Drawing the Urban

Abstract

<p>Behind the 'official city', of which we can easily draw the outlines, lies the city of ‘in-betweens’ – a system of thresholds in a constant state of transformation that oscillates between the classical duo of inside/outside, public/private, and legal/illegal. Because of this ambiguous status, this condition opens up multiple ways of interpreting the physical and metaphorical limits between the solid and the void, allowing the city to breathe.</p><p><br></p><p>For an architect, this liminal condition inspires precisely because it contains a set of spatial design strategies that resist a planning attitude trying to fill and control every space it encounters. However, to talk about ambiguity, words are sometimes not enough but drawings can be a precious tool to approach and analyse the ‘ineffable’.</p><p><br></p><p>“Looking for the Voids and Drawing the Liminal” will retrace fifteen years of my investigation of marginal spaces in Asia through drawings. The in-situ observation conducted on five ‘in-between’ sites: namely a network of tinny alleyways, a hill, and a small island located within and at the periphery of the dense city of Hong Kong; the residual spaces under Bangkok’s expressways; and a system of unbuilt mini-mountains in Seoul, led to the production of a series of analytical drawings that dissect the mechanism of buffer spaces within the city.</p><p><br></p><p>I will demonstrate how the crafting of drawing serves as a didactic tool not only to understand those liminal sites about also to explain an architecture of the 'in-between' inspired by the liminal condition in the city. To this end, the work presented argues that the action of reading the city is not merely a passive approach, but rather an active process of constructing a narrative; in other words, reading through drawing is a way of acting.</p>