ABSTRACT
In my last year of architecture studies as an undergraduate student, my degree project advisor told me to use a dotted line to show movement in my project to help me overcome a hurdle I had reached in visualizing my design process. The discussion took place with trace paper and heavy graphite pencils for quick drawings as was often the medium for discussion between instructor and student. I had known about the dotted line, but I had reserved it for formal uses, such as architectural elements that were hidden behind other elements in a section drawing, or an element hovering above the plan cut line. It was a precisely drafted line with alternating measured increments between solid and void that drove the line. In that moment of conversation, I tried to convey the movement of architectural elements, but not of conventional elements often found in construction drawings. Instead, this was out of a need to convey a design process where specifi c forms underwent an arabesque of rotations in order to land in their fi nal location. There was a need to show movement, which the dotted line could fulfi l because of its slightly ambiguous nature even though it was grounded in architectural conventions. The design process relied upon visual representation, which, in turn, reinforced a rigorous method where emphasis was placed on the development of a process rather than on the fi nal outcome of architecture. The project afforded me the time to learn how to think as a designer rather than perform the prescribed tasks drawn in construction documents used in the language of professional practice.
