Site Atlas Reference Drawings — the Module 1 hand-out

0 START HERE — the ten to look at before you draw anything

1. 01Harold Fisk, Geological Investigation of the Alluvial Valley of the Lower Mississippi River, 1944images ↗copyMAPTIME
   • The meander-belt plates (Plate 22, sheets 1–15).
2. 02Thomas Cole, The Course of Empire, 1833–36images ↗copyTIMEPERSP
   • Five paintings, one bay, one mountain, from wilderness to consummation to desolation.
3. 03Richard McGuire, Here, 1989 (six pages in RAW) and 2014 (book)images ↗copyTIMEPERSP
   • One corner of one room, panels inside panels, each panel dated: 1957, 1775, 2033, 100,000 BC.
4. 04Robert Crumb, A Short History of America, 1979images ↗copyTIMEPERSP
   • Twelve panels of one crossroads from forest to strip mall, plus three "future" endings.
5. 06Kate Orff / SCAPE with Richard Misrach, Petrochemical America, 2012images ↗copyMAPTIMETEXTSITE
   • The "Ecological Atlas" half: throughlines, sections, timelines and glossaries drawn over Cancer Alley on the Mississippi.
6. 07Perry Kulper, Contingent Practices and David's Island drawings, 1990s–2013images ↗copyTEXTPROCESS
   • The brief's second image. Notice that the strangeness is built from measured parts (plans, sections, notation, text) held in a field, not from blur.
7. 08Smout Allen, Liquid Kingdom (2019) and Augmented Landscapes (Pamphlet Architecture 28, 2007)images ↗copyPERSPPROCESS
   • The brief's third image. Landscape-scale instruments drawn as if they were real; models photographed and drawn over.
8. 09Robert Smithson, Bingham Copper Mining Pit — Utah / Reclamation Project, 1973 ✓images ↗source ↗copyPROCESSSITE
   • A photostat of an open-pit copper mine with a grease-pencil overlay proposing a rotating viewing disc at the bottom; the toxic yellow pond kept as the colour.
9. 10Heidi Natura, Root Systems of Prairie Plants, 1995 ✓ (ink on mylar, 30"×42", after John Weaver's Nebraska root studies)images ↗source ↗copyMAPSITE
   • A section through prairie ground where the drawing is 90% below the datum line.

1 MAPS THAT HOLD TIMEMAPTIME

Cartography where duration is in the map itself, not beside it.

• Harold Fisk, Mississippi meander maps, 1944images ↗copy
  • See above. Also look at his Plate 15 geological sections through the valley: the same story in section.
• Charles Joseph Minard, Carte figurative des pertes successives en hommes de l'Armée française dans la campagne de Russie, 1869images ↗copy
  • A band whose width is a quantity, running across a map, with a temperature graph hung beneath.
• Minard's other flow mapsimages ↗copy
  • Wine exports (1864), coal, emigration: the same technique for material moving across territory.
• John Snow, cholera map of Broad Street, 1854images ↗copy
  • Stacked bars of deaths on a street plan.
• Charles Booth, Descriptive Map of London Poverty, 1889–1903images ↗copy
  • A colour per house, seven classes.
• W. E. B. Du Bois, data portraits for the Paris Exposition, 1900images ↗copy
  • Hand-drawn, coloured, spiral and bar charts of Black life in Georgia.
• Emma Willard, Temple of Time, 1846 and Picture of Nations, or Perspective Sketch of the Course of Empire, 1836images ↗copy
  • History drawn as a perspective hall and as a branching stream.
• Joseph Priestley, A New Chart of History, 1769 / Chart of Biography, 1765images ↗copy
  • The first modern timeline: horizontal bars against a ruled time axis.
• Alexander von Humboldt, Naturgemälde (the Chimborazo section), 1807images ↗copy
  • A mountain cut in section, with bands of text on both sides listing what lives at each elevation.
• William Smith, A Delineation of the Strata of England and Wales, 1815images ↗copy
  • The first geological map; hand-coloured strata, the colour darker at the base of each bed.
• William Henry Holmes, panoramas in the Atlas to Accompany the Monograph on the Tertiary History of the Grand Cañon District, 1882images ↗copy
  • Strata drawn in perspective from a lookout, with every bed labelled.
• John Wesley Powell, Arid Region of the United States, Showing Drainage Districts, 1890images ↗copy
  • The watershed map that argued the West should be governed by basins, not grids.
• Erwin Raisz, Landforms of the United States, 1939images ↗copy
  • Hand-drawn physiographic map; every ridge a pen stroke.
• Heinrich Berann, panoramas of national parks (Yellowstone, 1989 etc.) and, with Marie Tharp & Bruce Heezen, World Ocean Floor, 1977images ↗copy
  • Painted oblique maps; the whole territory tilted toward you.
• Richard Edes Harrison, Look at the World: The Fortune Atlas for World Strategy, 1944images ↗copy
  • Oblique globes, the horizon curved.
• Eduard Imhof, Swiss school-atlas relief shading, 1930s–70simages ↗copy
  • The standard for how light falls on drawn terrain; the model for the shaded survey under Relief.
• Giambattista Nolli, Nuova Pianta di Roma, 1748images ↗copy
  • The figure-ground: public interiors drawn as open.
• Ian McHarg, the overlay maps for the Potomac River Basin and Staten Island studies (published in Design with Nature, 1969)images ↗copyPROCESS
  • The overlay method: one transparency per factor (slope, soils, hydrology, forest, history), stacked to find the answer.
• Anuradha Mathur & Dilip da Cunha, Mississippi Floods: Designing a Shifting Landscape, 2001images ↗copy
  • Fisk redrawn, sectioned, printed on strips; also Deccan Traverses (2006) and SOAK: Mumbai in an Estuary (2009).
• James Corner, the composite map-drawings of Taking Measures Across the American Landscape (with Alex MacLean's aerial photographs), 1996images ↗copy
  • Aerial photographs paired with Corner's composite map-drawings of the same ground: pivots, surveys, sections, notation.
• Denis Wood, Everything Sings: Maps for a Narrative Atlas, 2010images ↗copy
  • One neighbourhood (Boylan Heights, Raleigh) mapped fifty ways: jack-o'-lanterns, pools of streetlight, the routes of the paper boy.
• Rebecca Solnit et al., Infinite City (San Francisco, 2010), Unfathomable City (New Orleans, 2013), Nonstop Metropolis (New York, 2016)images ↗copy
  • Each plate overlays two unrelated histories on one base map.
• Bill Rankin, the maps of Radical Cartography (radicalcartography.net), 2005–images ↗copy
  • Mapping as argument; also his essay-maps on the US grid and the territory of the survey.
• Laura Kurgan / Spatial Information Design Lab, Million Dollar Blocks, 2006images ↗copy
  • Satellite imagery read critically; money as a map of blocks.
• Forensic Architecture, Environmental Racism in Death Alley, Louisiana, 2021 ✓images ↗source ↗copyTEXTSITE
  • With RISE St. James: plantation grids, lost cemeteries of the enslaved, and petrochemical plumes composited on one river.
• Fazal Sheikh & Eyal Weizman, The Conflict Shoreline, 2015images ↗copy
  • Aerial photographs of the Negev with a drawn threshold line moving over decades.
• Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI), the Land Use Database and its exhibitions and bus tours, 1994–images ↗copy
  • Deadpan mapping of extraction and waste sites; their tours and exhibits on tailings, pits and Superfund ground.
• Richard Weller, Claire Hoch & Chieh Huang, Atlas for the End of the World, 2017images ↗copy
  • Biodiversity hotspots against urban growth, plotted as an atlas of plates.
• Pierre Bélanger / OPSYS, the mining-claim maps of Extraction Empire and the EXTRACTION pavilion, Venice 2016images ↗copySITE
  • A whole country drawn as a mining claim map.
• Nikos Katsikis (with Neil Brenner), the planetary maps of Operational Landscapes / "Grounding Metabolism", 2014images ↗copy
  • Extraction hinterlands mapped at planetary scale.
• Anna Tsing, Jennifer Deger, Alder Keleman Saxena & Feifei Zhou, Feral Atlas, 2020 (online)images ↗copy
  • An atlas of the Anthropocene navigated through drawn "landscape" pages by Feifei Zhou.
• Native Land DigitalcopyTEXT
  • The territory map behind every one of your five sites.
• Guy Debord & Asger Jorn, The Naked City, 1957images ↗copyPROCESS
  • A city cut into fragments and rejoined with arrows: the psychogeographic collage-map.
• Constant Nieuwenhuys, New Babylon maps, 1959–74images ↗copy
  • Drawn sectors laid over real city maps of Amsterdam, The Hague, Paris.
• Buckminster Fuller, Dymaxion Map, 1943images ↗copy
  • The globe unfolded from an icosahedron so the continents read as one island in one ocean.
• Francis Galton, isochrone map, 1881images ↗copyTIME
  • Travel time from London drawn as bands over the world.
• Alighiero Boetti, Mappa, 1971–94images ↗copyTIME
  • World maps embroidered in Afghanistan and Pakistan, each dated, the flags changing as borders change over twenty years.
• NASA Earth Observatory, World of Change and Google Earth Timelapse (1984–2022)images ↗copyTIMESITE
  • Before-and-after satellite pairs, and every year of Landsat played over your site in thirty-eight frames: the pit filling, the chat piles shrinking, the waste beds greening.
• Charles O. Paullin & John K. Wright, Atlas of the Historical Geography of the United States, 1932images ↗copyTIME
  • 700 maps of the country changing: land grants, rail, votes, the frontier line decade by decade.
• Mapping Inequality (University of Richmond), the HOLC "redlining" maps, 1935–40 ✓images ↗source ↗copyMAPSITE
  • The federal Home Owners' Loan Corporation's colour-graded city maps; Syracuse is in it.
• Edwin Hergesheimer / U.S. Coast Survey, Map Showing the Distribution of the Slave Population of the Southern States, 1861images ↗copy
  • The first widely seen choropleth in America, shaded by county from the census; Lincoln kept one.
• Hermann Bollmann, New York, 1962images ↗copyPERSP
  • Manhattan drawn building by building in isometric from 67,000 photographs; the ancestor of the DAS panoramas (§9c).
• Louis Bretez / Michel-Étienne Turgot, Plan de Turgot (Paris), 1739images ↗copyMAPPERSP
  • The whole city in bird's-eye isometric on twenty sheets; every façade drawn.
• Leonardo da Vinci, plan of Imola, 1502images ↗copy
  • The first measured town plan in true plan, drawn from a walked survey with compass bearings; the origin of the MAP element as a document.
• Harry Beck, London Underground diagram, 1933images ↗copy
  • Topology instead of geography: only the order of stations and the direction of lines survive.
• Joaquín Torres-García, América Invertida, 1943images ↗copyTEXT
  • South America drawn with the south at the top: "our north is the south." A map that argues by orientation.
• John Ogilby, Britannia, 1675images ↗copyTIME
  • The road atlas as strips: each route drawn as a ribbon unrolled down the page, north turning as the road turns.
• Coloney & Fairchild, Ribbon Map of the Father of Waters, 1866images ↗copyMAPTIME
  • The entire Mississippi from source to Gulf on an eleven-foot strip that rolls up into a case; landings, plantations, sunk boats.
• Marshall Islands stick charts (mattang, rebbelib)images ↗copy
  • Ocean swells lashed as palm ribs, islands as shells: a map of how water moves, not where land is.
• Ammassalik wooden maps, Greenland, 1880simages ↗copy
  • Coastlines carved as edges of driftwood to be read by hand in the dark; the map as a tactile object (the Archivist's PIAF printer will like this).
• The Ngurrara Canvas, 1997images ↗copyMAPTEXT
  • A ten-by-eight-metre painting of Great Sandy Desert country by forty Walmajarri and Wangkajunga artists, presented as evidence of native title and accepted by the tribunal.

2 TIMELINES AND OTHER DURATIONAL STRUCTURESTIME

The brief lists bands, spirals, rings, strips of dated states, sets of cores. Here is one or more of each.

