Line and Number: From the Operative Abstraction of Form to the In(ter)vention of Plan Drawings in Architectural Practices of Pre- and Early History
The earliest documented plan drawings of human history – small, inconspicuous floor plans of simple buildings on clay tablets, stone slabs, and papyruses – emerged with the urban and centrally governed civilizations of ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt that also developed the first writing systems. The talk aims at providing a reconstruction of their genesis and operative logic as an early architectural design medium. It does so by tracing some of the crucial reconfigurations of building practices and corresponding transformations, abstractions, and translations of architectural form since the Early Neolithic that gradually led to and rendered possible in the first place the intervention of such drawings in the processes of conceptualizing and collectively realizing built structures.
Marc Pfaff is a researcher and lecturer in the fields of design theory, media studies, and cultural studies. He studied Design at Köln International School of Design and the Hong Kong Polytechnic University School of Design. For his doctoral thesis recently submitted for review at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne (KHM), he investigated the ancient origins of designing (Ger. »Entwerfen«) as a cultural technique from a media theoretical perspective. Marc Pfaff currently works and teaches at Berlin University of the Arts and Technische Universität Berlin for the inter-university transdisciplinary M.A. program Design & Computation.