“Every line used to cost something,” my professor sighed over the yield of an undergrad rendering course. This was around the start of the period covered by “Hand and Machine”: from the 2008 financial crisis to the Covid 19-pandemic. Disillusioned by techno-optimism and blaring architectural icons, architects—the exhibition asserts—longed for craft and community.

The diagnosed shift is presented through drawings of various media. Most rest flat on scavenged furniture spread across a vast museum hall. Delicate color studies neighbor a playful animation suspended by a hydraulic lift; a sober line drawing in a display case flanks a political zine on a ping pong table. Digital brushstrokes and grainy filters lend an aura of hand-made authenticity. Or is it a note of nostalgia? Aided by social media, some drawings have reached global grad school fame far beyond their built siblings (if they exist). It is a treat to see them bound by materiality and scale, standing still in a hyper-visual age where images live and die at unparalleled speed. The floor is carpeted by blown-up photos of local firms—a tea cup balancing on a stack of books, a colossal hand poising a pen for stroke. The bustling totality implies process, a moment of transition, a movement coming into being.

But what makes a movement? Critical issues in contemporary praxis—domain, dependency, and agency—are ghostly presences, like the discrepancies between representation and referent; between intent and conditioning factors. A drawing’s exclusions say as much as its inclusions. The most thought-provoking pieces interrogate labor or the discipline’s complicity in the neoliberal sterilization of urban space. Image-making is increasingly outsourced to low-wage workers, humans or robots. Yet most exhibitors lay between boutique office and recent-graduates-turned-collective. Looking behind (and beyond) the drawing could uncover where the hand goes when the machine writes poetry and paints utopias.

idr.