The Body Drawn Between Knowledge and Desire

The architectural drawing brings together two aspects of architecture’s inescapable relationship with the human body: knowledge and desire. When Adolf Loos designed the never built Josephine Baker House (1928), his drawings mobilized and transmitted knowledge of the human body in general. At the same time, Loos deployed architectural means to express desire for the dancer’s body. The sections and plans suggest that the Viennese architect imagined Baker swimming in a pool whose submerged walls include large windows looking into the watery stage, enveloping the dancer’s body while putting it on display for guests.

Considered more generally, the architectural drawing always contains these two bodily moments, insofar as it describes proposals that give form to the lived world. This dynamic couple in the drawing corresponds to the difference between touching the body and grasping it; between an architect pursuing the desire to affect others through their senses and an architectural discipline extending its knowledge of human existence. This article considers relevant aspects in the writings of Robin Evans, Michel Foucault, Michel de Certeau, William T. Mitchell, and Jean-Luc Nancy to develop a theoretical basis for understanding the tensions and alliances at play when architecture draws the body between knowledge and desire.

The seventh issue of Footprint attempts to address this contemporary state of affairs within a disciplinary understanding of the drawn theory of architecture. The premise of raising this issue originates from the critical exploration of a field within architectural theory that in the last decades has seen a progressive 'de-problematization'. Even though the role of drawing is nowadays still regarded as the most common act of architecture, this understanding of drawing is hardly subject to critical inquiries, and, unfortunately, mostly limited to its instrumental role within the representation of the project.
The relationship between drawing and theory belongs instead to a long and well-established tradition, according to which drawing is seen as a 'doubly significant instrument of representation: as a moment of knowledge (therefore adjusting the idea to fit the object), and as an act of creative construction, capable of modifying the passive perception of the real and refocusing it within the dimension of theoretical and practical construction, often with a pronounced ideological content'. 2 In the early part of the twentieth century, after the radical experiments of the historical avant-gardes of the project. 6 Chamber Works opened up a space in which the meaning of architecture is in need of rethinking and redefinition, as the set of drawings tests and questions the very notion of architecture itself. In the end, Libeskind claimed to have looked for, but was unable to find, any fixed instruments, elements, or strategies with which either to 'ground' the discipline of architecture or, at least, 'determine' the temporary boundaries that might circumscribe it. 7 Nowadays, while drawing still receives unrelenting attention as a field of artistic and architectural expression, the theoretical reflection on drawing still seems to be caught in this vicious circle of clarification and reiteration, perhaps especially because of the absence or acknowledgement of 'new' publications that could confront the relevance of the works from the aforementioned period.
There is an undeniably disturbing dimension to this analysis, which positions the current practices of drawing in an apparent state of paralysis. The conclusion of Purini's above-mentioned text, which articulates the relevance and decay of the theoretical poignancy experienced by the drawing during the 1970s, constitutes one of the facets of a 'theoretical emptiness' that was the premise of this issue.
In recent years, 'drawing' has suffered a general 'de-problematization', which probably started at the end of the 1980s, a period in which the experiences that had begun in the 1960s and 1970s nowadays, drawing appears to have dissolved into a visual culture that is fundamentally guided by the of the idea of "construction", both in its specific architectural character and in its wider meanings.
In this context, architecture attempted to define its own language, taking the field of representation as   You need nothing else.' It is nevertheless possible to give the architect the benefit of the doubt and to postulate that perhaps his efforts, while clumsy on the level of interpersonal relations, stem at least in part from a sincere intention to improve his client's life rather than impoverish it. Through a scorn that those familiar with the profession may recognize as frustration, perhaps this architect is also expressing the desire to affect a man who seemed so eager to enjoy a beautiful house. He works not only for material gain or public recognition (although he clearly considers these); his design is also a labour of love.
It is perhaps not passionate love, but the architect's concern for the well-being of another person, or for others in general, partakes of an economy of desire with complex mechanisms and manifestations.
This architect is of course a fictional character (although it is tempting to imagine that Loos based his architect-client exchanges on anecdotes over-Does the need for survival or for public recognition fully explain the effort to draw environments that, if built, will affect others through physical sensation?
A multifaceted desire may also be involved when we draw relationships between design and life. This is where the matter of body knowledge arises. The hand that draws a plan is coextensive with a body that, from birth, has felt the cold radiate from a massive wall, seen distant fields framed by a window, heard footsteps descending a tation, while the latter's practically parallel lines correspond to the abstraction of the orthographic projections that characterize architectural representation. 11 Schinkel's version of the origin of drawing would therefore suggest that conceiving architectural space requires drawing, and that such drawing objectifies the world that it represents.
Together, these two aspects define rather well the notion of knowledge in drawing that I would like to develop parallel to that of desire. Architectural drawing organizes knowledge so that it can act on the world. Evans notes that unlike drawing in the visual arts, drawing in architecture 'is not so much produced by reflection on the reality outside the drawing, as productive of a reality that will end up outside the drawing'. 12 It is oriented toward altering existing conditions, hence Schinkel's apparent concern with a chronology in which tracing lines precedes raising edifices. Complementing that orientation, architectural drawing consists of a formalized system 'capable of transmitting information', as Stan Allen puts it. 13 In Schinkel's painting, that capacity is represented (but not exhausted) by the sun's parallel lines casting an undistorted image of the model. The Josephine Baker house may be taken as a concrete example of these characteristics of architectural drawing: Loos's orthographic projections define precise spatial dimensions and proportions that portray a transformed world in which Josephine Baker could swim amidst her guests. At the same time, these objective plans and sections carry Loos's desire for Josephine Baker like a stowaway, to be read between the lines. Knowledge and desire cohabitate in Loos's project.

