Architectural drawing is primarily seen as a means of producing and documenting future buildings. Through ‘Encountering Drawings’, studio directors Aaron Paterson and Sarosh Mulla, in an ongoing collaboration with academic colleague Marian Macken, from the University of Auckland’s architecture school, have sought to explore speculative drawing practices, with a particular emphasis on the ways that bodies and drawings intersect.

The ongoing research fits within the umbrella of Encountering Drawings—an exploration of full-scale drawing’s potential for us to inhabit, occupy and be immersed within drawing—includes several distinct chapters, including: Drawing the Room and Drawing within the Room (2019–2020), Drawing Room (2020–2021) and a Room for Drawing and A Room as Drawing (2022–2023). Collectively, they present an alternative to typical conceptions of architectural drawing, exploring drawing in space, rather than of spaces, at full-scale and scaleless. 

Using motion capture technology, Drawing the Room & Drawing within the Room used projective drawings to capture movements of inhabitation, translating to line-work animations. DrawingRoom, exhibited at Toi Moroki Centre for Contemporary Art Christchurch, New Zealand, combined a mobile drawing apparatus, which explored ways of drawing with light and the generation of shifting shadows, with virtual reality animation, which was removed from its role as a form of instructive simulation to become a form of abstracted fiction.

A Room for Drawing & A Room as Drawing, responds and extends the outcomes of earlier works, to consider the idea of inhabitable drawing; ways of putting oneself into the drawings we make, occupying the emerging spatial proposition. Using two-dimensional shadow studies, maquette models and virtual reality to create conceptual spaces in which to encounter drawing.