The Underground Drawings
Conventional technical drawing assumes that
the drawing is rational, functional and objective; drawings are produced to
communicate an intention, an instruction, or a clarification. These drawings question those conventions and protocols, these drawings are not
rational or functional they are gestural and playful and what they communicate
is expressive rather than pragmatic. The starting point of the drawings were
the five chapter titles of Marko Jobst's text; Object; Space; Interior; Image; Movement,
mapping out the themes that the text evoked selecting the station layouts and
references that resonated with the ideas that that the text alludes to. The
drawings were principally made by overdrawing axonometric projections from
London Underground that show the organisation and layout of individual
stations, the stations. It should be stressed that the original drawings made
by London Underground are themselves a fiction edited to show only principal
circulation and abstracted to avoid the complexities of the subterranean system
they are part of. The overdrawing is
performed in a loose gestural manner rather than an exact tracing, the
‘inaccuracies’ are further distorted be stretching and rescaling to fit the
drawing frame. Different pairs of drawings were then juxtaposed against one
another. Against the main drawings other elements are composited within the
picture, some taken directly from the text or from my own readings and
interests. Specific framing devices are set within the composition as are
notational elements from the original LU drawings. The underground drawings clearly
refer to a number of other works particularly Guy Debord’s ‘The Naked City’ as
well obvious references to Bernard Tschumi’s “Manhattan Transcripts” and Daniel
Liebeskind’s ‘Micro-megas”.