• Bandimages ↗copy
  • Minard (above); the Chronographie universelle of Jacques Barbeu-Dubourg, 1753 (a 54-foot scroll in a case); Priestley; the Eames Office "Mathematica" history wall, 1961 and "A Computer Perspective" history wall, 1973 — dense dated objects packed on a band.
• Spiralimages ↗copy
  • The geological "spiral of time" diagrams (USGS, 1970s–); Willard's Temple of Time; the Long Now Foundation's Clock of the Long Now drawings, 1999– (a 10,000-year mechanism).
• Ringimages ↗copy
  • Tree rings, obviously: look at real dendrochronology plates (the Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research, Tucson); Rachel Sussman, The Oldest Living Things in the World, 2014; a ring also reads as a plan, which lets your TIMELINE and your MAP be one object.
• Strip of dated statesimages ↗copyPROCESS
  • Crumb; McGuire; Eadweard Muybridge, Animal Locomotion, 1887 and Étienne-Jules Marey's chronophotographs, 1880s; Ed Ruscha, Every Building on the Sunset Strip, 1966 (a 25-foot accordion strip, both sides of the street); Bernd & Hilla Becher, typologies of winding towers, blast furnaces, water towers, 1959–2007 — the same object repeated in a grid until the differences become the subject.
• Set of coresimages ↗copy
  • Onondaga Lake's mercury sediment cores are literally published (the 2005 Record of Decision has profile plots ✓); ice-core and pollen-core diagrams from the USGS and NOAA; Mark Dion, Tate Thames Dig, 1999 — mud from two beaches sorted into a cabinet; Anna Atkins, Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions, 1843 — specimens as blue plates.
• Frames within framesimages ↗copyPERSPPROCESS
  • McGuire; Chris Ware, Building Stories, 2012 — a Chicago three-flat drawn as diagrams of a century of tenants; Romare Bearden, The Block, 1971 — one Harlem street on six panels, collage, with lives visible through the windows.
• One place repeatedimages ↗copy
  • Cole's Course of Empire; Hokusai, Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji, c. 1830–32 (the same mountain from thirty-six lives); Monet's Rouen Cathedral series, 1892–94; Nicholas Nixon, The Brown Sisters, 1975– — a portrait a year for fifty years.
• Lawrence Halprin, The RSVP Cycles, 1969 and his "motation" scores, 1965–images ↗copyMAPTIME
  • Landscape drawn as a musical score: a time axis, a set of notated events.
• Buckminster Fuller, Dymaxion Chronofile and the "shrinking of our planet" diagram, 1938/1963images ↗copy
  • Durations drawn as changing size.
• Charles Lyell, frontispiece to Principles of Geology, 1830images ↗copyTIMEPERSP
  • The three columns of the "Temple of Serapis" at Pozzuoli, bored by marine molluscs partway up: a building used as a tide gauge for geological time.
• Lone Dog's Winter Count (Yanktonai Nakota), 1800–1871 ✓images ↗source ↗copyTIMETEXT
  • Seventy-one winters painted on muslin, one pictograph per year, spiralling out counter-clockwise from the centre.
• The Hiawatha Beltimages ↗copyMAPTIMETEXT
  • The wampum belt of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, founded on the shore of Onondaga Lake: five nations as figures on a band of purple and white shell, the Tree of Peace at the centre where the Onondaga are.
• Mark Klett with Ellen Manchester & JoAnn Verburg, Second View: The Rephotographic Survey Project, 1984, and Third Views, Second Sights, 2004 ✓images ↗source ↗copyTIMEPERSP
  • O'Sullivan's and Jackson's 1870s survey photographs re-shot from the same tripod positions in 1977–79, then again in 1997–2000.
• Camilo José Vergara, Tracking Time, 1977–images ↗copyTIMEPERSP
  • The same street corners in Detroit, Camden, Harlem and Chicago photographed every few years for forty years; an atlas of decay and rebuilding by address, now at the Library of Congress.
• Michael Wesely, the long exposures, 1997–images ↗copyTIMEPERSP
  • A single photograph exposed for two to three years (Potsdamer Platz, 1997–99; the Museum of Modern Art's rebuilding, 2001–04): the building site as a ghost, the sun's path as arcs.
• On Kawara, Today series, 1966–2013, and One Million Years, 1969–images ↗copyTEXT
  • A date painted each day for forty-seven years; a million years typed out and read aloud.
• Roman Opałka, *1965/1 – ∞images ↗copyTEXT
  • * — counting from one to (eventually) five and a half million, in white paint on canvases that grew lighter each year, with a self-portrait after every session.
• Tehching Hsieh, *One Year Performance 1980–81 (Time Clock Piece)images ↗copy
  • * — a punch clock struck every hour for a year, one film frame each; the strip of dated states as a body.
• Hanne Darboven, Kulturgeschichte 1880–1983, 1980–83images ↗copy
  • 1,590 framed sheets of a century's images and numbers, hung as one room; a timeline that is also an archive and a wall.
• Frank Gohlke, Mount St. Helens, 1981–90images ↗copyTIMEPERSP
  • The blast zone photographed the year after the eruption and again from the same spots a decade later.
• Jem Southam, The Pond at Upton Pyne, 1996–2002, and *Rockfalls, Rivermouths, Pondsimages ↗copy
  • * — one Devon pond photographed for six years as its owners dredged, planted and abandoned it.
• James Benning, 13 Lakes, 2004, and Ten Skies, 2004images ↗copy
  • Ten-minute fixed-frame shots of a lake or a sky; duration as the subject.
• Giorgia Lupi & Stefanie Posavec, Dear Data, 2016images ↗copy
  • A year of hand-drawn postcards of data.
• Jacob Lawrence, The Migration Series, 1940–41images ↗copyTEXT
  • Sixty panels, one narrative, each panel captioned in a plain sentence that is part of the work.

3 SECTIONS THROUGH THE GROUND — strata, cores, roots, minesMAPSITE

• Georgius Agricola, De re metallica, 1556images ↗copy
  • Woodcuts of shafts, adits, drainage wheels, smelting furnaces, cut away in section.
• Denis Diderot & Jean d'Alembert, Encyclopédie plates, 1751–72images ↗copy
  • "Minéralogie," "Forges," "Mines": the section through a mine paired with the plan of the works above.
• Armin K. Lobeck, Block Diagrams, 1924, and his physiographic diagrams of the United Statesimages ↗copyMAP
  • The block diagram: a map on the top face, a geological section on the two sides, one drawing.
• Fence diagrams and stratigraphic panelsimages ↗copy
  • The geologist's way of hanging several boreholes on one sheet and drawing the beds between them.
• Athanasius Kircher, Mundus Subterraneus, 1665images ↗copyMAP
  • The earth cut open to show fires, water channels and caverns inside it: the first section through the whole planet, wrong in every detail and right as a drawing.
• Alexander Keith Johnston, The Physical Atlas, 1848images ↗copy
  • Geology, hydrography, meteorology, botany and zoology of the world, each as a plate with a section along the bottom.
• The comparative mountains-and-rivers charts, 1810s–50s (Goldsmith, Bulla, Andriveau-Goujon)images ↗copyMAP
  • Every famous mountain drawn side by side on one sheet and every river laid out by length; a whole planet of heights and lengths as one measured drawing.
• Lore Kutschera & Erwin Lichtenegger, the Wurzelatlas root atlases, 1960–2010images ↗copySITE
  • Seven volumes of European plants excavated and drawn to the last rootlet; the companion to Weaver and Natura.
• Soil monoliths (the ISRIC World Soil Museum, Wageningen)images ↗copy
  • A vertical slab of a soil profile lifted intact and mounted like a painting; the section as a specimen.
• James Hutton / John Clerk of Eldin, drawings of the unconformity at Jedburgh and Siccar Point, 1787–88images ↗copy
  • Deep time discovered in a cliff drawing.
• USGS Geologic Atlas of the United States, folios 1894–1945images ↗source ↗copy
  • Every folio has a topographic sheet, a geologic sheet, and a strip of cross sections.
• Montana Bureau of Mines and Geology, Butte underground workings mapsimages ↗copy
  • The Anaconda Company's mine-level maps of the Butte hill, stacked level by level; several thousand miles of workings under the town.
• Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps (Library of Congress, digitised)images ↗copy
  • Every mill, smelter, zinc oven, tailings pond and company house, with its material, height and hazards, at 50 ft to the inch, redrawn every decade or two.
• Timothy O'Sullivan, photographs inside the Comstock Lode mines (Virginia City, Nevada), 1867–68images ↗copy
  • The first photographs underground, by magnesium flare, for the Clarence King survey.
• Lewis Hine, breaker boys at Pennsylvania coal mines, 1908–11images ↗copyPERSPTEXT
  • The labour in the section.
• John Weaver, the Nebraska root drawings (The Ecological Relations of Roots, 1919; Root Development of Field Crops, 1926)images ↗copy
  • The Nebraska root drawings Heidi Natura redrew; trenches dug and roots traced to 12 feet.
• USDA-NRCS county soil surveys (1900s–1990s, printed) and Web Soil Survey (online)images ↗copy
  • Soil profile plates with horizons in colour, and the aerial-photo sheets with map units drawn over them.
• Ernst Haeckel, Kunstformen der Natur, 1899–1904images ↗copy
  • Specimen plates: the way to draw the biodiversity study as a set of plates rather than a list.
• Charles Darwin, the section drawings of buried stones in The Formation of Vegetable Mould through the Action of Worms, 1881images ↗copy
  • The section drawings of buried stones and the rate of burial per year: a timeline of soil.
• Alan Berger, the aerial photographs and process drawings of Reclaiming the American West, 2002 ✓images ↗source ↗copy
  • Aerials, maps and "process drawings" of mined and reclaimed ground across the West; the term "post-technological landscape." Ricker Library.
• Jane Hutton, the paired drawings of material journeys in Reciprocal Landscapes, 2020images ↗copyMAPSITE
  • Five materials (guano, granite, steel, wood, fertiliser) traced from the site where they were dug to the New York park where they landed, with paired drawings of both ends.
• Charles & Ray Eames, Powers of Ten, 1977images ↗copy
  • A section through scale itself; every ten seconds a factor of ten.

