Architectural Drawing - An Animate Field

Architectural drawing is changing because architects today draw with computers. Due to this change digital diagrams employed by computational architectural practices are often emphasized as powerful structures of control and organisation in the design process. But there are also diagrams, which do not follow computational logic worth paying attention to. In the following I will investigate one such other kind of diagram, a sketch diagram, which has a play-like capacity where rules can be invented and changed as you go. In that way, sketch diagrams are related to steered indeterminacy and authorial ways of directing behaviour of artefacts and living things without controlling this behaviour completely. I analyse a musical composition by John Cage as an example of a sketch diagram, and then hypothesize that orthogonal, architectural drawing can work in similar ways. Thereby I hope to point out important affordance of architectural drawing as a ¬hybrid between the openness of hand-sketching and the rule-basedness of diagramming, an affordance which might be useful in the migrational zone of current architectural drawing where traditional hand drawing techniques and computer drawing techniques are being combined with each other.