Craig Mitchell, winner of the Nicholas Pozner Prize for Drawing, discusses drawing, photogrammetry, and architectural representation

Matthew Lloyd Roberts: Congratulations Craig on winning the Pozner Prize! Would you like to tell us a little bit about your project?

Craig Mitchell: My project found traction in my ETS 5 submission, for which I worked really closely with Javier Castañon. That’s where my interest in moving beyond 2D drawing and representation came from. I was working with an unfamiliar technology, photogrammetry, a new way of representing the existing condition. Photogrammetry works in a similar way to LIDAR, you take a series of photos from specific points, which you can use to generate a virtual, 3D representation of the space. I started by comparing 2D plans and elevations of my house with a combination of photogrammetry scans and ground-penetrating radar scans to produce a much higher resolution, but not necessarily more legible representation of the same building, acknowledging these different ways of reading and representing space.

MLR: What did you use photogrammetry for as the project developed?

CM: This case study made me realise that there are parameters, such as light, movement, obscuration which produce glitches in the reading and the representation. I am interested in manipulating the limits of photogrammetry to generate a different reading of the same spaces, at a different resolution. The project investigated the application of these technologies to the site of the Biennale in Venice. This is where our unit was based and the intent was to renegotiate the boundary condition of this territory, one of nation-based spatial organisation.

MLR: How did you apply these new techniques to that site?

CM: The starting point was to take a conventional 2D drawing at 1:50 of the whole Venice Pavilion and the adjacent neighbourhood of St Elena, so a very large drawing. Based on the limits of photogrammetry techniques and by identifying the precise locations where GPR scans could be taken, I worked out how many shots I would need to take to capture the whole site. I had limited time in Venice, so I was also experimenting using different photogrammetry techniques simultaneously: eg. a sweep of an elevation and a radial scan of an interior. That’s when I started to think more deeply about the limits of these photogrammetric representations, they aren’t perfect, they have a changeable nature.

MLR: What kind of design process did these techniques lead towards?

CM: I took the overlap between two scans of the same wall, and attempted to model the gap between them on the computer. The outputs produced very parametric, hard lined extrusions, an alien looking form. I took these generated forms as the site limits for intervention, the forms represented the limits of the machines and where they ‘failed’. By taking slices through them, I reproduced each slice by hand using plaster to generate more tactile, familiar environments. The reinterpretation of these harsh geometries produces what I call a ‘vernacular’, based on light and tactility, wrangling these hard shapes into something more humane. I think that Architecture should not be reduced to a machine-like ‘calculation’, this idea designs people out of the production of space to a great degree.

MLR: Did you have any references or influences in this approach?

CM: There was a reference that Shin Egashira gave me in a jury, ‘Temple Islands’ by Mike Webb. Webb talked about ‘sliced up sections’ in this project, the idea that I was building these slices by hand, which is the same technique they use in the construction of boats, which might have been part of a subliminal connection to Venice. I found it so interesting to draw and design like that. I was exposed to the work of other units during my time at the school who have a very precise way of drawing, based in plan and section, more historically typical of professional architectural drawing. But then I was thinking about how space could be produced in a totally different way, that freed me from a prescribed way of drawing. I was in practice before I came to the AA to do my Part 2, and I wanted to hone my skills in producing traditional architectural drawings, but by the end of my diploma, I was thinking about the other forms of representation that play a vital role in architectural design and production.

MLR: Has the project made you think differently about architectural practice?

CM: Nowadays on larger projects you’d have a facade specialist, amongst many other specialists, to whom the architect's historic role is relinquished. You don’t need an Architect to build a building. The architect works on the peripheries of projects, more removed from the process. Specialists in their field work towards optimisation, even in a design capacity they might become obsessed with generating the perfect swoop, the perfect parametric hard line.I don’t really subscribe to this. Hand drawing and physical model-making give you access to imperfect surfaces, which are crucial to my project’s proposal. Through making or drawing something, you have a deeper understanding of scale and its implications. If they had been perfectly smooth, computer generated, calculated surfaces, they would have been much less tactile than this ‘vernacular’ aesthetic that I was interested in generating.