4 THE BODY IN THE PLACE — perspective, townscape, sequencePERSP

• Gordon Cullen, the serial-vision sketches (Townscape, 1961)images ↗copy
  • "Serial vision": a walk drawn as a strip of small eye-level sketches keyed to a plan.
• John Hejduk, Victims, 1986images ↗copyTIMETEXT
  • Sixty-seven structures for a Berlin site that had been a Gestapo headquarters, each drawn small with a character and a text; the site is a timeline (the structures arrive over thirty years).
• Hugh Ferriss, The Metropolis of Tomorrow, 1929images ↗copy
  • Charcoal perspectives of a future city at eye level, from below.
• Joseph Michael Gandy, Architectural Ruins — a Vision (the Bank of England as a ruin), 1830, and Public and Private Buildings Executed by Sir John Soane, 1818images ↗copyTIME
  • A building drawn a century into its own future; a lifetime of works in one room.
• Hubert Robert, Imaginary View of the Grande Galerie of the Louvre in Ruins, 1796images ↗copy
  • The same move, painted in the year the gallery opened.
• Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Le Antichità Romane, 1756 (the sections through foundations) and Il Campo Marzio dell'antica Roma, 1762images ↗copyMAPTIME
  • The Campo Marzio plan is an archaeological map that is mostly invention: a MAP that argues about the past.
• Paul Rudolph, section perspectives, 1950s–70simages ↗copy
  • The section with a body standing in it, drawn in a thousand pen lines.
• Atelier Bow-Wow, Graphic Anatomy, 2007 and Graphic Anatomy 2, 2014images ↗copy
  • Section perspectives of small houses with every object and person drawn, one lineweight.
• Lewis Tsurumaki Lewis, the sixty-three section drawings of Manual of Section, 2016images ↗copy
  • On your syllabus; the taxonomy of section types.
• Thomas Cole, View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, after a Thunderstorm — The Oxbow, 1836images ↗copy
  • A river meander (compare Fisk), wilderness left, cultivation right, storm passing.
• Alexandre Hogue, Erosions series, 1932–46 (Drouth Stricken Area, 1934; Crucified Land, 1939)images ↗copySITE
  • The Dust Bowl on the southern plains painted as a wound in the ground, perspective from a low horizon.
• Charles Sheeler, American Landscape, 1930 and Classic Landscape, 1931images ↗copySITE
  • Ford's River Rouge plant as Precisionist landscape: the industrial site drawn with the calm of a Claude.
• Charles Demuth, My Egypt, 1927 and Incense of a New Church, 1921images ↗copy
  • Grain elevator and smokestacks in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, with rays of light drawn across them.
• Charles Burchfield, Black Iron, 1935 and the Buffalo industrial watercoloursimages ↗copy
  • The smelter as weather.
• Joseph Pennell, The Wonder of Work etchings, 1900s–1910simages ↗copy
  • Pittsburgh, Bethlehem, the Panama Canal: the industrial sublime in etching, from an eye at ground level.
• John Sloan, Ludlow, Colorado, 1914 (cover of The Masses, June 1914)images ↗copyTEXTSITE
  • The CF&I strike massacre drawn as an editorial image; Pueblo's steel company.
• W. Eugene Smith, Pittsburgh, 1955–57 and Minamata, 1971–75images ↗copySITE
  • An industrial city photographed for three years; a community poisoned by a factory's mercury, photographed for three years.
• Walker Evans, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, 1935images ↗copy
  • Graveyard, row houses, steel mill, in one frame, in that order: a timeline in one photograph.
• Lee Friedlander, Factory Valleys, 1982images ↗copy
  • Ohio and Pennsylvania mill towns and the people at the machines.
• The New Topographics photographers (George Eastman House, 1975)images ↗copy
  • Robert Adams, The New West, 1974 (the Colorado Front Range subdivided); Lewis Baltz, Park City, 1980 (a Utah silver-mining town becoming a resort, in 102 photographs); Frank Gohlke; Joe Deal.
• Terry Evans, Inhabited Prairie, 1998 and Prairie: Images of Ground and Sky, 1986images ↗copySITE
  • Kansas tallgrass from the air and from the knee, with bombing ranges and grid roads.
• Emmet Gowin, Changing the Earth, 2002images ↗copy
  • Aerial photographs of mines, test sites and pivot fields, printed as if they were portraits.
• David Maisel, The Mining Project, 1989 ✓ (includes Butte, Montana 1–9: the Berkeley Pit from the air) and Black Maps, 2013images ↗source ↗copySITE
  • The pit as an abstract painting.
• Richard Misrach, Desert Cantos, 1979– (Bravo 20: The Bombing of the American West, 1990) and Petrochemical America, 2012images ↗copy
  • The other half of the Orff book.
• Peter Goin, Nuclear Landscapes, 1991 and Humanature, 1996images ↗copyTEXT
  • The altered West, photographed, with captions that do real work.
• Mitch Epstein, American Power, 2003–09images ↗copySITE
  • Coal plants, refineries, wind farms and the houses beside them; energy as the American landscape, at large format.
• Victoria Sambunaris, Taxonomy of a Landscape, 2013images ↗copySITE
  • Mines, pipelines, rail yards, the border, on 5×7 film at a scale that lets you count the trucks.
• Lucas Foglia, Frontcountry, 2014images ↗copy
  • Nevada and Wyoming ranch towns with the mines behind them and the miners in front.
• Naoya Hatakeyama, Lime Works, 1996 and Blast, 1995–images ↗copySITE
  • Japan's limestone quarries and cement works, and the instant of a quarry blast photographed from inside the shot.
• Toshio Shibata, Landscape, 1980s–images ↗copy
  • Dams, erosion-control concrete and revetments photographed as pattern; the engineered ground as a drawing.
• Ed Ruscha, Thirtyfour Parking Lots in Los Angeles, 1967images ↗copyMAP
  • Aerial photographs as a deadpan typology of paved ground.
• Stephen Shore, Uncommon Places, 1982images ↗copy
  • The American intersection at eye level, in colour, with the telephone pole in the middle.
• Charles Marville, Paris before Haussmann, 1865–68images ↗copy
  • The streets about to be demolished, photographed for the city that was demolishing them.
• Berenice Abbott, Changing New York, 1935–39images ↗copyTEXT
  • The old city and the new in one frame, for the WPA, with captions that name the date and the block.
• Danny Lyon, The Destruction of Lower Manhattan, 1967images ↗copy
  • Sixty acres of the city photographed as it came down, building by building.
• Carleton Watkins, the New Almaden quicksilver mine, 1863images ↗copySITE
  • The first great photographs of an American mine; New Almaden's mercury went to the Comstock, and mercury is Onondaga's poison.
• Lewis Baltz, Candlestick Point, 1989images ↗copy
  • A San Francisco wasteland photographed as eighty-four frames hung in a grid; the site as a field of nothing in particular, taken seriously.
• David Goldblatt, On the Mines (with Nadine Gordimer), 1973images ↗copySITE
  • The Witwatersrand gold mines and the men in them; the section through a mine as a social document.
• Sebastião Salgado, Serra Pelada, 1986images ↗copySITE
  • Fifty thousand men climbing out of a gold pit with sacks on their backs; the open pit as a Bruegel.
• Chris Killip, Seacoal, 1983–84images ↗copySITE
  • Northumberland families gathering coal washed onto a beach from the mines; extraction at the scale of a horse and cart.
• Josef Koudelka, Black Triangle, 1990–94images ↗copyPERSPSITE
  • The strip-mined coal region where Bohemia, Saxony and Silesia meet, in panoramic black and white; the most complete photographic record of a landscape eaten.
• Edward Burtynsky, Manufactured Landscapes, 2003 and Anthropocene, 2018images ↗copy
  • Mines, tailings, quarries at scale; use cautiously — the sublime can swallow the site's specifics.
• Robert Polidori, Zones of Exclusion: Pripyat and Chernobyl, 2003images ↗copy
  • And Sophie Ristelhueber, Fait, 1992 (the Kuwaiti desert after the war, from the air and from the ground) — contamination as a place you can stand in.
• Todd Stewart, the Picher photographs (Picher, Oklahoma: Catastrophe, Memory, and Trauma, with Alison Fields, 2016) ✓images ↗source ↗copyTEXTSITE
  • Photographs of the evacuated town and the objects left in it.
• Historic bird's-eye views (LoC Panoramic Maps collection) ✓images ↗source ↗copyMAPPERSPTEXT
  • Henry Wellge, Panoramic View of Butte, Montana, 1904 (with the mines drawn in among the houses and an index of points of interest); Pueblo, Colorado, 1890; Bird's Eye View of Syracuse, N.Y. (1870s–80s) .

5 WORDS DOING WORK IN THE DRAWINGTEXT

• Jacob Lawrence, *The Migration Seriesimages ↗copy
  • * (above) — the caption as a panel's other half.
• Helen Mayer Harrison & Newton Harrison, The Lagoon Cycle, 1974–84; Sacramento Meditations, 1977; Peninsula Europe, 2001–images ↗copyMAP
  • Maps overwritten with a dialogue between the "Lagoonmaker" and the "Witness"; ecological argument as handwritten text across an aerial.
• Mark Lombardi, Narrative Structures, 1994–2000images ↗copyTIME
  • Pencil diagrams of corporate and political networks, every node dated, drawn as an arc across the sheet.
• Jenny Holzer, the Redaction Paintings, 2006–images ↗copy
  • Declassified documents enlarged, redactions and all, as paintings.
• Ed Ruscha, word paintings and *Every Building on the Sunset Stripimages ↗copy
  • * — a place name as the whole picture.
• Richard Long, text works (A Ten Mile Walk, 1968; A Line Made by Walking, 1967) and Hamish Fulton's walk-textsimages ↗copy
  • A walk recorded as a sentence set in type, with a map or none.
• Matthew Rangel, A Transect — Due East, 2007– ✓images ↗source ↗copyMAP
  • Lithographs of a 200-mile walk due east from Dinuba, California into the Sierra, with survey lines, historical notes and geology inscribed on the image.
• Tim Robinson, Connemara and Oileáin Árann maps, 1970s–90simages ↗copy
  • Hand-drawn maps of the west of Ireland with every placename in the language that named it, collected on foot.
• Maya Lin, Vietnam Veterans Memorial, 1982, and What Is Missing?, 2009–images ↗copyTIMETEXT
  • Names cut in the order of death into a wall that is also a section into the ground; then a global "last memorial," an online atlas of extinctions and disappearances.
• The USGS topographic map symbol sheet and the Ordnance Survey characteristic sheetimages ↗copyMAPTEXT
  • The legend as an object. Italic for water, roman for land, a pecked line for a trail: conventions a stranger already knows how to read, which is why a map looks measured.
• Hans Haacke, *Shapolsky et al. Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, a Real-Time Social System, as of May 1, 1971images ↗copyTEXTSITE
  • * — 142 photographs of tenements with their typed deeds, mortgages and shell companies, and two maps; the exhibition was cancelled for it.
• Martha Rosler, The Bowery in two inadequate descriptive systems, 1974–75images ↗copy
  • Storefronts paired with typed lists of words for drunkenness; a critique of caption and photograph that is itself the best model for pairing them.
• Douglas Huebler, Duration Pieces and Location Pieces, 1968–images ↗copy
  • A photograph taken every minute for ten minutes, a map with points, a typed statement that is the work.
• Lawrence Weiner, statements, 1968–images ↗copy
  • A work that consists of a sentence painted on a wall; the TEXT element with nothing else to lean on.
• Allan Sekula, Fish Story, 1995images ↗copy
  • Container ports and the sea, in photographs and long captions that follow the cargo.
• Maps of invented places that carry text as territoryimages ↗copyMAP
  • William Faulkner's map of Yoknapatawpha County, 1936 (drawn for Absalom, Absalom!, "William Faulkner, sole owner and proprietor"), Thomas Hardy's Wessex, Tolkien's Middle-earth, Le Guin's Earthsea — each a fiction that needed a MAP to be believed.
• Ian Hamilton Finlay, Little Sparta, 1966–2006images ↗copy
  • A garden in which the words are carved into the ground.
• Saul Steinberg, View of the World from 9th Avenue, 1976images ↗copy
  • And his hand-lettered maps — a perspective that is an argument, with lettering as line.
• Stephen Walter, The Island, 2008images ↗copy
  • And Adam Dant's London drawings — maps built entirely out of hand-lettered words and rumours.
• Grayson Perry, Map of Nowhere, 2008 and Map of an Englishman, 2004images ↗copy
  • Etched pictorial maps with the text as territory.
• Paul Noble, Nobson Newtown, 1996–2014images ↗copy
  • Vast pencil drawings of an invented town whose buildings are letterforms.
• Jo Mora and the American pictorial map tradition, 1920s–40simages ↗copy
  • The tourist map with a joke in every square inch; a way of putting a lot of small captioned things on one sheet without it becoming a poster.
• Bureau d'Études, An Atlas of Agendas, 2015 and their wall-maps of ownership, 2000simages ↗copy
  • Everything connected to everything, dense small text on one giant sheet.
• Kate Crawford & Vladan Joler, Anatomy of an AI System, 2018images ↗copy
  • One very large map-diagram of extraction, labour and disposal behind one object.
• Michael Brill & Safdar Abidi, the WIPP marker drawings — Landscape of Thorns, Menacing Earthworks, Forbidding Blocks (Sandia report SAND92-1382, 1993) ✓images ↗source ↗copyTIMESITE
  • The panel that had to design a message, in pictures and words, to last 10,000 years on a waste site: the "Landscape of Thorns" (Michael Brill, drawn by Safdar Abidi), "Menacing Earthworks," "Forbidding Blocks," and the text "This place is not a place of honor…".
• Ursula K. Le Guin with Margaret Chodos-Irvine, the maps and drawings of Always Coming Home, 1985images ↗copy
  • A future Northern California delivered as an atlas: maps, glossary, songs, recipes.

6 EXTRACTION, SMELTING, WASTE — the site as subjectSITE

Art and photography that took mines, smelters, tailings and slag as the subject rather than the background. (Photographers who belong here are listed in §4.)

