Drawing Research Platform, Somerset 2023
Photo: Alexander Turner
ENAC Summer Workshop Highlight:
This past August, an interdisciplinary group of ENAC students participated in a workshop at Shatwell Farm in Somerset, where they explored drawing as a key tool of architecture and engineering through access to the renowned Drawing Matter collection and the construction of on-site drawings of the environment.
Through research into the Drawing Matter Collection and through the construction of survey drawings and spatial fabrications measuring and observing the site, drawing was be explored as a corporeal form of measuring and conceiving our environment. The Drawing Matter site, Shatwell Farm, Somerset, UK, offered a unique setting as drawing archive as well as testing ground for construction.
The summer workshop Drawing Research Platform Somerset links to the teaching unit in Civil Engineering - Docta Manus_Drawing Structures, a research into the discipline of drawing for students in civil engineering and architecture. Drawing is introduced to the students not as a technique of representation but as a mediator between the construction and the individual. We understand drawing by hand as a cognitive tool, as a physical act, an experience, a construction in its own right. Through the act of drawing in the landscape (with ropes, with wood members), drawings can become mapping devices on a 1:1 scale. The students were encouraged to understand the place and the scale through a corporeal form of measuring that becomes a tool of design (disegno: drawing or invention).