Rendered Futures^W045

Groupwork directors Tessa Forde and Simon Glaister, as well as pre:fab platform were invited by Objectspace to show architectural drawings as part of Objectspace’s retrospective exhibition Rendered Futures: Drawing Architecture. Groupwork also participated in the public programming events surrounding the exhibition: Tessa was a panellist for one of Objectspace’s infamous “Coffee and Croissants” discussions, and Simon led the affirmative team in Objectspace’s debate on the use of artificial intelligence in architectural drawing practice in Aotearoa. Read Simon's arguments for the affirmative team here or listen to the AI voice generated closing performance.

Drawing 1: The pre:fab Quattro Stagioni.

This is a recreation of a collaborative drawing produced by attendees of ‘The Pizza Palar Workshop’ at pre:fab’s 2023 Detecting the Darchive conference – a programme exploring the concept of the ‘Darchive’: the dark matter of architectural practice consisting of those undeclared, undiscussed, or uninspected people, objects, spaces, ideas, and desires conventionally excluded from public discourse yet central to our individual and collective creative work. The centre of the drawing shows an ontological terrain map or ‘pizza base’ of pre:fab’s practice, kneaded into existence by a mandala of antinomies. The underlying map provided Workshop attendees, or ‘Love Triangles Pizza Palar Journey Persons’, with a framework to collaboratively explore their own architectural subjectivity by locating and discussing selection of ‘pizza toppings’ sourced from their personal ‘darchives’.

Drawing 2: The Restaurant at the End of The Universe World

This drawing was originally made in 2015 as part of a competition entry for the Aotearoa Pavillion at the Biennale Architettura Venice 2016. It imagines the pavilion as a large floating island and swimming pool within the Arsenale lagoon, supporting a program of ‘cultural tastings’, focus groups, and trade negotiations promoting AotearoaTM taking place amidst a 24hr pool party’. This mix of typology and program hoped to provide institutional sponsors and visiting Kiwis with an opportunity to simultaneously critique and embrace the structural contradictions of their collective desires. Enjoy your symptom! Reproduced here as phototex print, the drawing simulates AutoCAD’s graphical user interface, playfully exploiting the arcane conventions of architectural drafting to help communicate the critique of our particular approach to national representation encompassed by the proposal, and point to the hidden forces that shape architectural drawing, practice, and the built environment more broadly.

Drawing 3: TNS Workshop Methods

This drawing was produced by Tessa Forde and Maxine Goon to theorise and communicate the working methods of The Night School: an educational platform for the free exploration of architectural ideas and practices founded in Tāmaki Makaurau in 2022. The Night School uses three strategies through which to design and deliver collaborative workshops: take the ‘radical’ methodologies of other architects and artists and replicate them to reveal their tactics and inner workings; invite emerging architects with experimental practices to theorise their practices through delivering workshops; and collaborate with others to design workshops that encapsulate practice overlaps and respond to particular collaborative opportunities. Each workshop technique has been formulated into a ‘how-to’ worksheet for replication into the future.