Mediated Suburbia - Composite Drawing
The drawing I proposed indicates the Winter Park House is constructed by layers of media such as colored blocks, coded data, multiple lines and cells. The project begins with a simple question: during current digital development, have suburban houses undergone a fundamental transformation by the intervention of digital tools and media? To examine this question, I looking to tree distinct practices.
Howard Arkley collected patterns from suburban house facades and classical wallpaper designs to transforms everyday suburban house into “image symboles”by repeating these patterns and blocks of color. This practice resembling a “database logic”:throuh collecting, organizing and recombining patterns, Arkley tried to reshape people’s imagination of suburbia. Matthew Wilson’s similarly explain this logic in digital area. In the book “New Lines,” he argues that geospatial data is not neutral. It operates in digital system, deciding what phenomena can be recorded and what is ignored, ultimately influencing politics and governance. Digital map like GIS constructs filtered spatial experiences, shaping people how to see, to measure and record the world. Jan de Vylder and Inge Vinck explored this concept in architectural drawing software. They believe that drawing is a form of thinking, and using Excel to draw, to fill cells, to fill lines, to combine and arrange these elements can help people observe, imagine and reconstruct the reality. Excel forces designers to interact with the cells really detailed and replaces traditional drawing software’s idealised representation. The purpose of this is not only to record objective facts, but to reveal the biases and omissions inherent in the traditional drawing software.
Together, these theories lead to my Allegorical Anchor: the verandah and pergola of the Winter Park House as a media thresholds of visibility. The landscape in my drawing become basic ground data and form the first layer of spatial information which sometimes erased by digital representation. To indicate this anchor, I adopt Safer’s composite drawing method. The plan and axonometric are combined to transfer 2D drawing into 3D, side elevations expose how verandah and pergola filter the suburban spaces by coded, colored and selectively revealed. Arkley’s sampling color block is used for representing openings and furniture. Wilson’s digital visibility is emerged by glitches of elevations. De Vylder and Vinck’s logic appeared in the decomposition design elements and architectural structures.Excel cells as basic landscape and ground information affects all others digital intervenes.These composite multiple layers together form the house as a digitally reconstructed organism.
Ultimately,this final drawing argues that suburban housing is shaped by mediation. Digital tools homogenise, simplify and discipline suburban space, determining what is real before reality is encountered. Therefore, this final drawing not a visual representation but a critical practice. It is an attempt to make the invisible intervention of digital media visible, and to reveal how the veranda and pergola, a traditional transition place become the conceptual threshold, and they continually reassembled and controlled the suburban space.