The drawing of things Emily Bowerman’s drawings of semi-industrial conditions in and around the agricultural hinterland near Guelph, Ontario, bring some of the outlines of landscape urbanism to bear on the analysis of impacted landscapes. This is very much a drawing process, where history, statistics, geography, economics, land use and land fallow are laid graphically into a single drawing. Critical conjunctions that appear on the drawing would fail in text, or at least would be buried in words. Logocentricity does not necessarily clarify, often it obscures, diverts. There are connections between the Guelph drawing process and that of Metis, discussed in the essay on micro- urbanism. Connections are made, visually, that lead to connections of meaning. It is in the process of drawing that invention occurs. As with materials, drawing itself can be wilful: things happen on the page beyond one’s intellectual control. Lisa Rapoport and PLANT’s project, With Words As Their Actions, is a set of curved screens installed on an Ottawa subway platform that carry oral history texts about nineteenth-century Ottawa. This is text, the text is words, the words were spoken. Ephemeral speech, uttered before sound recording, becomes, ultimately, letters removed from large stainless steel sheets. Air blows through them. They can be touched. Like drawing, this too is a process of translation: an idea, a word, a thing is inscribed, becomes physical. Becomes material. Becomes stainless steel. Maya Przybylski and J Cameron Parkin’s work is specifically about software-embedded design, where data and algorithms are considered architectural elements of form and material assembly. Her drawing of Formworks’ 2018 Murmur Wall is a diagram of software connections made evident, and evidence that such connections have material and spatial consequences. How such consequences are evaluated depends on the computational literacy of architects, something that is increasingly generational. The practice of architecture is in the process of re-prioritising starting points. No longer the scribble on the back of an envelope made form, it starts with a complex array of conditions and connections. Dom Cheng’s Let It Rain, the first piece in this issue, starts with the complex condition of anomie and finds a small object, the umbrella, and its capacity to open and close, bump into other umbrellas and to create a safe space beneath it, as a germinal builder of community. His project relies on common will, the need to connect, the desire for sociability. His drawings show how this might happen: a kit of parts, assembly, a product. Deceptively simple. micro-urbanism Three essays are in this section – Joseph Heathcott’s aerial view of Mexican markets, Joanne Lam’s registration of street memory and media-recorded protests in Hong Kong, and Maria Portnov and Jonathan Ventura’s resurrection of the value-oriented designer who walks streets so unloved that it demands a manifesto. No matter what global forces blow around the world, like climate change they eternally play out on local terrain.
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on site review 36: our material future
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