Research Fellow Program “Tools of Drafting”

The verb “to draft,” is derived from flowing, drawing off – a gesture of distance and the loss of possession. This gesture is oriented on a certain purpose or aim, but is by no means determined by it. Drafting is an attempt to give a form to something unknown or unthought, or an act of constructing a graphic, or, in the case of a model, a three-dimensional bridge to nothing. In modern usage the word “drafting” can designate nearly all practices that come into play when works of art, architecture, machines, pieces of music or texts are projected. The horizon of meanings ranges from drawing, modelling and composing to planning, conceptualizing and constructing. The tools in this drawing and desk adventure are as multifarious as they are heterogeneous: from the pencil to CAD software, from graph paper to the 3D printer, the widest variety of media were and are deployed in the service of drafting.

The projects of the Research Fellow Program are concerned on the one hand with the history and theory of these tools of drafting; on the other they study the modes of drafting activity, that is, those procedures which are developed in the use of instruments and models. In so doing they delve into one of the central research emphases of the IKKM: the question as to non-human agents’ capacity for acting. In focusing on the history and theory of drafting, the Research Fellow Program attempts to intensify the exteriority of drafting, forming and thinking, both methodologically and thematically: First by dealing with the concept of the tool, by subjecting it to a critical revision from the perspective of recent science and technology studies; and secondly by regarding the concept of drafting as a practice that characterizes and grounds the modern artist, architect, engineer and scientist. From this perspective, drafting appears not as one activity among many, but as a specifically modern modus operandi, which proceeds from the concept of the discovering, researching, creative, future-oriented subject as its condition.

Members and projects

Bernard Cache

Eva Maria Froschauer:
On Collecting and Designing

Stefanie Klamm:
Archaeological Models as Experimental Tools

Ana Ofak:
Agents of New Form. Visual Media and Drafting Practices of the Art Group EXAT51

Ulrich Richtmeyer:
Wittgenstein’s “Philosophy of the Working Drawing“

Susanne Schregel:
Crossing Frontiers – Interdisciplinarity and the Spatial Layout of Science

Nicole Stöcklmayr
Models of Phenomena. Parametric Design in Architecture

Franziska Uhlig:
About Tools

Barbara Wittmann:
What’s Left of Drawing. Case Studies on Graphic Drafting in the Present

Associate members

Nathalie Bredella:
Techniques of Design. Tools and Media in the Design Process of Frank O. Gehry Associates

Gert Hasenhütl:
Epistemological Aspects of Design Processes

Peter Heinrich Jahn:
Imitatio & disegno geometrico. Idea of Invention and Planning Process of the Roman Architect Carlo Fontana (1638-1714) and his School

Lutz Robbers:
Embodiment/Temporalization: The Emergence of the Moving Image in Architecture

Wladimir Velminski:
Designs of the Novelty of Thought