• Robert Smithsonimages ↗copyMAPPROCESS
  • Bingham Copper Mining Pit (above); A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey, 1967 (a photo-essay on industrial ruins as monuments, with the famous "ruins in reverse"); Spiral Jetty, 1970 (in a dead-industry corner of a salt lake); Broken Circle / Spiral Hill, 1971 (in a working sand quarry, Emmen); the Non-Sites, 1968– (rock from a quarry in a bin, next to a map of where it came from — a MAP paired with a specimen).
• Michael Heizer, Double Negative, 1969images ↗copy
  • Two cuts in a mesa; the drawing is the removal.
• Agnes Denes, Wheatfield — A Confrontation, 1982images ↗copyMAP
  • (Two acres of wheat on a Manhattan landfill) and her Map Projections drawings, 1974–79 (the globe redrawn as a doughnut, a snail, a hot dog).
• Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Touch Sanitation, 1979–80 and the Fresh Kills landfill work, 1989–images ↗copy
  • Maintenance as the subject; the dump as a public place.
• Alan Sonfist, Time Landscape, 1965–78images ↗copy
  • A pre-colonial forest replanted on a Manhattan block: a timeline you can walk into.
• Joseph Beuys, 7000 Oaks, 1982–87images ↗copy
  • A tree and a basalt column, seven thousand times, planted over five years.
• Mel Chin, Revival Field, 1991–images ↗copyTEXT
  • A fenced circle of hyperaccumulator plants on the Pig's Eye landfill, St.
• Jorge Otero-Pailos, The Ethics of Dust, 2008–images ↗copy
  • Latex casts that lift a century of pollution off a wall and hang it as a translucent sheet.
• Otobong Nkanga, Carved to Flow, 2017–, and the mineral drawings and tapestriesimages ↗copyMAPSITE
  • Minerals from Nigeria and the Congo traced from the vein to the hand to the coin; her drawings put the ore body, the body and the market on one sheet.
• Sammy Baloji, Mémoire, 2006images ↗copyTIMEPROCESS
  • Colonial-era photographs of Katanga's copper mines cut out and montaged onto photographs of the same mines today.
• Lucy Raven, China Town, 2009images ↗copyTIMESITE
  • Copper followed from a Nevada open pit to a Chinese smelter in seven thousand still photographs.
• Lara Almarcegui, Mineral Rights, 2015– ✓images ↗source ↗copyTEXTSITE
  • The artist buys the mineral rights under a hill in Norway so the iron there can never be mined; the work is the deed and the drawing of the deposit.
• Michael Heizer, Effigy Tumuli, 1983–85images ↗copySITE
  • Five animal-shaped earthworks on a reclaimed strip mine at Buffalo Rock, Illinois, on the Illinois River; the reclamation paid for the sculpture.
• Robert Morris, Untitled (Johnson Pit #30), 1979images ↗copy
  • A gravel pit in King County, Washington, terraced and seeded as the first "earthworks as land reclamation" commission; Morris's own essay questioned whether art should launder industry.
• Herbert Bayer, Mill Creek Canyon Earthworks, Kent, Washington, 1982images ↗copy
  • Flood-control basins shaped as rings and mounds; hydraulic engineering drawn as a Bauhaus garden.
• Nancy Holt, Sky Mound, 1984–images ↗copyTIME
  • (Unfinished) — a fifty-seven-acre landfill in the New Jersey Meadowlands as a solar and lunar observatory, methane vents included; the plans and models exist even where the work does not.
• Betty Beaumont, Ocean Landmark, 1978–80 ✓images ↗source ↗copySITE
  • Seventeen thousand blocks of processed coal fly-ash sunk three miles off Fire Island as an artificial reef: an industrial waste product drawn into an ecosystem you cannot see.
• Patricia Johanson, Fair Park Lagoon, Dallas, 1981–86images ↗copy
  • A polluted lagoon restored by sculptures in the shape of the plants that clean it, walkable; the remediation drawn as an organism.
• Maya Lin, Storm King Wavefield, 2009images ↗copy
  • A gravel pit at the sculpture park regraded into seven waves of earth; the pit's own material as the landform.
• Chris Drury, Carbon Sink, 2011images ↗copySITE
  • Beetle-killed pine logs laid in a whirlpool around a ring of coal at the University of Wyoming; removed within a year after coal-industry complaints.
• Amar Kanwar, The Sovereign Forest, 2012–images ↗copyTEXT
  • Films, seed archives and hand-made books on the mining of Odisha; testimony as an installation.
• Kara Walker, A Subtlety, 2014images ↗copyPROCESS
  • A sugar sphinx inside the Domino refinery before demolition: a cutout artist working at the scale of an industrial site.
• Olalekan Jeyifous, Shanty Megastructures, 2015– and The Frozen Neighborhoods, 2020images ↗copyPERSP
  • Extraction and inequality drawn as speculative perspectives with bodies in them.
• Liam Young / Unknown Fields Division, Rare Earthenware, 2015images ↗copy
  • A tailings lake at Bayan Obo turned into porcelain vases; the film of the lake.
• Design Earth (Rania Ghosn & El Hadi Jazairy), Geographies of Trash, 2015; Geostories: Another Architecture for the Environment, 2018; The Planet After Geoengineering, 2021images ↗copyPERSPTEXT
  • Section-perspectives of whole territories, drawn flat with a limited palette and a caption that tells a story.
• Territorial Agency (John Palmesino & Ann-Sofi Rönnskog), Museum of Oil, 2015– and Oceans in Transformation, 2020images ↗copy
  • Territories mapped from satellites with a written case for leaving the oil in the ground.
• Dredge Research Collaborative (Rob Holmes, Brett Milligan, Tim Maly, Stephen Becker, Brian Davis), DredgeFest, 2012–images ↗copy
  • Sediment as an infrastructural landscape; drawings of dredge spoil, tailings and levees over time.
• Bernd & Hilla Becherimages ↗copy
  • (Above) — Zeche Zollern, Zeche Concordia, the Pennsylvania anthracite breakers, 1970s.
• Bill Morrison, Dawson City: Frozen Time, 2016images ↗copy
  • A gold-rush town's history told through film found buried in a swimming pool.
• Alison & Peter Smithson, Patio and Pavilion, 1956images ↗copy
  • A shed and a yard with found objects; the "as found."

7 REMEDIATION, RECLAMATION, PROJECTION — drawing the next 100 yearsTIMESITE

Built and unbuilt landscape projects on contaminated ground, and the drawings that got them built. Your future half must "stand on what you verified about the past"; these are what a defensible future looks like on paper.

• Cedric Price, Potteries Thinkbelt, 1964–66images ↗copyMAP
  • A derelict industrial landscape (the Staffordshire potteries and their rail lines) redrawn as a university on rails, with faculties in railway carriages.
• Richard Haag, Gas Works Park, Seattle, 1971–75images ↗copy
  • The first park to keep the plant (a coal-gasification works) and bioremediate the soil in place.
• Hargreaves Associates with Peter Richards & Michael Oppenheimer, Byxbee Park, Palo Alto, 1991 ✓images ↗source ↗copySITE
  • A closed landfill given a field of telephone poles, concrete chevrons and a methane flare: the cap's own engineering turned into the drawing.
• Bernard Lassus, the Crazannes quarries rest area on the A837, 1993–97 ✓images ↗source ↗copySITE
  • A limestone quarry beside a motorway kept as a walk through cut rock, with Lassus's coloured drawings of the route.
• Georges Descombes / Atelier Descombes Rampini with Superpositions, Renaturation of the River Aire, Geneva, 2002–15 ✓images ↗source ↗copyMAPTIME
  • The canalised river given a diamond lattice of cuts and left to find its own course through them; drawn as dated plans in which the water takes over the pattern year by year.
• IBA Emscher Park, the Ruhr, 1989–99images ↗copy
  • A whole coal-and-steel region treated as one exhibition of remediation, dozens of sites; Latz's Duisburg-Nord is one piece.
• Weiss/Manfredi, Olympic Sculpture Park, Seattle, 2007images ↗copyMAP
  • A brownfield fuel yard crossed by a Z-shaped section that steps over a road and a railway to the water.
• West 8, the Zeeland shell project (Oosterschelde), 1992images ↗copy
  • Black and white shells laid in stripes on a storm-surge dyke so the birds sort themselves by colour: a landscape drawn as a graphic that the ecology finishes.
• Field Operations, Diller Scofidio + Renfro & Piet Oudolf, High Line, 2009images ↗copy
  • A self-seeded rail viaduct kept as the plan; the "agri-tecture" section diagram that shows the paving thinning into planting.
• Teresa Galí-Izard / Arquitectura Agronomia, the planting-calendar drawings (The Same Landscapes, 2005)images ↗copyTIME
  • Planting drawn as a calendar; ideas for a timeline that is a growing season.
• Frederick Law Olmsted, Back Bay Fens, Boston, 1878–95images ↗copy
  • A sewage-choked tidal marsh rebuilt as a flood basin and salt-marsh park; the first large American remediation drawn as landscape.
• Hargreaves Associates, Crissy Field, San Francisco, 2001images ↗copy
  • An airfield on fill returned to tidal marsh; the plan shows the runway ghosted under the marsh.
• Batlle i Roig, Vall d'en Joan landfill restoration, Garraf, 2003– ✓images ↗source ↗copySITE
  • Barcelona's main dump terraced like a vineyard, with the biogas piping and leachate drains drawn as the geometry of the terraces.
• Turenscape, Qiaoyuan Wetland Park, Tianjin, 2008images ↗copyMAP
  • A shooting range and dump turned into a field of ponds that clean themselves by adaptive planting; the plan is a pattern of circles.
• Latz + Partner, Hafeninsel, Saarbrücken, 1985–89images ↗copy
  • A coal harbour's rubble sorted and rebuilt as a garden of ruins; the rehearsal for Duisburg.
• Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates, Brooklyn Bridge Park, 2010–21images ↗copy
  • Piers and fill as a series of landforms with the sound berm drawn in section; the section as noise control.
• Latz + Partner, Landschaftspark Duisburg-Nord, 1991–2002images ↗copyMAP
  • A steelworks kept as a ruin, the ore bunkers as gardens, the gasometer as a dive tank, the sintering slag mapped and fenced rather than removed.
• OMA, Zollverein masterplan, Essen, 2002images ↗copy
  • And Peter Latz / Agence Ter, Zollverein Park — coal mine and coking plant as a cultural landscape; the timeline of the site drawn into the plan.
• Field Operations (James Corner), Lifescape: Fresh Kills Park, 2001–images ↗copyMAPTIME
  • A 2,200-acre landfill on Staten Island drawn as a 30-year phased succession: the competition boards have the plan at year 0, 10, 20, 30 and sections through the cap.
• Julie Bargmann / D.I.R.T. studio with T. Allan Comp, Stacy Levy and Robert Deason, Testing the Waters / AMD&ART Park, Vintondale, Pennsylvania, 1995–2004 ✓images ↗source ↗Stacy Levy's page ↗copyTIMESITE
  • A 40-acre passive treatment park for acid mine drainage on a coal-mine site; the "Litmus Garden" is a hedgerow whose autumn colours match the water as it clears from orange to green through six basins.
• D.I.R.T. studio, Urban Outfitters Headquarters at the Philadelphia Navy Yard, 2006–images ↗copy
  • And Turtle Creek Water Works, Dallas — industrial ground kept and cut.
• Kate Orff / SCAPE, Oyster-tecture, 2010 (MoMA Rising Currents); Living Breakwaters, 2014–24; Toward an Urban Ecology, 2016images ↗copy
  • The section-perspectives with organisms drawn in; the phased plans; the "throughline" drawings from Petrochemical America.
• Studio Gang, Ford Calumet Environmental Center (Best Nest), 2004images ↗copy
  • And Reverse Effect: Renewing Chicago's Waterways, 2011 — on a slag site by Lake Calumet; the river drawn as a 100-year reversal.
• Michel Desvigne, the phased planting drawings (Intermediate Natures, 2009)images ↗copy
  • Plantings drawn as 30-year phases; the landscape as a succession rather than a plan.
• Lebbeus Woods, War and Architecture (Pamphlet Architecture 15, 1993) and Radical Reconstruction, 1997images ↗copyPERSP
  • "Scab," "scar," "injection": a vocabulary of drawings for a damaged place that heals visibly rather than being restored.
• Superstudio, Il Monumento Continuo, 1969 and Supersurface, 1972images ↗copyPROCESS
  • Photo-collage futures: a grid laid over the whole earth.
• Archigram, Plug-In City (Peter Cook, 1964), Walking City (Ron Herron, 1964), Instant City (1968–70)images ↗copy
  • Sections and sequences of a city arriving over time.
• Archizoom, No-Stop City, 1969images ↗copy
  • The endless plan as a typed page.

8 LAYERED, COMPOSITE, PALIMPSEST DRAWINGS — the cutout methodPROCESS

The brief wants the atlas "built from CUTOUT PARTS… layered, shuffled, recomposed." These are drawings whose authors did exactly that.

• Peter Eisenman, Cities of Artificial Excavation, 1978–88images ↗copyMAPTIME
  • Cannaregio (Venice), Checkpoint Charlie (Berlin IBA), the Wexner Center (Columbus), the Parc de la Villette entry with Derrida (Chora L Works): historic grids, an unbuilt Le Corbusier hospital, a demolished armory, and the survey grid superimposed as layers of the same drawing.
• Bernard Tschumi, The Manhattan Transcripts, 1976–81images ↗copyTIME
  • Every page a strip of three: photographs (event), plans (space), notation (movement).
• OMA, Parc de la Villette competition, 1982images ↗copy
  • The site as horizontal bands of programme, a strip per activity.
• Zaha Hadid, The Peak, Hong Kong, 1982–83 and The World (89 Degrees), 1983images ↗copyMAPPERSP
  • The site painted from above as if it had exploded, fragments in oblique projection.
• Daniel Libeskind, Micromegas, 1979 and Chamber Works, 1983images ↗copy
  • Pure line, layered until it becomes a field.
• Aldo Rossi, La città analoga, 1976 (with Consolascio, Reichlin, Reinhart)images ↗copyMAP
  • A collage-map of remembered buildings and paintings; the city as a composite of times.
• Perry Kulperimages ↗copy
  • (Above) — also Bleached Out, Fast Twitch and the Thematic Drawings; with Nat Chard, Fathoming the Unfathomable: Archival Ghosts + Paradoxical Shadows (Pamphlet Architecture 34, 2013).
• Nat Chard, the picture-plane instruments and their drawings (Drawing Indeterminate Architecture, 2005)images ↗copy
  • Instruments built to make drawings; the picture plane as a device.
• Bryan Cantley, Mechudzu: New Rhetorics for Architecture, 2011images ↗copy
  • Layered techno-graphic drawings; the drawing as a machine.
• CJ Lim, Short Stories: London in Two-and-a-Half Dimensions, 2011 and Smartcities + Eco-warriors, 2010images ↗copyTEXT
  • Narrative city drawings, part model, part plan.
• Neil Spiller, Communicating Vessels, 1998–images ↗copy
  • One imaginary site drawn for thirty years.
• Jimenez Lai / Bureau Spectacular, Citizens of No Place, 2012images ↗copy
  • Architecture as a graphic novel of small worlds.
• Dogma (Pier Vittorio Aureli & Martino Tattara), Stop City, 2007 and the collage plansimages ↗copy
  • Black-and-white found photographs with a drawn object set flat into them, one lineweight.
• Fala atelier, OFFICE Kersten Geers David Van Severen (with Bas Princen), Point Supremeimages ↗copy
  • The current school of flat collage-perspective: a plan, a photograph, a drawn wall, a cutout figure.
• Luis Callejas / LCLA Office, Islands & Atolls (Pamphlet Architecture 33, 2013)images ↗copy
  • Landscapes drawn as archipelagos of plans.
• Ben Nicholson, Appliance House, 1990images ↗copy
  • A house designed by collaging appliance catalogues; the "Kleptoman Cell." The kit-of-parts collage with a straight face.
• Mies van der Rohe, Resor House collage, 1939 and the Convention Hall collage, 1954images ↗copy
  • A photograph of a landscape or a crowd with a drawn structure over it.
• Madelon Vriesendorp, Flagrant Délit and the paintings for Delirious New York, 1975–78images ↗copy
  • The buildings as characters.
• Kurt Schwitters, Merz collages, 1919–48; Hannah Höch, Cut with the Kitchen Knife…, 1919; Paul Citroen, Metropolis, 1923images ↗copy
  • Where the cutout method comes from.
• Henri Matisse, the cut-outs, 1943–54images ↗copy
  • "Drawing with scissors." Look at how a shape is cut, not drawn, and pinned, moved, re-pinned for weeks before it is glued.
• Romare Beardenimages ↗copy
  • (Above) and Mark Bradford, Los Moscos, 2004 and the map paintings — paper layered, sanded back, layered again: a palimpsest you can see into.
• Julie Mehretu, Stadia I–III, 2004 and Mogamma, 2012images ↗copy
  • Plans, sections and flags layered as painting; the sheet as a field of drawn time.
• David Hockney, *Pearblossom Hwy., 11–18th April 1986, #2images ↗copyTIMEPERSP
  • * — a photocollage of one road junction from a hundred viewpoints over a week: a perspective that contains time.
• Mishka Henner, Feedlots, 2012–13images ↗copyMAP
  • Satellite tiles stitched into one image of an Amarillo feedlot: the aerial as a collage.
• Chris Wareimages ↗copy
  • (Above) — his page is a diagram that reads as a picture.

