Making Contact- Drawing Ground

Abstract

How might we read architectural drawings not as formal exercises or isolated visions, but as embedded practices of contact, entanglement, and care?

The article will reflect on a selection of site-based sketches and drawings from the Drawing Matter Archive through the lens of “contact: grounding”—a proposed critical method that reframes drawing as an active engagement with the material, ecological, political, and mnemonic dimensions of land. To ground is not simply to locate, but to encounter the histories, violences, lifeforms, and processes that constitute a site.

Focusing on architects and landscape theorists whose on-site sketching practices move beyond stylistic expression—such as Lawrence Halprin, Alberto Ponis, Peter Zumthor, Gilles Clément, and others—the study explores how site sketch drawings can reflect multispecies entanglements, climatic awareness, and territorial memory. These drawings are treated not as static representations, but as temporal, processual, and phenomenological acts—maps of encounter rather than maps of control.

Engaging thinkers such as John Berger, Anna Tsing and Jeremy Till, and drawing upon eco-critical and decolonial frameworks, this inquiry positions these sketches as sites of epistemic transformation. It considers how drawing can become a medium for ethical response—visualizing not only what is, but what could be, in architecture’s relationship to land and world-making.