Postphenomenology and Architecture: Architecture as Measurer for Human and World

A Postphenomenological framework is not only enlightening for understanding our interactions with the built environment but it also provides structure for an analysis of the mediated creation of architectural drawings. There has been numerous postphenomenological studies into visualizations, but predominantly in what I define as empirical visualisations in the sciences. The article opens by establishing the differentiation between empirical and ideational visualisations. Ideational visualization is important for architectural drawing as a creative practice. It then explores particularly what is seen as an alterity relation in the creative work with the drawings and parallels this to the back-talk from material theorized by Donald Schön (Schön 1987). This work points to that the understanding of digital and analogue in architectural drawing which has been hotly debated is too narrowly defined. An alternative definition of analogue and digital is sought in Goodman (Goodman, 1976). Architectural drawing is a puzzling case between what Goodman defines as auto- and allographic (Goodman, 1976), as is demonstrated and discussed through the case of the burnt architectural drawings from the Copenhagen building archive. Goodman’s definitions of analogue and digital are transformed into more relational notions where the dense ambiguity of the analogue is argued to be connected with the ideational visualization.