Radical precedents, 1960s–90s — where the contemporary drawing culture comes from

• Hans Hollein, Aircraft Carrier City in Landscape, 1964images ↗copyPERSP
  • A photograph of a carrier pasted into a photograph of rolling farmland.
• Ettore Sottsass, The Planet as Festival, 1972–73images ↗copyTIME
  • Pencil drawings of a future earth where nobody works: temples for listening to rock music, a stadium for watching the stars.
• Haus-Rucker-Co, Oase No. 7, 1972 and the Cover drawingsimages ↗copy
  • A plastic bubble grafted onto a Kassel façade; environments drawn as prosthetics for a damaged atmosphere.
• Raimund Abraham, Elementary Architecture and the Ten Houses series, 1970simages ↗copy
  • Pencil and collage on a black ground; a house for a site defined by one element (wind, sun, water, earth).
• Michael Webb, Temple Island, 1987 (and Two Journeys, 2018)images ↗copyTIMEPERSP
  • Twenty years of drawings of one bend in the Thames at Henley, done as an exercise in perspective: the same place from a submarine, from a car, from a drawing instrument.
• Massimo Scolari, watercolours and drawings, 1970s–2000simages ↗copy
  • Imaginary architecture in a Renaissance light; the wing, the ark, the tower on a bare plain.
• Arduino Cantàfora, La città analoga, 1973images ↗copy
  • The painting for the Milan Triennale that put Rossi's whole vocabulary on one horizon.
• Franco Purini & Laura Thermes, drawings, 1970s–80simages ↗copy
  • Grids, ruins, aqueducts, drawn in ink with a ruler; the "drawn architecture" of Italy's 1970s.
• James Wines / SITE, Highrise of Homes, 1981; Ghost Parking Lot, 1978; the BEST Products showrooms, 1972–84images ↗copyPERSP
  • Buildings drawn as landscapes and landscapes drawn as buildings, in a loose, populated pencil.
• Emilio Ambasz, Green over Gray drawings, 1970s–images ↗copy
  • Buildings buried under gardens, drawn as sections through a hill.
• Lina Bo Bardi, drawings for SESC Pompéia and the Museu de Arte de São Paulo, 1950s–80simages ↗copyTEXT
  • Coloured pencil, felt-tip, hand-lettered notes running across the sheet, children and animals drawn in.
• Enric Miralles, the Igualada Cemetery drawings (with Carme Pinós, 1985–94) and his "mapping" studiesimages ↗copy
  • Plans that look like a walk, sections cut along a path, the sheet turned as he drew.
• Álvaro Siza, sketchbooks, 1960s–images ↗copyPERSP
  • A place drawn in six lines from where you are standing, with your own hand and feet in the corner.
• Steven Holl, watercolours, 1980s–images ↗copy
  • 5"×7" concept watercolours, one per morning.
• Peter Wilson (Bolles+Wilson), Ninja drawings and the Bridgebuildings, 1980simages ↗copy
  • Collage-drawings of objects in cities; the "Western Objects, Eastern Fields" series.
• Zoe Zenghelis and Madelon Vriesendorp, the OMA paintings, 1975–85images ↗copyMAPPERSP
  • The flat, coloured, aerial site paintings that carried early OMA (Parc de la Villette, Roosevelt Island).
• Léon Krier, Atlantis and the Luxembourg drawings, 1970s–80simages ↗copy
  • Ink drawings of whole quarters in bird's-eye, with a section and a plan on the same sheet.

9 CONTEMPORARY ARCHITECTURAL GRAPHICS — the last twenty yearsPROCESS

The brief calls for an "artistic, poetic, experimental drawing." Here is the culture that phrase comes from: drawing-led architecture since roughly 2005, when the photoreal render lost its authority and the flat collage, the exploded axonometric, the hand-cut model and the drawn narrative came back. Sam Jacob's "Architecture Enters the Age of Post-Digital Drawing" (Metropolis, March 2017) ✓ source ↗ is the essay that named it; read it first. The practices below are grouped by the drawing method they share, not by geography. Most have websites and Instagram accounts where the drawings are full size.

9a · The flat collage — OFFICE, Dogma, Fala and the post-digital school

• OFFICE Kersten Geers David Van Severen (with Bas Princen), 2002–images ↗copy
  • A black-and-white photograph of a place, a drawn wall or colonnade laid into it, one figure.
• Dogma (Pier Vittorio Aureli & Martino Tattara), Stop City, 2007; A Simple Heart, 2011; Living and Working, 2022images ↗copy
  • The plan as a black figure on a white ground; a found photograph with a thin black frame set into it.
• Fala atelier (Porto), 2013–images ↗copy
  • Collage perspectives with pastel walls, a checkerboard floor and a clip-art figure; plans as coloured diagrams.
• Point Supreme (Konstantinos Pantazis & Marianna Rentzou, Athens), 2007–images ↗copyPERSP
  • Collage sections of Athens apartment blocks with plants, cats, neighbours and weather drawn in; the Athens Projects book, 2013.
• MAIO (Barcelona), 2012–images ↗copy
  • Flat plans, isometric grids, a collage figure or two; the 110 Rooms drawings.
• Monadnock (Rotterdam), 2006–images ↗copy
  • And Bovenbouw (Antwerp), 2005– — collage elevations with painted skies; the Flemish/Dutch line.
• architecten de vylder vinck taillieu (Ghent), 2008–images ↗copy
  • Drawings that look like a child did them on purpose; plans with the existing building in one colour and the new in another.
• Baukuh (Milan), the drawings of Two Essays on Architecture, 2011images ↗copy
  • The plan as text; drawings without shading.
• 6a architects (London)images ↗copy
  • The collage sections for Tree House, Cowan Court; hand-cut paper.
• Lütjens Padmanabhan (Zürich)images ↗copy
  • Collage elevations built from found photographs of ornament.
• Sam Jacob Studio (London), 2014–; FAT (Fashion Architecture Taste, 1995–2014)images ↗copy
  • "Cartoon" drawings, exploded axonometrics in flat colour, the Cartoon Museum; Jacob's essays on drawing at Drawing Matter.
• Adam Nathaniel Furman (London)images ↗copy
  • The maximal, colour-saturated end: Democratic Monument, 2017; the Proud Little Pyramid, 2024.
• Charles Holland Architectsimages ↗copy
  • Ordinary Architecture; drawings of the English house as pattern.
• Studio Ossidiana (Alessandra Covini & Giovanni Bellotti, Rotterdam), 2015– ✓images ↗source ↗copy
  • Drawings that read as textiles: pavilions for birds, terrazzo gardens, the Drawing Theatre Pavilion; Prix de Rome 2018.
• Pezo von Ellrichshausen (Concepción, Chile), 2002–images ↗copy
  • Small oil paintings and pencil "naive" drawings of their own houses, hundreds of them, one format.
• Smiljan Radić (Santiago), Every So Often a Dog Breaks Its Chain, 2016images ↗copy
  • Collages and models in bottles; the Serpentine Pavilion drawings, 2014.
• Tatiana Bilbao Estudio (Mexico City), 2004– ✓images ↗source ↗copy
  • The office banned renderings; every project is developed as a hand-cut collage on paper, made collectively, then a model.
• Marshall Brown Projects (Princeton), Dequindre Civic Academy, 2016– ✓images ↗source ↗copy
  • A Detroit block reimagined as a collage of modernist megastructures cut from books; the Ziggurat and Chimera collage series; Recurrent Visions, 2022.
• Andrew Kovacs / Office Kovacs (Los Angeles), Archive of Affinities, 2010– ✓images ↗source ↗copy
  • A running archive of found architectural fragments, and buildings made by stacking them.
• Filip Dujardin, Fictions, 2008– ✓images ↗source ↗copy
  • Photomontages of impossible buildings assembled from photographs of real Belgian ones.
• Young & Ayata (Michael Young & Kutan Ayata, New York), the drawings and renderings of The Estranged Object, 2015images ↗source ↗copy
  • The theory of all of the above: "realism" in drawing after the digital image; the seam as a political choice (see his Drawing Matter essay "Montage-Entourage; or the Politics of the Seam").

9b · The drawing as a world — Bartlett, narrative and the built model

• Perry Kulper, Nat Chard, Bryan Cantley, Neil Spiller, CJ Lim, Smout Allenimages ↗copy
  • The elders of this school; see §0 and §8.
• Thomas Hillier, The Emperor's Castle, Bartlett, 2009 ✓images ↗source ↗copy
  • A Hiroshige print turned into an origami city: hand-cut paper, pencil, thread, knitting.
• Factory Fifteen (Jonathan Gales, Paul Nicholls, Kibwe Tavares), 2011– ✓images ↗source ↗copyPERSP
  • Robots of Brixton (Tavares, 2011, RIBA Silver Medal), Megalomania (Gales, 2012: all of London as one construction site), Golden Age — Somewhere (Nicholls).
• Liam Young / Unknown Fields, Planet City, 2020; Where the City Can't See, 2016images ↗copy
  • See §6; the film-as-atlas.
• You+Pea (Luke Pearson & Sandra Youkhana), Videogame Urbanism, 2016–images ↗copy
  • Cities drawn as game levels; the drawing you can walk through.
• Anton Markus Pasing, City in a Box: Paradox Memories, 2019 ✓images ↗source ↗copy
  • An unknown city sealed in a box, drawn as if the box were about to be opened; overall winner of the 2019 Architecture Drawing Prize.
• Clement Laurencio, Apartment #5, a Labyrinth and Repository of Spatial Memories, 2020 ✓images ↗source ↗copy
  • A single apartment's memory drawn as a labyrinth; 2020 overall winner.
• Dafni Filippa, Fluid Strata, 2021images ↗copyMAP
  • The 2021 overall winner: geology and water drawn as one stratified section.
• Jerome Xin Hao Ng, Memento Mori: A Peckham Hospice Care Home, 2017images ↗copyTIME
  • And Li Han (Drawing Architecture Studio), The Samsara of Building No. 42 on Dirty Street, 2018 — the first two overall winners; Ng's is a hand-drawn Bosch, Li's is a Beijing block drawn through a whole life cycle.
• Eldry John Infante, (Re)membering the See Monster, 2023images ↗source ↗copy
  • And Sanjidah Chowdhury, Shilpogram: A Crafter's Village, 2025 ✓ — a decommissioned North Sea rig turned art platform, and a flood-prone Bangladeshi craft village drawn as a triptych: the 2023 and 2025 overall winners.
• Joe Franklin, Ultra Town (Kingston, RIBA Silver Medal 2024) and Glory Kamthumzi, Dialogues in Sticks and Stones (Free State, Silver Medal 2025) ✓images ↗source ↗copySITE
  • The Silver Medal (Part 2) and Bronze (Part 1) archive is searchable by year and school and is the single largest open collection of student drawing at this level.

