THE MONOLITH DRAWING

Robin Evans describes the way in which architecture always exceeds its representations for every architecture meanders through different stages of being image [*]. Stan Allen defines the practice of producing images of architecture to be a combination between representation and expression [*]. The practice of notational drawing, driven by professional codes, indeed allows us to represent spaces as empirical objects. The diagram, as he explains, is a moment where one takes a distance from such a professional vocabulary to allow the image or drawing to become expressive of something perhaps less tangible [*]. This distinction between notation and diagramming has been termed by the American Philosopher Nelson Goodman (1976) as the difference between allographic and autographic art forms. Allographic art is “capable of being reproduced at a distance from the author by means of notation” [*]. An example of this would be music scores or indeed an architectural drawing. Autographic art its authenticity on the other hand is clearly dependent on direct contact with the author. Its value therefore lays in the original, such as in a painting or diagram. This paper aims at describing a drawing protocol through which the dialectics between representation and expression are under perpetual review. The protocol, termed The Monolith Drawing, acts as a performative discourse syncopating between representation and expression like Rubin’s Vase allowing both models to simultaneously exist on for and background. A significant attribute of The Monolith Drawing is its investment in the enormity of absence in order to avoid, as much as possible, ready made vocabularies and pre-determined routes of reflection. As such overthrowing the Architect’s personal formations of truth to allow him/her to interact with the vastness of what one could address as collective memory. This allows for a particular kind of embryonic architecture, born out of the organizational framework in which individual consciousness can coincide with shared understanding (or indeed collective memory). This is important to prevent the act of drawing to be reduced to subjective idealism and allow it to enter the dimensions of an architectural history. The Monolith Drawing invests in the entirety of history actively referencing historical archetypical elements to explore aspects of duration freed from historical classification and taxonomy. This in turn seems to create a practice of paradox with the appearing congruence between intuition and tradition. It is this kind of practice which is enabled a search for architecture escaping a historical periphery in order to (re) enter history in pursuit of productive points of intersection and overlap. In doing so, any boundary between historicized and present day architecture is carefully erased. Any safe distance between historical and contemporary information is eliminated to allow the drawing to engage with a process of intimate reflection. Such production of architecture demands a distancing between the architect as author and the authored product. The Monolith Drawing, as this paper will explain, is partly responsible for its own becoming with the architect standing at a (critical) distance. Such positioning of the architect, as maker of drawing constructs or choreographer of (historical) information is the actuation of a practice in which any linear or secular understanding of time is rejected and the idea of space or more specifically ‘distance’ is allowed to change.status: accepte