Whatever happened to normative drawing?

Abstract

One hallmark of humanities inquiry is its motivation by normative concerns: a critical view of how things are and a corresponding vision of how things could be. Architects used to adeptly deploy the rhetorical approaches of humanities inquiry in the promotion of architectural visions. Today architecture seems to be dominated by technical and instrumental concerns and where a vision is articulated it is usually of transformed individual living rather than of a different society. Imaginative text and image based signifying strategies have largely given way to the ubiquity of computer generated plans, elevations, walk-throughs and unconvincing images of contrived and unlikely sociality