9c · The exploded axonometric and the drawn city — Asia

• Drawing Architecture Studio (Li Han & Hu Yan, Beijing), A Little Bit of Beijing, 2013 and A Little Bit of Beijing · Dashilar, 2014 ✓images ↗source ↗copyMAPTIMEPERSP
  • Whole neighbourhoods drawn as flat-coloured axonometric panoramas in which every shop sign, air-conditioner, cat and bicycle is drawn; the book was one of "China's Most Beautiful Books" 2013.
• Adam Frampton, Jonathan D. Solomon & Clara Wong, Cities Without Ground: A Hong Kong Guidebook, 2012 ✓images ↗source ↗copyMAP
  • Thirty-two routes through Hong Kong's footbridges and malls drawn as exploded axonometrics with no ground plane.
• Atelier Bow-Wow (Yoshiharu Tsukamoto & Momoyo Kaijima), Made in Tokyo, 2001; Pet Architecture Guide Book, 2002; Graphic Anatomy, 2007 & 2014; Commonalities, 2014images ↗copyPERSP
  • The hybrid building as a drawn specimen; the section perspective with every object drawn.
• The forty-two drawings of Architectural Ethnography (Japan Pavilion, Venice 2018; curated by Momoyo Kaijima with Laurent Stalder & Yu Iseki) ✓images ↗source ↗copyMAPTEXT
  • The Japan Pavilion at the 2018 Venice Biennale: forty-two drawings from twenty years of "architectural ethnography" — spatial-activity charts, maps of urban hybrids, drawings of fishing villages after the tsunami.
• Junya Ishigami, Another Scale of Architecture, 2010 and the Venice 2010 drawingsimages ↗copyMAP
  • Plans in which thousands of trees are drawn individually; a forest as a plan.
• Kazuyo Sejima / SANAA, plans, 1990s–images ↗copy
  • The hairline plan with furniture and people drawn in as the only weight.
• Sou Fujimoto, sketches and the Primitive Future drawings, 2008images ↗copy
  • A forest, a cave, a nest, drawn as diagrams.
• Go Hasegawa, section drawingsimages ↗copy
  • Sections at the scale of a body.
• Yasutaka Yoshimura, Super Legal Buildings, 2006images ↗copy
  • Tokyo's code-shaped buildings drawn as a taxonomy.
• Chinese "drawn city" scroll traditionimages ↗copyMAPTIME
  • Along the River During the Qingming Festival (Zhang Zeduan, 12th c.) is the ancestor of the DAS panoramas: a whole city on one long strip, in oblique projection, with every trade drawn.

9d · Post-digital America — LA, Michigan, the Midwest

• T+E+A+M (Thom Moran, Ellie Abrons, Adam Fure, Meredith Miller, Ann Arbor), Detroit Reassembly Plant, 2016 ✓images ↗source ↗copySITE
  • The Packard Plant's rubble reprocessed into new building material, drawn as rendered mountains of "megamasonry"; U.S.
• Jimenez Lai / Bureau Spectacular, Citizens of No Place, 2012; the Tower of Twelve Stories, 2016images ↗copyTEXT
  • Architecture told as comics.
• Jennifer Bonner / MALL, Domestic Hats, 2014; Haus Gables, 2018; the "fake" drawingsimages ↗copy
  • Roofs as graphic figures; a Southern vernacular drawn flat.
• Clark Thenhaus / Endemic Architecture, Unresolved Legibility in Residential Types, 2019images ↗copy
  • American house types redrawn and mis-read on purpose.
• Andrew Zago / Zago Architecture, Property with Properties, 2010images ↗copy
  • Drawings of ambiguous objects; the "estranged" drawing.
• FreelandBuck (David Freeland & Brennan Buck), Parallax Gap, Renwick Gallery, 2017 ✓images ↗source ↗copy
  • Nine drawn ceilings printed on fabric and suspended: a drawing you stand under.
• Mark Foster Gage (Yale), Killing Simplicity drawings, 2015–images ↗copy
  • Kitbashed towers rendered at absurd resolution; the opposite of the flat school, useful to know why you are not doing it.
• Nemestudio (Neyran Turan & Mete Sönmez), Museum of Lost Volumes, 2015; Nine Islands; *Middle Earthimages ↗copyMAPSITE
  • * — a museum for the rare-earth minerals a green economy digs out; geological sections drawn as flat coloured architecture.
• Wes Jones, Instrumental Form, 1998, and Neil Denari, Gyroscopic Horizons, 1999images ↗copy
  • The 1990s machine-drawing: exploded axonometrics with every bolt.
• Diller + Scofidio, Slow House, 1991, and the Blur Building drawings, 2002images ↗copy
  • A house drawn as a route to a view; a building drawn as weather.
• Anne Holtrop, material-gesture drawings, 2010–images ↗copy
  • Plans made by pouring, folding and casting; the drawing as the site's own material.
• Tomás Saraceno, Cloud Cities and Aerocene, 2008–images ↗copy
  • Architecture drawn as floating; the air as ground.
• Aristide Antonas, drawings and The Archipelago of Protocols, 2016images ↗copy
  • Athens as a set of typed protocols with small line drawings.
• Erin Besler / Besler & Sons; Kyle Miller; Kristy Balliet; Anya Sirota / Akoaki (Detroit, The Mothership)images ↗copy
  • The Midwestern edge of Possible Mediums.
• Catie Newell / Alibi Studio (Detroit), Salvaged Landscape, 2010–11images ↗copySITE
  • A burned house in Detroit cut and re-stacked; darkness and light drawn as material.
• MOS (Michael Meredith & Hilary Sample), the thin-line renderings, 2010–images ↗copy
  • Buildings drawn as line, trees and people as clip art, no shading; An Unfinished Encyclopedia of Scale Figures without Architecture (2018, on your syllabus).
• WAI Architecture Think Tank (Nathalie Frankowski & Cruz García), Narrative Architecture, 2012–; *Loudreadersimages ↗copyTEXT
  • * — manifesto drawings, collage-posters, the "Intelligentsia Gallery."
• Design With Company (Stewart Hicks & Allison Newmeyer, Chicago), Late Entries to the Chicago Public Library Competition, 2013; the "Chicagoisms"images ↗copy
  • Narrative axonometrics in flat colour.

9e · Landscape and territory — drawing the ground, the water and the air

• Stoss (Chris Reed), Lower Don Lands, Toronto, 2007–; Erie Street Plaza; the Trinity River drawingsimages ↗copyTIME
  • Succession drawn as a series of dated plans.
• Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates, Lower Don Lands / Port Lands, Toronto, 2007–images ↗copy
  • River-mouth re-naturalisation drawn in section at the scale of a city.
• Lateral Office (Lola Sheppard & Mason White), the maps, timelines and drawings of Many Norths, 2017 ✓images ↗source ↗copyMAPTIME
  • An atlas of the Canadian Arctic in original maps, timelines and diagrams; also Arctic Adaptations (Venice 2014) and the Bracket journal ([at extremes], [goes soft], [takes action]).
• Neeraj Bhatia / The Open Workshop, the settlement drawings of The Petropolis of Tomorrow (with photo-essays by Garth Lenz, Alex Webb and Peter Mettler), 2014 ✓images ↗source ↗copyMAPSITE
  • 576 pages on extraction urbanism: photo-essays of the Alberta tar sands (Garth Lenz, Alex Webb, Peter Mettler), then drawn proposals for settlements built around oil.
• Pierre Bélanger / OPSYS, EXTRACTION (Canada Pavilion, Venice 2016) and the maps of Extraction Empire, 2018images ↗copy
  • See §1.
• Kate Orff / SCAPEimages ↗copy
  • See §0 and §7; the section-perspectives with oysters and birds drawn in.
• Bradley Cantrell & the Dredge Research Collaborativeimages ↗copy
  • See §6.
• Philippe Rahm architectes, Jade Eco Park, Taichung, 2012–20 ✓images ↗source ↗copyMAP
  • A park designed as eleven "climatic lands"; plans and sections that draw temperature, humidity and pollution as coloured fields rather than objects.
• Sean Lally / Weathers, the energy-field drawings (The Air from Other Planets, 2014) ✓images ↗source ↗copyMAP
  • Architecture made of energy fields (thermal, acoustic, electromagnetic) instead of walls, drawn as gradients.
• Nerea Calvillo / C+ arquitectas, In the Air, 2008– ✓images ↗source ↗copyMAPSITE
  • Madrid's air pollution visualised as a coloured cloud over the city, and a book on who gets to sense toxicity.
• Frédérique Aït-Touati, Alexandra Arènes & Axelle Grégoire, the speculative maps of Terra Forma, 2022 ✓images ↗source ↗source ↗copyMAPTIME
  • New cartographic conventions for a living earth: maps drawn from the soil outward, "the thickness of the ground," territories redrawn around what moves through them.
• Design Earthimages ↗copy
  • See §6; Geostories is the drawn version of the same argument.
• Walter Hood / Hood Design Studio, the International African American Museum landscape (Charleston, 2023) and Double Sights (Princeton, 2019)images ↗source ↗copyTEXTSITE
  • And the drawings for the International African American Museum (Charleston) and Double Sights (Princeton) — landscape as the record of who was erased from it; the heritage layer drawn, not captioned.
• Sara Zewde / Studio Zewde, Ecologies of Memory, 2018–images ↗copy
  • Archival research drawn into landscapes (Valongo Wharf, Rio; Graffiti Pier, Philadelphia).
• Cave_bureau (Kabage Karanja & Stella Mutegi, Nairobi), The Anthropocene Museum, 2018– ✓images ↗source ↗copyMAPSITE
  • Kenya's volcanic caves surveyed by 3D scan and drawn as architecture that predates architecture; geothermal extraction and the Maasai in Of Steam and Struggle; curators of the British Pavilion at Venice 2025 (Geology of Britannic Repair).
• Bas Smets (Brussels), Biosphere, Notre-Dame forecourt, 2022–images ↗copy
  • The landscape as a stratified section, drawn in plan and section with the climate layer on top.
• Günther Vogt / Vogt Landscape, the office's drawing types collected in Miniature and Panorama, 2006images ↗copy
  • A landscape office's own atlas of drawing types.
• Michel Desvigne, the phased planting drawings (Intermediate Natures, 2009)images ↗copy
  • See §7; Gilles Clément's Third Landscape manifesto is in the appendix.
• LCLA Office (Luis Callejas), Islands & Atolls, 2013images ↗copy
  • See §8.
• Turenscape (Kongjian Yu), the "sponge city" drawings, 2000s–images ↗copyMAP
  • Wetlands as terraces, drawn in bright flat colour with the water in blue bands.

9f · Forensic and investigative drawing — evidence as graphics

• Forensic Architecture (Eyal Weizman, Goldsmiths), 2010–images ↗copyTIMETEXT
  • Environmental Racism in Death Alley (§1); Forensic Architecture: Violence at the Threshold of Detectability, 2017 (the book); their "situated testimony" drawings and composite timelines.
• INTERPRT (Nabil Ahmed), 2017–images ↗copy
  • Spatial investigations of environmental crimes; cartography for ecocide law.
• Paulo Tavares & Ursula Biemann, Forest Law, 2014 ✓images ↗source ↗copyTEXTSITE
  • The oil and mining frontier of the Ecuadorian Amazon assembled from interviews, legal documents and maps into one "mosaic landscape"; the Sarayaku case for the rights of the living forest.
• Territorial Agencyimages ↗copy
  • See §6.
• Cooking Sections (Daniel Fernández Pascual & Alon Schwabe), Climavore, 2015–; Salmon: A Red Herring, 2020images ↗copy
  • Extraction and food drawn as diagrams and tables.
• Kadambari Baxi, Janette Kim, Meg McLagan, David Schiminovich & Mark Wasiuta, *Who Owns the Sky?images ↗copy
  • * and Janette Kim / Urban Works Agency, Underdome, 2015 — energy politics as a drawn guide.
• Nicholas de Monchaux, Local Code: 3,659 Proposals about Data, Design & the Nature of Cities, 2016images ↗copyMAP
  • Every vacant public lot in four cities drawn as a small park, from data, one plan each.
• Laura Kurgan / Center for Spatial Researchimages ↗copy
  • See §1.

9g · Atlases made by architects — the form itself, since 2005

• WORKac (Amale Andraos & Dan Wood), the forty-nine redrawn city plans of 49 Cities, 2009images ↗copyMAP
  • Forty-nine visionary cities from Vitruvius to Superstudio redrawn at the same scale, in the same graphic language, with the same statistics.
• Keith Krumwiede, the plates of Atlas of Another America, 2016images ↗copyTIMETEXT
  • The American suburban house recombined into "Freedomland" estates, drawn as an eighteenth-century pattern book with plates and a fictional history.
• Michael Sorkin, Local Code, 1993 and New York City (Steady) State, 2014images ↗copy
  • A self-sufficient New York drawn as diagrams; Sorkin is on your syllabus.
• Bjarke Ingels / BIG, Yes Is More: An Archicomic on Architectural Evolution, 2009images ↗copyTEXT
  • A practice's whole output as a comic book.
• Rem Koolhaas / AMO, Countryside, A Report, 2020 (Guggenheim)images ↗copy
  • The countryside as an atlas of data-drawings.
• MVRDV, Metacity/Datatown, 1999 and KM3, 2005images ↗copy
  • Data extruded into form; the "datascape."
• Andrés Jaque / Office for Political Innovation, Transmaterial Politics, 2017 ✓images ↗source ↗copy
  • Projects drawn as ecological chains: where the water, the money, the bodies and the plastics come from and go.
• Marina Tabassum, Sumayya Vally (Counterspace), Mariam Kamara (atelier masōmī), Kunlé Adeyemi (NLÉ, African Water Cities)images ↗copy
  • Practices whose drawings begin from a territory's water, heat and material rather than from a building; look at how each draws its ground.

