Visual Culture


Coordinators - Apurva Talpade, Anuj Daga & Kausik Mukhopadhyay


The Visual Culture cluster at SEA aims to set up a drawing culture in the school that is interrogative and reflective and where all manner of constructions and expressions of drawing are seen as a means to ask questions, make arguments, challenge institutional ways of learning, and become documents of new knowledge. SEA wishes to inculcate in its pedagogy the ability to think through drawings and with that aim, spark discussion around new frontiers in representations and what this could mean for the study and practice of architecture. The cluster looks to develop a critical perspective around questions of drawing and representation, but is not limited to existing, narrow understandings of how architects draw. Rather, its purpose is to open up, through interrogating drawings, questions of artistic practices around concerns that architects often engage with. These range from questions of the impact of images in our everyday lives, to considering the roles of phenomenon and semantics on spatial representations.


The following initiatives are being undertaken under this cluster:


1. Survey of Drawing Practices:
Exploring / establishing relationships between drawing traditions across different cultures and their spatial imaginations / configurations. This project may include compilations of drawings (including those made for buildings) across different cultures and studies of builtform in relationship with these drawings.
 


2. Critique of Contemporary Architectural Drawing Practices:
The orthographies to the logarithmic - permanence, privacy, geometry, standards, etc. to modularity, system-thinking, etc.
 


3. Image and Life:
Looking closely as dimensions related to image and life - role of images; the practices of image; meaning and experiences in images; space and image, etc.
 

4. Engaging with Drawing Pedagogy:
Pedagogic and artisanal experiments in architectural / spatial thinking through drawings towards developing a framework for visual culture in architectural pedagogy - along with speculations on what kind of spatiality they would produce.