The Body of Knowledge
The link between applied knowledge and the body in architectural drawing is complex. It would be misleading to infer from Schinkel's version of Pliny's myth that, since tracing a person's shadow precedes building, figure drawing is the origin of architecture.
Indeed, one could argue that Pliny's body-centred commentary on Michel Foucault's writings (notably Discipline and Punish). But it is also corresponds to a central concern in much of de Certeau's research, found in his most-cited book in architectural discourse, The Practice of Everyday Life, as well as in his work on historiography, mystics, cartography, and sociology. That concern, which he calls of the 'erotics of knowledge', 18   Evans's observations about architectural drawing find resonance in a broader field. Michel de Certeau defines the combination of code and action as a general phenomenon of knowledge production in modernity: [F]or the last four centuries all scientific enterprise has included among its traits the production of autonomous linguistic artifacts (its own specific languages and discourses) with an ability to transform the things and bodies from which they had been distinguished. 17 We need not construe architecture as a purely scientific undertaking to recognize that architectural drawing functions like one of these 'linguistic artifacts'. Nor need we drift into a debate about the similarities and differences between architecture and language to admit that, more specifically, architectural drawing has linguistic properties insofar as its conventions allow us to share ideas. For the issues at hand, let us retain that de Certeau's definition corroborates the idea that the body is a site where architectural drawing's twin qualities of system and transformation intervene. This stems no doubt in part from de Certeau's careful reading and measures, institutions that aim to manage, govern, control, and orient in a way that purports to be useful for the behaviours, gestures, and thoughts of human beings'. 22 The apparatus is that which models, contaminates, or controls individual lives in the spirit of utility. That spirit is what is at stake when the body is grasped by the apparatuses that extend the reach of disciplines and regulation.
For Agamben, the most ancient of apparatuses is perhaps language itself, 'one in which thousands and thousands of years ago a primate inadvertently let himself be captured'. I prefer 'to grasp' over Agamben's 'to capture'. The concern is not that the  For Hillier, the link between a graphic-based analytical method and lived experience is clear: Hillier's argument expresses the belief that architectural drawing can be used in association with analytical methods to determine the spatial configuration necessary to achieve specific ends, in this case a certain form of urban sociability. Here, the spirit of utility is double and mutually reinforcing: physical space is useful for individuals, who are themselves useful for a social project.
Applied during the design process (as Hillier and his team did for Norman Foster Associates' King's Cross redevelopment master plan in London), this drawing method may well help to create urban environments with 'an intelligible pattern to the space structure', where the 'integration core' is strongly defined, in short, in which one easily finds one's way. But it also produces and perpetuates a few ideas about lived experience: that spatial orientation is primarily a matter of vision; that seeing things in a certain way corresponds to a specific way of understanding them; that vision may be used to get people to behave certain ways. Pulled into a network apply knowledge about lived experience in the built environment to proper ends, we might argue that getting lost is the original mode of perceiving space.