9h · Comics, sequential drawing and the drawn story

• Richard McGuire, Chris Ware, Robert Crumbimages ↗copy
  • See §0 and §2.
• François Schuiten & Benoît Peeters, Les Cités obscures, 1983–images ↗copy
  • An invented continent of cities, each with its own architecture, drawn in the line of a nineteenth-century engraving.
• Moebius (Jean Giraud), The Long Tomorrow, 1975 and Arzach, 1975images ↗copy
  • The vertical city and the silent landscape that every film since has copied.
• Katsuhiro Otomo, Akira, 1982–90images ↗copy
  • A city drawn in section through catastrophe.
• Tsutomu Nihei, Blame!, 1998–2003images ↗copy
  • A megastructure with no outside, drawn in ink.
• Frank King, Gasoline Alley Sunday pages, 1920s–30simages ↗copy
  • One yard, one family, panels as a plan of the property; the origin of the "one place, many panels" page.
• Joost Swarte, Yuichi Yokoyama (Travel, 2006; Garden, 2011)images ↗copyPERSP
  • The clear line; a landscape drawn one frame at a time as you move through it.
• Seth, Palookaville / *Dominion Cityimages ↗copy
  • * — an invented Ontario town drawn as a model and a comic.
• Nick Sousanis, Unflattening, 2015 (a dissertation drawn as a comic)images ↗copy
  • A doctoral dissertation as a comic about seeing; the argument for drawing as thinking.
• Winsor McCay, Little Nemo in Slumberland, 1905–14images ↗copy
  • The Sunday page as architecture: panels that grow as the bed grows, a city that walks.
• Shaun Tan, The Arrival, 2006images ↗copyPERSP
  • A wordless migration story in sepia; a whole invented city drawn in pencil, page by page.
• Jiro Taniguchi, The Walking Man, 1990–92images ↗copyPERSP
  • A man walks through a Tokyo suburb; nothing happens; every fence and tree is drawn.
• Marc-Antoine Mathieu, Julius Corentin Acquefacques, 1990–images ↗copy
  • Comics that cut holes in their own pages and run in spirals; the page as a device.

9i · Where to look every year

• See the appendiximages ↗copy
  • The prizes, shows, platforms and journals that publish this kind of drawing are listed there, since none of them is itself a drawing.

10 SITE BY SITE — drawings and records that already exist for YOUR groundSITEMAP

Everything below is drawable material: trace it, cut it, re-scale it, put your datum on it. Verify each item's date at the source before it goes on the sheet.

Tar Creek — Picher & Miami, Oklahoma (Quapaw Nation)

• Quapaw Nationimages ↗source ↗copy
  • The tribe's own name for itself, Ogáxpa ("downstream people"); the 1833 treaty reservation; the 1890s allotment plats; and the Catholic 40 cleanup, 2013– ✓, the first Superfund remediation in the country run by a tribe (108,000 tons of chat removed from the site of a Quapaw children's school).
• BLM General Land Office survey plats and field notes (glorecords.blm.gov)images ↗copy
  • The original township surveys of the Indian Territory: section lines, the pre-mining prairie, the creek as first drawn.
• USGS topoViewimages ↗copy
  • The 1:24,000 and older 1:62,500 sheets of the Picher/Miami quads: watch the chat piles appear, the town grow, the town be struck from the map.
• Sanborn maps of Picher, Cardin, Commerce and Miami, 1910s–30simages ↗copy
  • (LoC).
• Tri-State Mining District mapsimages ↗copy
  • The Oklahoma Geological Survey and the old Engineering & Mining Journal maps of the Picher field: shafts, mills, tailings, the underground stope maps that explain the sinkholes.
• Historic aerialsimages ↗copy
  • The 1938–41 USDA AAA aerial photography and 1950s–70s USGS flights (EarthExplorer, historicaerials.com): the chat piles at their largest.
• Todd Stewart & Alison Fields, Picher, Oklahoma, 2016 ✓images ↗copy
  • (§4); Matt Myers, Tar Creek (film), 2009; LEAD Agency (Rebecca Jim), Miami OK — the community organisation whose maps and testimony are the TEXT element waiting to happen.
• Heidi Natura's prairie roots ✓ and Weaver's root drawingsimages ↗copy
  • (§0, §3) — the ground before the mines.
• Alexandre Hogue's *Erosionsimages ↗copy
  • * (§4) — the same plains, in the same decade the mines peaked.
• Cherokee County, Kansas, and Jasper County, Missouriimages ↗copy
  • The same Tri-State ore field across the state lines, each its own Superfund site; the Tri-State Mineral Museum in Joplin and the Baxter Springs Heritage Center hold the mine maps and photographs.
• Tri-State Mining Maps collection (Missouri Southern State University, Spiva Library, Joplin) ✓images ↗source ↗copyMAPSITE
  • The Eagle-Picher Mining & Smelting Company's own mine maps, digitised: the underground drawn by the people who dug it.

Butte & Silver Bow Creek, Montana

• Henry Wellge, Panoramic View of Butte, Montana, 1904 ✓images ↗source ↗copyMAPPERSPTEXT
  • (LoC) — mines among the houses, with an index.
• USGS Folio 38, Butte Special, 1897 ✓images ↗source ↗copy
  • Geology, topography and cross sections at 1:15,000.
• Montana Bureau of Mines and Geology, Anaconda Company mine-workings mapsimages ↗copy
  • The Butte hill in plan at every level.
• David Maisel, The Mining Project (Butte, Montana), 1989 ✓images ↗source ↗copy
  • The Berkeley Pit from the air, before it filled.
• Sanborn maps of Butte, 1884–1950s.images ↗copy
  • Historic aerials of the pit growing east through the Meaderville and McQueen neighbourhoods, 1955–82 — a town consumed, in five flights.
• Pamela Roberts, Butte, America (film), 2009images ↗copy
  • Edwin Dobb, "Pennies from Hell," Harper's, October 1996 — the essay on the Berkeley Pit that everybody quotes.
• Robert Smithson's Bingham proposal ✓images ↗copy
  • (§0) — the same kind of hole, the same decade the pit was at full production.
• The Anaconda smelter stack (1919, 585 ft), 25 miles down Silver Bow Creekimages ↗copy
  • The tallest surviving masonry structure in the US, a state park you cannot enter.
• Milltown Dam removal, 2008 ✓images ↗source ↗copyTIMESITE
  • 120 miles downstream at Missoula, the dam that held a century of Butte's sediment was breached on 28 March 2008 and 2.2 million cubic yards of contaminated silt hauled out.
• The Berkeley Pit viewing standimages ↗copy
  • A public platform on the pit's rim with a recorded narration: Smithson's rotating disc, built by the tourism board.

Onondaga Lake — Syracuse, New York (Onondaga Nation)

• Sanborn maps of Solvay and the Syracuse lakeshoreimages ↗copy
  • Soda-ash works, salt sheds, the Erie Canal; the Erie Canal surveys, 1817–25; Bird's Eye View of Syracuse, N.Y. (LoC) ✓.
• The salt industryimages ↗copy
  • The Onondaga Salt Springs Reservation maps (1790s–1900s), the solar-evaporation vats drawn in plan: the site's first extraction, a century before soda ash.
• Historic aerials, 1930s–80simages ↗copy
  • The waste beds spreading white along the west shore.
• Sediment coresimages ↗copy
  • The ROD's profiles are a ready-made SET OF CORES for the timeline element.
• The Hiawatha Belt and the Great Law of Peaceimages ↗copy
  • (§2) — the Confederacy was founded on this shore.

Colorado Smelter — Pueblo, Colorado

• Pueblo, Colorado, 1890 bird's-eye (LoC) ✓images ↗copy
  • The smelters on the south bank, the Arkansas River, Bessemer laid out for the steelworks.
• The Pueblo Levee Mural, 1970s–2016 ✓images ↗source ↗copyTIMETEXT
  • Three miles of the Arkansas River levee painted by the city, once the world's longest mural (Guinness), jackhammered off in 2016 when the levee was rebuilt, being repainted since 2020.
• The 1921 Arkansas River floodimages ↗copy
  • The maps and photographs that produced the levee and moved the river.
• John Sloan, *Ludlow, Colorado, 1914images ↗copy
  • * (§4) and the Ludlow Massacre monument — CF&I's labour history, forty miles south.
• Robert Adams, The New West, 1974images ↗copy
  • (§4) — the Front Range, same state, same decade the smelter slag was being built on.
• Sanborn maps of Pueblo, 1883–1950s; the Eilers/Colorado Smelting Co. plant drawn at 50 ft/in.images ↗copy

Palmerton — Palmerton & Blue Mountain, Pennsylvania

• New Jersey Zinc Company drawings and photographsimages ↗copy
  • The East and West plants (1898, 1911), the horizontal-retort furnaces, the cinder bank (33 million tons of slag, 2.5 miles long); the company-town plan of Palmerton itself, laid out with the works.
• Historic aerials, 1938–2000simages ↗copy
  • The 2,000 acres of Blue Mountain going bare, then the aerial-seeding stripes returning green (the "moonscape" years, 1980s).
• Lehigh Gap Nature Center revegetation, 2002–images ↗copy
  • Warm-season prairie grasses seeded over the dead slope: a remediation you can draw as a strip of dated states.
• USGS topoViewimages ↗copy
  • The Palmerton and Lehighton quads; the Lehigh Gap water gap as a section.
• Lewis Hineimages ↗copy
  • (§3) and Walker Evans, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, 1935 (§4) — the same industrial valley, thirty miles apart.
• Sanborn maps of Palmerton, 1900s–40s.images ↗copy
• Bernd & Hilla Becher's Pennsylvania industrial typologies, 1970simages ↗copy
  • (§2, §6)

A NOT DRAWINGS — books, essays, records, archives and where to look

Everything above is a drawing, a map, a painting, a photograph, a film or a built piece of ground — something you can pin up. What follows is not: it is reading, records and places to look. Kept here because it is useful, and kept apart so the list of works stays a list of works.

Books about drawing, mapping and time

1. 05Jill Desimini & Charles Waldheim, Cartographic Grounds: Projecting the Landscape Imaginary, 2016 ✓images ↗source ↗copyMAP
   • Ten chapters, ten techniques: sounding, contour, hachure, shaded relief, land classification, figure-ground, stratigraphic column, cross section, line symbol, conventional sign.

