In the first years of architectural study students are challenged to develop their ability to perceive the World around them. As an analytical exercise, students were asked to capture movement in a drawing. Whereas traditional architectural graphics represent a still, static thing, the motion drawing is conceived as a multi-relational, disjointed composition. These disjunctions imply what we, the students, were meant to learn: that no singular instance can be understood without looking at the others; each part has a relationship to the rest; and, every construction is off-balance because of the traces of another construction.

This lesson is particularly important for aspiring architects because of the part-to-whole relationships involved in a building. Being able to identify these relationships when attacking a design problem is arguably the most important step toward achieving a successful design. The motion drawing project asked students to identify the relationships between an object moving through space and to report those findings in the form of a black and white, hard-lined drawing.

The actual drawing has not yet been scanned into the system. Yeah.