The Autonomous Plan II

"The conventions and intentions of an architectural drawing are universally understood. By today’s standards, what is expected of a design submission, professionally or within an academic setting, are highly composed renderings accompanied by easily digestible diagrams. This past semester has allowed me the opportunity to reconsider this convention by firmly situating myself within the discipline and asking what can the drawing do to inform the communicative capabilities of an experimental project, and to simultaneously work autonomously? The goal in exploring the autonomous plan is to communicate something other than what a model, rendering, or traditional plan can do. An autonomous plan is therefore not generative; it is not to be read as a construction document, or a diagram, but to be studied as a visual device that can provide insight as to the intention of the design. The autonomous plan was informed by a new approach to precedents and adjacent disciplines. Using the work of architects John Hejduk and José Oubrerie, and the paintings of Jonathan Lasker and UIC’s Pamela Fraser, my approach to precedents was not through collage or a relationship to function, but rather through a close study of line quality, layering, texture, and visual rhyming."