Study Architecture 
ProPEL 
Author(s): Gonzalo José López Garrido
This paper focuses on a pedagogical tool named by the author Argumentative Analytical Drawing, a method of drawing that teaches architecture students how to use analyses to construct an argument that becomes the generator of design decisions. Influenced by radical and counter-mapping methods developed by Radical Geographers in the United States during the 1960s and 1970s, Argumentative Analytical Drawing is a method that has been tested during several years in design studios, seminars on representation, history and theory, and electives on urban design. Through these drawings, students develop a strong position towards their site and interests, showing how environmental harm, social and cultural oppression, the experience of native populations, colonial history, or militarization, to name a few, conform a site and start to grasp how architecture might engage with them through strategies of remembrance, reparation, celebration, or awareness to articulate present-day urgencies in the field of architecture. This method aims to investigate our current state of “Crisis Conglomeration” (Heglar, 2020), and its roots in colonialism, dispossession and oppression and address how notions of reparations, care and degrowth can constitute an attempt to dismantle power structures that carry the legacies of settler interests and imperialism. In the process, students are asked to consider comparative cultural, historical, ecological, and social histories, as well as specific local conditions. They use experimental methods of charting history and space to understand the complexities of their site in the present and begin to imagine the mapping of a different future. The contemporary architecture student cares deeply about their impact in the world but often struggles to understand the limits and potential in their role as architects. This method aims to help them articulate some of those preoccupations and become a disciplinary technique using interdisciplinary tools.
https://doi.org/10.35483/ACSA.AM.113.54
Volume Editors
Sara Jensen Carr & Rubén García Rubio
ISBN
978-1-944214-48-7