• Mark Monmonier, How to Lie with Maps, 1991images ↗copy
  • Read before you pick a projection, a class break or a colour ramp.
• Kevin Lynch, What Time Is This Place?, 1972images ↗copy
  • The essay on how cities carry time, and his notation for it.
• Daniel Rosenberg & Anthony Grafton, Cartographies of Time: A History of the Timeline, 2010images ↗copy
  • The book of all of the above. Ricker Library.
• Bob Sheil, Frédéric Migayrou, Luke Pearson & Laura Allen (eds.), Drawing Futures: Speculations in Contemporary Drawing for Art and Architecture, UCL Press, 2016 ✓images ↗source ↗copy
  • 288 pages, 260 illustrations, and FREE as a PDF.
• Kelly Bair, Kristy Balliet, Adam Fure & Kyle Miller (eds.), Possible Mediums, Actar, 2018 ✓images ↗source ↗copy
  • Sixteen "mediums" by emerging American practices, each a technique with drawings and objects: the field guide to this section.
• Clare Lyster, Learning from Logistics, 2016images ↗copy
  • How delivery networks shape cities, drawn as diagrams of flows; the logistics of your ore leaving the site.
• Mohsen Mostafavi & Gareth Doherty (eds.), Ecological Urbanism, 2010images ↗copy
  • The Harvard compendium; look at it for the range of drawing types in one book.
• Chris Reed & Nina-Marie Lister (eds.), Projective Ecologies, Harvard GSD / Actar, 2014 ✓images ↗source ↗copyTIME
  • How ecological modelling gets drawn as design; Stoss Landscape Urbanism's phased plans and diagrams.
• Jesse Reiser & Nanako Umemoto, Atlas of Novel Tectonics, 2006images ↗copy
  • An atlas of diagrams rather than places.
• Interboro Partners, The Arsenal of Exclusion & Inclusion, 2017images ↗copyTEXT
  • An illustrated glossary of the devices that open and close American cities.
• Stan Allen & Marc McQuade (eds.), Landform Building, 2011images ↗copyMAP
  • Architecture drawn as terrain; sections through built ground.
• Nadia Amoroso (ed.), Representing Landscapes: A Visual Collection of Landscape Architectural Drawings, 2012images ↗copy
  • Plans, sections and composite drawings by drawing type, with the authors explaining the technique.
• Katharine Harmon, You Are Here: Personal Geographies and Other Maps of the Imagination, 2004 and The Map as Art, 2009images ↗copy
  • Two hundred artists' maps in each.
• Lize Mogel & Alexis Bhagat (eds.), An Atlas of Radical Cartography, 2007images ↗copy
  • Ten maps, ten essays, in a box.
• Janet Abrams & Peter Hall (eds.), Else/Where: Mapping — New Cartographies of Networks and Territories, 2006.images ↗copy
• Peter Turchi, Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer, 2004.images ↗copy
• Denis Cosgrove (ed.), Mappings, 1999images ↗copy
  • Where Corner's "Agency of Mapping" was published.
• Susan Schulten, Mapping the Nation: History and Cartography in Nineteenth-Century America, 2012images ↗copy
  • Willard, the geological surveys, the statistical atlases of the 1870s (Francis Walker, Statistical Atlas of the United States, 1874 — which you should look at directly).
• Mark Dorrian & Frédéric Pousin (eds.), Seeing from Above: The Aerial View in Visual Culture, 2013.images ↗copy
• Elizabeth Ellsworth & Jamie Kruse (eds.), Making the Geologic Now, 2013images ↗copy
  • Artists on deep time and extraction.
• David Gissen, Subnature: Architecture's Other Environments, 2009images ↗copy
  • Dust, smoke, puddles, weeds, debris: the atlas of what your site actually has.
• Edward Tufte, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, 1983 and Envisioning Information, 1990images ↗copy
  • Minard, small multiples, layering and separation, "micro/macro readings." The chapter on layering is about your test swatches.
• Jacques Bertin, Semiology of Graphics, 1967images ↗copy
  • The eight visual variables. Read it once so you can break it deliberately.
• Julia McMorrough, Drawing for Architects; David Dernie, Architectural Drawing; LTL, *Manual of Sectionimages ↗copy
  • * — on your syllabus.
• Alan Berger, Drosscape: Wasting Land in Urban America, 2006images ↗copy
  • The argument that waste landscapes are the design site of the century.
• Laura Kurgan, Close Up at a Distance: Mapping, Technology, and Politics, 2013images ↗copy
  • Reading satellite imagery critically.
• Michael Young, Reality Modeled After Images: Architecture and Aesthetics after the Digital Image, 2021 ✓images ↗source ↗copy
  • The theory of the post-digital drawing; his Drawing Matter essay "Montage-Entourage; or the Politics of the Seam" is the short version.
• Nerea Calvillo, Aeropolis: Queering Air in Toxicpolluted Worlds, 2023images ↗copy
  • Who gets to sense pollution, and what counts as evidence.
• Walter Hood & Grace Mitchell Tada (eds.), Black Landscapes Matter, 2020 ✓images ↗source ↗copy
  • The erasure of Black geographies from the landscape record.
• Sam Jacob, "Architecture Enters the Age of Post-Digital Drawing," Metropolis, March 2017 ✓images ↗source ↗copy
  • The essay that named the contemporary collage school (§9).
• James Corner, "The Agency of Mapping," in Denis Cosgrove (ed.), Mappings, 1999images ↗copy
  • The essay behind this whole assignment.

Reading on the sites' subjects — extraction, ecology, deep time, the future

• Lucy Lippard, Undermining: A Wild Ride Through Land Use, Politics, and Art in the Changing West, 2014images ↗copy
  • Gravel pits, uranium, art in the extraction landscape.
• John McPhee, Basin and Range, 1981 (in Annals of the Former World, 1998)images ↗copy
  • "Deep time" in prose; the source for the phrase.
• Kiel Moe, Unless: The Seagram Building Construction Ecology, 2021images ↗copy
  • On your syllabus; the maps of where a building's materials came from.
• Rachel Carson, Silent Spring, 1962images ↗copy
  • The opening "A Fable for Tomorrow" is a one-page projected history of a place.
• Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac, 1949images ↗copy
  • The "Good Oak" chapter: sawing through a fallen oak and reading each ring as a year of Wisconsin history.
• Jorge Luis Borges, "On Exactitude in Science," 1946images ↗copy
  • And Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities, 1972 (on your syllabus) — one paragraph each; both are about what a map can carry.
• Laurie Palmer, In the Aura of a Hole: Exploring Sites of Material Extraction, 2014images ↗copySITE
  • Visits to the American mines and quarries that supplied a periodic table of materials; the book to read before drawing a pit.
• Gilles Clément, Manifesto of the Third Landscape, 2004images ↗copy
  • The argument for the abandoned, the residual and the waste ground as the reservoir of biodiversity.
• Dilip da Cunha, The Invention of Rivers, 2019images ↗copy
  • The river is a line we drew; the wetness was always everywhere.
• Bradley Cantrell, Laura Martin & Erle Ellis, "Designing Autonomy: Opportunities for New Wildness in the Anthropocene," 2017images ↗copy
  • A remediation run by machines with no human aesthetic; read it as a provocation for the far end of your timeline.
• Alan Weisman, The World Without Us, 2007images ↗copy
  • What happens to a place if we simply leave: the 100-year projection everybody else's future has to beat.
• Kim Stanley Robinson, The Ministry for the Future, 2020 (on your syllabus)images ↗copy
  • The near future written as documents.
• Finlay Aitken, Remaking the Extractive Island: landscape, custom and misrule in Shetland (Bartlett, RIBA Dissertation Medal 2025)images ↗copy
  • A dissertation on exactly your subject.

Site records and documents (text, not drawings — but every figure in them is)

• EPA Tar Creek site profile; the Records of Decision for OU1–OU5; the Five-Year Reviews; the 2006 Picher buyout maps.images ↗copy
• Onondaga Nation, Land Rights Action, 2005 and the timeline on onondaganation.org ✓images ↗source ↗copyTEXT
  • The lake as the founding place of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy (the Peacemaker, the Tree of Peace); the Nation's own chronology of Solvay, Allied and Honeywell.
• The 2005 Record of Decision, Onondaga Lake Bottom Subsite ✓images ↗source ↗copy
  • Mercury sediment profiles, the map of the Solvay waste beds (Beds 1–15), the dredging and capping plan. 165,000 lb of mercury, 1946–70: the number that anchors the timeline.
• Steelworks Center of the West (Bessemer Historical Society) archivesimages ↗copy
  • The CF&I (Colorado Fuel & Iron) drawings, mill plans, company-town maps of Eilers, the Grove and Bessemer; the neighbourhoods on the slag.

Archives to pull drawable material from

• Library of Congressimages ↗Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps ↗Panoramic Maps ↗Chronicling America ↗copy
  • Farm Security Administration / OWI photographs (search your county); (newspapers to 1963, for the TEXT element).
• USGSimages ↗topoView ↗EarthExplorer ↗Publications Warehouse ↗copy
  • (Every historical topo sheet as a georeferenced download); (historical aerial photography, 1930s–); the (folios, bulletins, professional papers on your district); the National Map (NHD hydrography, 3DEP lidar — the same ground Relief cuts).
• BLM General Land Office Recordscopy
  • Original survey plats and field notes.
• USDA-NRCS Web Soil Survey and the printed county soil surveys.images ↗copy
• EPAimages ↗copy
  • The site profile, the Records of Decision, the Five-Year Reviews, the Site Redevelopment Profiles, the SEMS document library (every figure in every remedial investigation is a drawn map of your site); ATSDR public health assessments; EJScreen.
• David Rumsey Map Collectioncopy
  • Every 19th-century state and county atlas, downloadable at full resolution.
• State historical societies and digital librariesimages ↗copy
  • Oklahoma Historical Society Gateway; Montana Memory Project; NYS Historic Newspapers and the Onondaga Historical Association; Colorado Historic Newspapers and History Colorado; Pennsylvania's Power Library and the Palmerton Area Library.
• Native Land Digital; the Quapaw Nation and Onondaga Nation websitesimages ↗copy
  • Territory, treaty and the names.
• The Surveyor (toolkit.allmeans.works/site-analysis)images ↗copy
  • Climate, terrain, hydrology, flood, watershed, context, with every claim tagged; export the terrain and boundaries to Rhino for the underlay.
• For harvesting images into the class Reference Libraryimages ↗Wikimedia Commons ↗Library of Congress ↗Smithsonian Open Access ↗Met ↗National Gallery of Art ↗David Rumsey ↗USGS ↗Internet Archive ↗HathiTrust ↗copy
  • Public-domain scans first: (Fisk, Minard, Humboldt, Holmes, Agricola, Piranesi, Cole, the FSA photographs), free-to-use collections, , the and open-access images, (CC licence), (all public domain), and for the old Engineering & Mining Journal and Mining and Scientific Press plates.
• Google Earth Timelapse, NASA Earth Observatory, USGS MRDS, mindat.orgimages ↗copy
  • See §1 and §3.
• USGS Mineral Resources Data System (MRDS) and mindat.orgimages ↗copyMAPSITE
  • Every recorded mine, prospect and mill as a point with its commodity, its years and its owners.

Prizes, shows, platforms and journals to watch each year

• KRob — the Ken Roberts Memorial Delineation Competition (Dallas, since 1974)images ↗copy
  • The oldest drawing competition in the field; hand and digital categories, archived online.
• Bartlett Summer Show (June), AA Projects Review, SCI-Arc Spring Show, Cooper Union End of Year Show, Michigan Taubman Student Showimages ↗copy
  • The annual places to see where this is going.
• Landezine's LILA award and the Landscape Architecture Drawing books (Nadia Amoroso, Representing Landscapes: Hybrid, 2016; Analogue, 2022)images ↗copy
  • Where landscape drawing is collected year by year.
• Mas Context, "Narrative" issueimages ↗copy
  • Already in the syllabus for Module 4.
• Drawing Matter (drawingmatter.org)images ↗copy
  • The Somerset archive of architectural drawings, with weekly essays; search "collage," "site," "section," "survey."
• KoozArch (koozarch.com)images ↗copy
  • The online platform for speculative architectural drawing since 2015; interviews with most of the people in this section.
• Socks (socks-studio.com)images ↗copy
  • The archive of exactly this kind of image, 2008–.
• The Architecture Drawing Prize (Make / Soane Museum / WAF), 2017–images ↗source ↗copy
  • Winners' exhibition at the Soane each January–February; all shortlists online. ✓
• RIBA President's Medals (presidentsmedals.com)images ↗copy
  • Searchable back to 1998.
• KRob (krobarch.com)images ↗copy
  • Since 1974.
• Archisource's Drawing of the Year, 2019–images ↗copy
  • A student and young-practice drawing award, online.
• Venice Architecture Biennaleimages ↗source ↗copy
  • 2025's Intelligens (Carlo Ratti) had repair and extraction as its through-line: the British Pavilion's Geology of Britannic Repair (Cave_bureau, Owen Hopkins, Kathryn Yusoff) ✓ .
• Chicago Architecture Biennialimages ↗copy
  • DAS, Kovacs, T+E+A+M and Design With Company have all shown there; catalogues online.
• Journals that print drawings: Log, Perspecta, Pidgin (Princeton), Paprika! (Yale), Dimensions (Michigan), Offramp (SCI-Arc), New Geographies (Harvard), Bracket, Scapegoat, LA+ (Penn), Mas Context, San Rocco, Real Review, AD (the "Drawing Architecture" issue, 2013; "Celebrating the Marvellous," 2018).images ↗copy
• Drawing Matter, KoozArch, Socks, the Architecture Drawing Prize (Soane Museum / WAF, 2017–)images ↗copy
  • Four online archives of exactly this kind of drawing.

The short shelf

• Desimini & Waldheim, Cartographic Grounds ✓copy
• Orff & Misrach, Petrochemical Americacopy
• Corner & MacLean, Taking Measures Across the American Landscapecopy
• Mathur & da Cunha, Mississippi Floodscopy
• Rosenberg & Grafton, Cartographies of Timecopy
• Tufte, Envisioning Informationcopy
• Wood, Everything Singscopy
• Berger, Reclaiming the American West ✓copy
• Hutton, Reciprocal Landscapescopy
• Cullen, Townscapecopy
• Kulper & Chard, Fathoming the Unfathomable (Pamphlet Architecture 34)copy
• McGuire, Herecopy
• Sheil, Migayrou, Pearson & Allen (eds.), Drawing Futures ✓ (free PDF)copy
• Aït-Touati, Arènes & Grégoire, Terra Forma ✓copy
• Books on the shelf for this sectionimages ↗copy
  • Drawing Futures (2016, free); Possible Mediums (2018); Architectural Ethnography (2018); Helen Thomas, Drawing Architecture: The Finest Architectural Drawings Through the Ages (Phaidon, 2018); Peter Cook, Drawing: The Motive Force of Architecture (2008, 2nd ed. 2014); Marc Treib (ed.), Drawing/Thinking, 2008; Lebbeus Woods, Slow Manifesto, 2015; Kulper & Chard, Fathoming the Unfathomable, 2013.

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