Drawing other Þings

This thesis is traced by a desire to explore whether architecture can persist as an unfolding negotiation between drawer’s intent and external forces. Drawing is conventionally understood as a passive vehicle for transcription. In this understanding, the translation between idea and building is pure, with drawing serving as its neutral translator—having no generative agency. This thesis gently unsettles that assumption. It asks what happens when you actively disrupt drawing practices through engaging with the external forces that pressurise drawing—when memory, site, and material resistance all press on drawing’s mark making. This research unfolds through drawing my family’s farm, through practice-as-research, weaving together drawing, walking, making, and autoethnographic storytelling. Across Three Tracks, the work stages progressively more complex negotiations between myself and the farm—starting with a body-scale drawing of the farm, using a machine built from farm materials that register the site, to an exploration of entanglements between farm, myself, external forces and architecture, and finally, an investigation into architecture drawn from disruptions, material translations, architectural elements and personal stories, within my family farm. Central to this research is the understanding that drawing is thinking—not a preparatory act but a live and open-ended process where gesture, memory, resistance, and material awkwardness all shape outcomes. Through engaging in disruptive drawing practices, I relinquish control; the act of drawing becomes a form of mutual discovery, where drawer and external forces mutually pressurise each other. Through this process, the research uncovers how relinquishing control opens possibilities—allowing drawing to be destabilised and contingent, with unexpected outcomes. This results in architecture that resists fixity, totalisation, and finality; it becomes ever-persisting, through unfolding negotiations between drawer’s intent and external forces. This research contributes to knowledge in the expanded field of architectural drawing—where drawing is understood as open, indeterminate and figured by multiple forces. It explores how personal stories and architecture can entangle through the expanded architectural practice of drawing. Through drawing that remains open to the unexpected, architecture becomes a site of encounter rather than resolution; this research is a conversation between myself, the family farm, and elusive forces shaping me, drawing and architecture.