This paper examines some of the ways in which university-level foundation studies in architecture and design, which are undertaken as forms of situated praxes, can encourage students to more meaningfully – and more readily – ground their drawn lines of inquiry, their works, and themselves in corporeal presence, attunement, and place. It aims to share some experiments in phenomenologically-based approaches, as possible ways for more commonly interweaving action and analysis, practice and theory. The engagements with these embodied and relational practices are not merely about meaning‐making through the subjectivities the students produce. Rather the practices also include the meaning‐making co‐produced through relations with one another, with the given occasion(s), and the particular place(s). In short, the attempt will be made to demonstrate how a series of body‐centred and place‐oriented drawing practices can help instill forms of embodied criticality and wonder in the students’ own modus operandi. The cases to be discussed will include a series of sketchbook methods, embodied vision workshops, as well as in situ spatial interventions; with each strategy offering different means for probing and contesting the ocularcentrism prevalent in much of architecture and design representations today. The attempt will be made to show how these practices and tools can be seen as significant because they invite students to question and challenge the intensification of experiential blindness in their education and profession(s), whilst also purposefully resisting such dualities as real vs. virtual, analogue vs. digital, etc.

Much as how we think greatly affects how we act, so too does how we draw (envision) architecture significantly affect how we build architecture. Our realised built environments, in turn, shape our behaviours, our relationships with other beings, and with the planet as a whole. In short, architecture, as built form, shapes our fundamental humanity, as well as standing as a testimony of it – for better, and for worse. Given these intimate bonds between envisioning, erecting, and inhabiting our built environments, this chapter will critically focus upon contemporary, normative visual practices in architecture, most specifically on architectural drawing. The intent is to help propose and advance alternative tactics for on architectural drawing – tactics which amongst other things, endeavour to: move beyond the dominance of perspectival vision, including the reduction of architecture to image; contest the blind-faith in trivial form-making, and in novelty for the sake of novelty alone; disentangle bonds between neo-liberal production and on architectural drawing production; reconnect on architectural drawing to embodiment and the lifeworld.

Exhibited (and performed with) two different drawing prostheses during TRAVERS in Glyptoteket museum. Funded by Statens Kunstfond / Danish Arts Foundation. PRIOR TO TRAVERS, each prosthesis took its point of departure in personal moments of frustration about – and rebellion against – the ocularcentrism that the architecture profession in particular has inherited (rather uncritically!) from the past. Though, in architecture, this stems from several centuries prior, one can ongoingly witness this extreme privileging of vision over all the other senses today – especially in terms of architectural drawing. Ocularcentrism swells exponentially in our flat-screened environments, where our built environments are increasingly reduced to digital eye-candy (Insta’ ready) and hyper-realistic CGIs (‘money shots’). The rise of 'iconic architecture' and 'starchitects', for example, are merely symptoms of this inheritance (being coupled with Neoliberalism) gone awry. Where have the wisdom of the body, perceptual knowledge and all our other senses and synesthesia disappeared in today’s architectural / artistic praxes? What can the fragmentation and incompleteness of history reveal to us to enrich our current and future practices? How can we bring somaesthetic knowledge, phenomenology, and more embodied practices to the core and fore? DURING TRAVERS, it was revealed that certain sculptures had partial limbs added to them by Glyptoteket professionals so the sculptures “did not look too handicapped to museum visitors” (C. Brøns, 28.11.2018). The Wounded Amazon (Rome, 150 CE, marble) is one such example; a partial left shoulder having been added. Knowledge of this forced normativity became a huge provocation and impetus to me to then push my prostheses into other directions still: exploring ‘the diversity of bodily being’, as well as ‘the relevance of the (in)complete’. This was done in situ – and via performativity – with select sculptures. The prostheses were thus tested, tinkered, and transformed across the week of TRAVERS via site-specific interventions and diverse cross-artistic collaborations and performances.

This paper focuses on a questioning of ‘experiential blindness’ in architectural education today, and yet consciously resists such dualities as real vs. virtual and analogue vs. digital. It aims to identify some of the key ways that drawing-within-experience can encourage architecture students to ground themselves and their drawing praxes in lived experience and place. All the examples to be presented aim to probe and contest the ocularcentrism prevalent in architectural drawing practices today. These sensate and enactive strategies – and devices – have also been devised to not only enhance somaaesthetic awareness and sensory experiences, but more specifically to highlight the often taken-for-granted nature of kinaesthetic understanding and haptic knowledge in the creation of architectural drawings and architectural spatialities. This presentation will argue that this series of body‐centred and place‐oriented drawing practices can help instill a form of embodied criticality in the students’ own praxes, and that the pedagogies can aide architecture students in better identifying, analysing and understanding the reciprocal relations between the embedded interactions of their own gesturing bodies and the flesh of the world.

Broadly speaking, this presentation addresses the need for more rigorously integrating embodied pedagogies in education. Specifically, it asks how might foundation studies undertaken in the field encourage architecture and design students to more meaningfully ground their lines of inquiry, their works, and themselves in corporeal presence, attunement, and topos. Furthermore, this talk elucidates a series of place‐oriented practices created to help students better identify, analyze and understand the reciprocal relationships between human livability and the built environment; including the embedded interactions of their own gesturing bodies and the flesh of the world. This talk argues that important abilities such as attunement and presencing do not occur in an undifferentiated everywhere or nowhere. They occur in the body, and in and through place. It is precisely in this intermeshed state that educators ought develop and situate more pedagogies.