Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington
Gate 3, Kelburn Parade
Wellington 6140
New Zealand

Drawing Is/Not Building

$25.00

Published 2016 by Te Pātaka Toi Adam Art Gallery at Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington
95 pages
298mm x 210mm, softcover, with colour illustrations
Edited by Christina Barton, Sarah Treadwell and Simon Twose
ISBN: 978-1-877309-35

This exhibition presented the work of three architects who have a theoretical interest in drawing. Simon Twose, Sarah Treadwell and Roland Snooks respectively teach at Victoria University of Wellington, University of Auckland, and RMIT in Melbourne. Each approaches drawing not merely as a preliminary stage in a design process, but as an instrumental means to determine how matter is formed, shaped, constructed and, perhaps, felt. They argue that the material entanglements of drawing are usually hidden, cleaned away by the presence and seriousness of buildings the drawings are deemed to represent. Yet these delicate, complicated things figure the designer’s spatial understanding and are the tissue of architecture; they are the making of it.

Roland Snooks looks at possibilities offered by the shared authorship of human and computer; Sarah Treadwell merges the conventions of architectural rendering with hand-drawn processes to access the oceanic, and Simon Twose works in the space between building and drawing, by using concrete at full scale as his medium. The three put material engagements in focus and question building and representation to distil the potentialities in drawing.

Published with support from the Adam Art Gallery Programme Development Fund and with funds from the School of Architecture and Planning, National Institute of Creative Arts and Industries, University of Auckland and the Faculty of Architecture and Design, Victoria University of Wellington.