Drawing and Desire
The debate about design and life, which occupied pretation that 'the sensation of light is a stimulus to the grasping as a response, the burn resulting is a stimulus to withdrawing the hand as a response and so on'. In a turn of phrase that seems like a precursor of deconstruction, Dewey counters that, in fact, to understand the child's experience of the candle, one must realize that that 'the burn is the original seeing'. 28 When architectural drawing is understood as the application of body knowledge to produce specific results, it follows the cause and effect model of human perception and action, and neglects the nuance that Dewey attempted to bring to the matter. Regarding Hillier's use of drawing to 'ecstasy of reading' tied to an 'erotics of knowledge'.
He himself takes 'voluptuous pleasure in it', recognizing that 'the fiction of knowledge is related to this lust to be a viewpoint and nothing more'. 34 The vili- god' from on high, one sees 'the analogue of the facsimile produced, through a projection that is a way of keeping aloof, by the space planner urbanist, city planner or cartographer'. 30 One sees the 'texturology' of a 'concept city'. 31 As with Evans's view of architectural drawing and Foucault's power of writing, constructing such a text, for de Certeau, depends on being isolated from that which it would alter. Writing fashions 'on its own, blank space ... a text that has power over the exteriority from which it has first been isolated'. 32 That power serves the ambition 'to reform' the 'reality of things'. 33 The whole image of Manhattan is analogous to that of the planner not only through resemblance, but also because it places the viewer in the distant position from which its alteration can be projected. 'It haunts writing, which sings its loss without being able to accept it.' 38 It is also a motor: 'Despite the change of scene, the One does not cease organizing by its absence a "Western" productivity.' 39 That drive to produce advances in the form of 'proliferating conquests destined to fill an original lack'. 40 In the place of religion, modern historiography continues the task of producing 'the relationship that a society maintains with its dead', 41  Lost-body writing stems from an unquenchable desire and questions the authority through which it takes 'the place of the other'. It may be a model for a lost-body drawing that is a reflexive practice conscious of the 'ruins' that inhabit its lines: the ruins of the life that it can never quite seize but that disturbs its order, and those of the author him-or for a more vivid depiction of what Blake calls the "bounding line", the line that binds, confines, and determines a boundary, and the line that leaps over a boundary, like a gazelle "bounding" over a fence.' 50 It shows the architect's 'infinite desire for orderly, rational boundedness reproducing itself'.
The '"binding" and "unbinding" of desire are fused in a single image': a picture of the architect drawing his own body between knowledge and desire.

Lost-Body Drawing
Whether we take desire as lack or desire as binding Many of today's vocal 'younger-generation' architects herself, the 'I' of any text or drawing that appears as a 'multiple, iconoclastic passer-by' in a fragmented work. 55 Such drawing would not retreat from the objectification of lived experience through which it articulates architecture's potential effects. But its incorporation of the architect's longing for othersfrom the past and in the future -might disturb its grasp of the body, and perhaps prefigure an architecture that touches us in unexpected ways.

