Lines as Architectural Thinking

Architecture stems from a sapient working together of writing, drawing, and construction lines. The critical study of genetic architectural representations by examination of the sedimentation of architectural materiality inscribed in weathered boards, papers and models develops the ability of architects to become architecturally conscious. Architectural lines are material, spatial, cultural and temporal occurrences of refined multi-sensorial and emotional understandings of architecture. Architectural lines create a graphesis , a course of actions based on factures by which architects actualize future and past architecture into representations. Architectural drawings must not be understood as visualizations of building, but as essential architectural factures. Leon Battista Alberti's term lineamenta carries embedded in itself the idea of facture since Alberti's understanding of lineamenta derives from the use of tracing lines, ropes, ribbons, strings or threads mostly made with flax fibres and used by the builder on construction sites during the facture of buildings. “Tota res aedificatoria lineamentis et structura constituta est.” Leon Battista Alberti, De re aedificatoria