journal content, except where otherwise noted, is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0). Work may be copied, shared and distributed when authors are properly accredited; this includes outlines of any work. Amendments to the original work needs to be shown. The licensor does not in any way endorse third party views or how journal content is used by others. How to Cite APA Tipene, L. (2018). Drawing the Impossible — The Role of Architectural Drawing in the Production of Meaning in Social Space. Cubic Journal, 1(1), 90-107. http://dx.doi.org/10.31182/cubic.2018.1.005

deconstruct formal aesthetics to create a spatial discourse on "states of being rather than on the physical reality of use" (Lerup 1987, 9). Perhaps the most identifiable example of this mode of drawing is the Le Carceri d'invenzione [Imaginary Prisons] (1745-61) portfolio by the architect Giovanni Battista Piranesi. These difficult and bleak drawings go beyond simple depictions of imaginary architectural space to include elements of optical illusion. Such elements make these depictions unbuildable outside the artifice of drawing by including paradoxical forms, parallel scales, and the deliberate obscuration of linear perspective. Such elements deny the plausible consideration of these drawings as depictions of real space. Instead they confront us as a type of unknowable space made from a "tangle of things that questions one another's meaning" (Tafuri 1987, 50).
A more recent example of this mode of drawing is Lars Lerup's Love/House (1987). This episodic depiction of the fate of two lovers demonstrates unbuildable space through the metamorphosis of built form across twenty-six drawings that disregard physical limitations such as gravity and structural logic (Lerup 1987, 59-80 (1986). 2 Foucault describes heterotopias as places that are "outside of all places, even though it may be possible to indicate their location in reality" (Foucault 1986, 24). Like the drawings, Foucault explains heterotopias as consisting of a duality that configures the unreal with the locatable; a process that he describes in detail through an allegory of his interaction with a mirror (1986, 24).
Foucault begins by describing the characteristics of the mirror that correlate with heterotopia's other, utopia. He suggests that the space of reflection within the mirror is like a utopia in that it is "a placeless place" (1986,24). In a similar way, he describes utopias as "fundamentally unreal spaces" (1986, 24) because they are representations of "society itself in a perfected form, or else society turned upside down" (1986,24). This description of utopias as only perfect (eu-topian) or the inverse (dystopian) demonstrates the limitations of such idealisations; like the space of reflection in the mirror, utopias are unreal and bare an inevitable distance to reality. James J. Gibson discusses the same effect of idealised representation in drawing. He suggests drawings that attempt to perfectly depict the observable world prevent any reliable impression of reality (Gibson 1978, 231). He describes this as       Moving from his definition of the utopia to his conceptualisation of the heterotopia, Foucault returns to the allegory of the mirror. He states that in addition to its unreal space of reflection, the mirror is also a real site that "does exist in reality" (Foucault 1986, 24). In the same manner, Foucault suggests heterotopias are "real places […] that do exist" 3 (1986, 24), resulting in their ability to affect us through exerting "a sort of counteraction on the position that I occupy" (1986,24). Importantly, he suggests that for this counteractive mechanism to affect us, like the mirror, heterotopias must be simultaneously experienced as both real entities and unreal reflections (1986,24). For Foucault, this non-hegemonic interface of these two depictions is central to the concept and agency of the heterotopia.
Returning to Gibson, he parallels this duality of the heterotopia in his description of how we experience drawings (Gibson 1978, 231). He suggests that like Foucault's mirror, drawings are simultaneously experienced as both "surface and scene", or image and space 4 (1978, 231). The result of which is a dual perception when viewing drawings as real images that affect us through counteraction and as unreal spaces of reflection that gives the counteraction meaning.
Considering drawings in this way, perfected depictions of the observable world can be described as attempts to favour unreal spaces over real images. The result of which are idealised representations that provide little "counteraction on the position I occupy" (Foucault 1986, 24) because they locate "the observer in a virtual environment" (Gibson 1978, 232). Adversely, drawings that engage in optical illusion and depict unbuildable space break the drawings ability to convincingly enact such perfected representations. They result in drawings that we experience as real images that use counteraction to affect us through reflecting the unreal qualities that make space meaningful.
By depicting purposely unbuildable space, such drawings give agency to real but ephemeral characteristics of our social experience. In the case of Piranesi's work, this results in spatial depictions that are "a systematic criticism of the concept of place" (Tafuri 1987, 27). In the case of Lerup's work, it results in spatial descriptions that "attempt to arrest or disrupt the unspoken and unheard 'family narrative' written in the spaces of the house" (Biln 1995, 40). These drawings become sites to explore the meaning of such unbuildable spatial qualities and question unseen social-spatial practices.
Lerup's drawings suggest how such agency takes hold in our cultural imagination. Prior to his development of the Love/House, Lerup defined his approach to design as "interactionist" (Lerup 1977, 19), suggesting that the meaning of architecture is unfinished in its built form and instead is constantly produced through participatory engagement in our social space. His Love/House drawings appear to embody the same view. Drawn to articulate a critical reflection on the American domestic interior, these depictions of the relational experience of the lovers leave the house unfinished. Described by John Biln as a "somatic suture" (Biln 1995, 60-65), these metamorphic and unbuildable representations compel the viewer to actively participate in the construction of their meaning (1995,(60)(61)(62)(63)(64)(65). A point articulated by Lerup himself when suggesting that the clients of Love/House, the lovers themselves, reflect a particular relational moment that we have all experienced at one point in our lives. (Lerup 1987, 18).
Manfredo Tafuri describes a similar relationship with the unfinished in Piranesi's unbuildable prisons. Paraphrasing May Skeler, he suggests the "disintegration of the coherence of structure" in the drawing results in "the spectator to recompose laboriously the spatial distortions, to reconnect the fragments of a puzzle that proves to be, in the end, unsolvable" (Tafuri 1987, 26). Tafuri appears to describe this interactive process as the central mechanism of Piranesi's work, resulting in "infinite dialectics" (1987,53), which democratise the production of meaning in the drawing by opening it to "unforeseen possibilities of intervention into the form of the human environment" (1987,46). The counteractive agency of these drawings to affect our understanding of social space is evident through their significant influence on architecture, art, stage design, cinema, literature and critical theory since its completion in 1761 (Roncato 2007, 6;Tafuri 1987, 39). By remaining unfinished, or even "unfinishable", these drawings provide an inexhaustible site to reflect on the unbuildable qualities of the human condition that make space meaningful.  (Lefebvre 1991, 33;38-9).
An essential premise of this triadic structure is the idea that space does not exist independently of human action but instead is a product of our relational engagements and subject to the "tensionfilled" (Olivier 2011, 79)  This portfolio was able to sustain this investigation into social spaces of the domestic interior by making full use of the unique attributes of the medium of drawing, as a site to explore the logic of ephemera. Such a mode of drawing, which removes expected outcomes and sustains unbuildable elements, offers a means to explore the unseen mechanisms of social processes and contribute to the infinite dialectics of meaning in social space.