Special Subject: Design — Chasing Dust Bunnies: Architectural Illustration in Fragments

Architects often craft images that show only the most polished views and idealized spaces to define a building’s identity and spatial experience.

This workshop proposes an alternative approach to image-making, one that focuses on small, fragmented views of a space in order to capture architecture’s overlooked moments. By illustrating architectural spaces at the size of 1’x1’x1’ fragments, we will get impressions of spaces that traditional architectural images would otherwise neglect—such as corners, undersides, sills, material details, traces of occupation and maintenance. In foregrounding these minor moments, the workshop invites a political reconsideration of which spaces and narratives are valued, challenging the hierarchy of architectural representation.

Dust bunnies—the small clumps of debris that form in the corners—will guide the process of identifying these fragments. Upon closer inspection, dust bunnies reveal a microcosm of their environment, as they indiscriminately collect tiny fragments from their surroundings. We will speculate on the origins of the particles within dust bunnies and depict the architectural fragments they might have once belonged to. Throughout the workshop, dust bunnies will be our guides into illustrating overlooked rhythms and spaces of occupation and maintenance.

Undergraduates welcome.