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Summer Show 2026
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Learning to Draw, Again

Project details

Programme
Unit PG21
Year 5

Learning to Draw, Again translates hand drawing into architectural form through machine vision, point clouds, and physical modelling. The project asks how drawing changes when it is made for a visual system trained on photographs, where line, tone, density, erasure, and blank paper are read as spatial evidence.

Depth-estimation software converts marks on paper into unstable digital terrains. Through repeated drawing, scanning, projection, extraction, and printing, these misreadings are tested until they become a usable design process. Drawing becomes a negotiation between hand, paper, software, and spatial output.

The resulting point clouds are treated as sites to be occupied, cut, projected through, and translated into architectural fragments. Developed across scales, from landscape to handrail, the paper surface begins to acquire thickness, programme, structure, and use.

Situated within Bologna’s industrial and ecological edge, the project proposes an architecture formed through translation. It asks how a drawing must be made to become legible as space, and what forms emerge when the architect learns to draw according to the limits, habits, and errors of machine vision.

Monocular Depth Estimation

Monocular Depth Estimation

Diagrams trace the workflow from hand drawing to depth map, script, and point cloud. The project uses machine vision’s misreading of line, tone, erasure, and blank paper to produce architectural ground, fragments, and models.

Calibrating the System

Calibrating the System

A sequence of point clouds produced through calibration, opacity, absence, and projection tests. Each cloud records a different way the machine misreads line, tone, erasure, and blank paper as spatial evidence.

Live Drawing, Live Reading

Live Drawing, Live Reading

The drawing is made while watching the point cloud update in real time. Marks are adjusted in response to the cloud, creating a feedback loop between hand, paper, camera, software, and spatial output.

Paper Architecture

Paper Architecture

Physical models translate the point clouds into architectural fragments across scales, from landscape to detail. Paper acquires thickness, structure, programme, and use through cutting, casting, printing, and assembly.

Process Film

Process Film

The process film documents the project as a live drawing apparatus: drawing, scanning, depth estimation, point cloud generation, projection, extraction, and modelling become one continuous design method.

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The Bartlett
Summer Show 2026
25 June – 12 July
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