LECTURE

Drawing on the Existing

The prevailing paradigm of architecture is currently transitioning through a period of re-evaluation, recalibration, and repurposing, with a focus on the critical care of the existing built environments. Its constructive force is being reinterpreted as a transformative craft capable of mediating a dialogue between multiple historical layers, acting as a medium for knowledge and interconnectedness. In this reinterpretation, architecture once again becomes a porous threshold, a contact zone, a space for resonance. In this context, drawing is given a new task: to change again its ability to mediate between perception and design. And to unfold a new immersive ability to make the material space of the future existing tangible.The process of drawing on the existing thus becomes a transmedia practice, a hybrid media practice combining the use of plans, perspectives, models, textile diagrams, photography, digital construction, and text. This generates epistemic artefacts capable of revealing both existing environments and their potential design-driven adaptations.

In the lecture we will present the challenge and potential of repositioning the drawing practice in contemporary architectural design displaying a catalogue of historical and contemporary uses of drawing on the existing.

VITA

Dr. Lidia Gasperoni

is Associate Professor, Co-Director of Design and member of the Cluster Just Environments at The Bartlett School of Architecture (UCL). She is a philosopher and architectural theorist who specialises in the transformative function of architectural theory, practice and education and responds to contemporary challenges associated with designing just environments. Between 2018 and 2024, she was a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer in the Department of Architectural Theory at TU Berlin. She previously studied philosophy in Rome, Freiburg-im-Breisgau and Berlin, receiving her PhD from TU Berlin in 2015 and her Italian Habilitation as associate professor in 2020. At TU Berlin (and previously at UdK Berlin and the University of Kassel), she taught in the fields of philosophy, architectural theory and design, with a focus on media theories, Anthropocene discourse and aesthetics.

VITA

Prof. Matthias Ballestrem

is an architect and since 2024 Professor of Fundamentals of Architecture at the Technische Universität Dortmund. From 2022 to 2024 he was founding program director of the Bauhaus Earth Fellowship Program at Bauhaus Earth and co-manag-ing director of Experimental. From 2017 to 2022 he was professor for Architecture and Experimental Design at the HafenCity University in Hamburg.

Since 2006, he has held other teaching positions at various institutions, including Cornell University, the CIEE GAD Berlin Program, and TU Berlin from 2006-2018. Matthias Ballestrem received his PhD from the TU Berlin on implicit visual spatial perception. His research focuses on the methodologies of design-driven research, experimental design, space perception, spatial complexity and the architectural typologies of interior spaces. Matthias represented the HCU Hamburg in the Erasmus+ Project “Collective Evaluation of Design Driven Doctoral Training” (2019-22). He is a member of the Research Academy Workgroup of the European Association for Architectural Education (EAAE).