Architects Draw Performance

Performance and temporary installation commission for the South Waterfront Artist in Residence Program. Located on a 20,000 sf pre-developed lot in the South Waterfront District of Portland, OR.

“The principal value to the architect in freehand drawing lies in the act of disciplining the whole organism of their own, that is in order to understand with every fiber of the body the true nature of space.” Dore Ashton “The Free Hand”

This event invited performance-based artists to create site-specific works within the high-rise towers of the new South Waterfront development. The only constraint was a 4’x4′ stage- the signature component of the Ten Tiny Dances performance series. Choosing a freshly scraped site along the industrial edge of the new neighborhood, we began by asking ourselves how could we, as architects, see the site as more than a blank slate?

In walking through this landscape we found a shared desire to somehow use our bodies as drawing tools, making large-scale, real-time “life” drawings that directly respond to the features of the landscape. We set to work re-imagining the given 4×4 stage as a group of “surveying suits” that extruded pink surveyors string to layout full scale drawings of surrounding, soon-to-be-erased, features- cranes, barges, bridges, power lines and clouds.

“Even the object most familiar to our eyes becomes totally different if one applies oneself to drawing it: one perceives that one didn’t really know it, one had never really seen it.” Paul Valery, “Degas, Dance and Drawing”