The Drawing and the Space. Reflections on 10 Years of Design Research and Education

The Drawing and the Space moves from a shared conviction: that drawing is not merely a tool for representation, but the locus where architecture takes shape before it becomes building. Not a medium for illustrating finished ideas, but a field of inquiry in which thought encounters matter, the body meets gesture, and imagination negotiates physical constraints. This volume gathers nearly a decade of work by the Research Group The Drawing and the Space, founded by Thierry Lagrange and Jo Van Den Berghe and developed through design research and pedagogical experimentation. Across these trajectories, drawing is approached as a situated practice, one that unfolds in the interval between reflection and construction, between perception and articulation. Here, drawing operates as an epistemic device: it cuts, listens, measures, pauses, and stitches. Through lines, sections, layers, perforations, movements, and overlays, it renders perceptible the often-invisible dimensions of space—memory, absence, empathy, rhythm, fragility, ecological entanglement. The page becomes a laboratory in which fragments are assembled, relationships tested, and spatial hypotheses slowly brought into presence. The contributions assembled in this book do not advance a single theory, but a constellation of practices. From constructive detail to choreography, from Renaissance perspective to emotional topography, from ecological grammars to co-drawing processes, drawing emerges as a threshold: between thinking and building, between subject and context, between space and place. In these pages, to draw is to inhabit the world critically and attentively. Drawing is to slow down, to observe, to attune, and to care. Rather than offering definitive conclusions, the book opens a shared field of research, one in which drawing continues to generate knowledge, relations, and new possibilities for contemporary architectural culture.