Architectural Drawings as Investigating Devices: Architecture’s Changing Scope in the 20th Century

Architectural Drawings as Investigating Devices explores how the changing modes of representation in architecture and urbanism relate to the transformation of how the addressees of architecture and urbanism are conceived.

The book diagnoses the dominant epistemological debates in architecture and urbanism during the 20th and 21st centuries. It traces their transformations, paying special attention to Le Corbusier and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s preference for perspective representation, to the diagrams of Team 10 architects, to the critiques of functionalism, and the upgrade of the artefactual value of architectural drawings in Aldo Rossi, John Hejduk, Peter Eisenman, and Oswald Mathias Ungers, and, finally, to the reinvention of architectural programme through the event in Bernard Tschumi and the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA). Particular emphasis is placed on the spirit of truth and clarity in modernist architecture, the relationship between the individual and the community in post-war era architecture, the decodification of design process as syntactic analogy and the paradigm of autonomy in the 1970s and 1980s architecture, the concern about the dynamic character of urban conditions and the potentialities hidden in architectural programme in the post-autonomy era.

This book is based on extensive archival research in Canada, the USA and Europe, and will be of interest to architects, artists, researchers and students in architecture, architectural history, theory, cultural theory, philosophy and aesthetics.

Dr. Ing. Marianna Charitonidou is Principal Investigator and Postdoctoral Researcher at the Department of Art Theory and History of Athens School of Fine Arts, where she is leading the project Constantinos A. Doxiadis and Adriano Olivetti’s Post-war Reconstruction Agendas in Greece and in Italy: Centralising and Decentralising Political Apparatus, and Founder & Principal of Think Through Design Architectural, Urban and Landscape Design Studio. She is architect engineer and urbanist, historian and theorist of architecture and urbanism, expert in sustainable environmental design and curator. Apart from her PhD thesis The Relationship between Interpretation and Elaboration of Architectural Form: Investigating the Mutations of Architecture’s Scope (National Technical University of Athens, 2018), she completed the following two postdoctoral projects: The Travelling Architect’s Eye: Photography and the Automobile Vision at the Department of Architecture of ETH Zurich, where she was Lecturer (2019-2021), and The Fictional Addressee of Architecture as a Device for Exploring Post-colonial Culture: The Transformations of the Helleno-centric Approaches at the School of Architecture of the National Technical University of Athens. She curated the exhibition The View from the Car: Autopia as a New Perceptual Regime (ETH Zurich, 2021).