Postscript: An Ethics of Seduction
In the end, the drawing circulates freely. Mitchell observes that images 'both "express" desires that we already have, and teach us how to desire in the first place'. 56 If non-painters enjoy looking at portraits, perhaps non-architects can also learn about desire by looking at architectural drawings.
A further possibility arises when we neutralize the directional line that points from the producer to the receiver, from the architect to the client or the anonymous user. We can imagine that the ethic of the architect who practices lost-body drawing is doubled by an ethic of the drawing's other, the absent body that haunts it. One whose presence is evoked in the drawing, who would be touched, may be wary of architecture's reach and hesitate giving oneself up to it.
Jean-Luc Nancy distinguishes between two ways that one can give oneself up to others. The first is as something to grasp (empoigner), 'an appropriable commodity'. In that case, 'I, "myself", remain behind that thing and behind the gift, I watch them and set myself apart from them' -like an unhappy man condemned to living with his own corpse. The second way is 'by averting the touch, thereby inviting to look further or elsewhere'. One cannot prevent another's lost-body drawing, but all is not lost: 'I do not control this gift, and he or she who touches me and withdraws, or who I stop before the touch, has truly drawn from me a shimmer of (my) presence.' 57 Pérez-Gómez argues that architecture's fundamental responsibility is to engage desire through 14. Ibid. Allen qualifies his remark with a comparison between the corrections that might be brought to a student's work in a painting studio and in an architecture studio. In the former case the teacher could point out that the arm is too long, in the latter that the window is too small. For Allen, these are completely different registers with different relationships to abstraction; but I am not certain that a teacher who corrects arm length is teaching painting.   To address these issues, we need, first, to reflect on Tschumi's two drawings, neither of which says anything directly about the project, a museum.
With its notation, the scribbled freehand drawing is less abstract than the digital one. The former entails certain aspects of the historicity of drawing, particularly its representational dimension, as will be discussed below. Still, in the freehand drawing,              In this consideration of a complex site, mapping is approached as a creative act, involving both a willingness to listen and a readiness to act. Through mapping, the architect mapmaker reads the site and allows stories to emerge, but also takes on the position of the narrator.

Mapping in Time
Maps will, as Harley reminds us, always 'represent more than a physical image of place', and if 'to read the map properly, the historian must always excavate the terrain of its surface geography', we argue that the same needs to be done to create the map sensibly. 19 When the architectural historian  position in these two temporal frameworks. And at the fold between these two complex temporal sites of the architectural project, lie the pasts, presents, and futures of any project. While the buildings themselves eventually embody and orchestrate these times, it is really at the drawing board (to use a somewhat anachronistic expression) that architects may critically address architecture's relation to time. It also elevated the (physical) context as the paramount design concern.
This mid-century, postmodern graphic re-evalua-      3. By aural, the author refers to hearing (or audition) as one of the five traditional senses. Sometimes the word auditory will be used instead as a synonym for aural in this paper.

Directionality
Also contrary to language, the representational space 19 of drawings is orientated in the sense that the topological relations of the parts of a drawing allow for orientation and are thus part of the epistemic function of the drawing. Conversely, language relies on the principle of linearity.

Graphism
In contrast to languages, drawings do not consist of elements, but are rooted in the act of drawing lines.
Lines cannot be rendered as elements in the sense of discrete objects, as they rely on a medium that they can differentiate. This is mirrored in George  29 Only the latter can If language and, more specifically, the declarative sentence is the paradigmatic model for the binary coding of digital data processing, and the symbol system within which drawing is embedded, is not completely commensurable with the symbol system of written language, then there are limitations to the digitalization of drawing. To tackle this issue, it is a good starting point to discuss Nelson Goodman's above-mentioned differentiation between analogue and digital symbol systems.

Drawing and Digitalization
In his attempt to develop a general symbol theory To address the epistemic functioning of a symbol system, we have to understand it as being operational; to invest it with meaning, we have to take it