Call for Papers: Drawing and Architecture. Bitácora Arquitectura 42
Bitácora Arquitectura is a peer-reviewed academic journal published by the School of Architecture of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, UNAM since 1999. The journal specializes in the critical, historical and theoretical study of architecture, landscape architecture, industrial design, urbanism, and art as studied from multiple vantage points. It is published three times a year and its goal is to disseminate knowledge on these topics and, therefore, it is aimed towards a wide audience including students, architects, philosophers, town planners, designers, artists, historians, critics and theorists of art, architecture, and social sciences, as well as any other person interested in the themes addressed in the journal.
Drawing and Architecture. Drawing is still considered to be an action that is central to architecture, but only rarely is it problematized. The understanding of this process is solely limited to its instrumental, necessary and supposedly objective role in the representation of the project and its construction. Advances or transformations in drawing methods, as well as the tools and materials used, are not neutral; they influence the design, the proposals and our conception of reality at each historic moment. Given the current general preference for the use of computers in design, a study of the role that drawing methods and conventions have historically played as tools of architectonic communication, and in putting forward certain specific conceptions of space, can spark critical analysis of the resources used today to conceive, register and represent architecture. To this day, we continue to use the abstraction of Cartesian geometry with far too much naturality, as it allows three-dimensional objects to be reduced to two dimensions and, consequently, for the control and precision required by the Industrial Revolution and scientific thinking. Nevertheless, while this geometry aims for a correspondence between representation and object, modern artists have explored the fascinating, enigmatic distance between reality and its projections. Many have explored unconventional drawing methods and tools, subverting the visual canon in order to propose architectures that lie outside of established conceptions; nevertheless, sketches have maintained their position of prestige in the expression of architectonic thinking. In this issue, we aim to explore the evasive relationships between architectonic drawings, drawing methods, materials and tools and architectonic works, whether built or imagined.
Please submit your papers by 1 September 2019 at bitacoraunam@gmail.com and bitacora.arquitectura@unam.mx