UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — On Feb. 18, the Stuckeman School in the College of Arts and Architecture will present “Hatchwork: An Archaeology of Generative Drawing,” an exhibition and lecture by architects Andrew Kudless and Adam Marcus, showcasing more than 15 years of experimentation with generative methods of architectural design and representation. The lecture will be held at 4 p.m. in the Stuckeman Family Building Jury Space, where it will also be livestreamed via Zoom.
The exhibition, which will open in the adjacent Rouse Gallery and will run through March 15, comes from an archive of architectural ideations and procedural drawings over the years of the duo’s experimentation with generative design. The work shown at the event will feature various elements, such as diagrams, drawings, images and generative media.
These computational sketches and prototypes explore techniques for using computers to produce innovative architectural diagrams, drawings and representations.
Although each drawing will retain its own independent purpose and legibility, they will also serve as a part to a larger field. The 1,000 drawings featured will be exhibited as a single, gradual presentation constructed by layering, repetition and adjacency.
At the core of the exhibition are 16 new drawings — eight sections by Marcus and eight plans by Kudless — using repurposed archival materials from their previous work.
Through this exhibition, Marcus and Kudless reassert drawing as the primary start of inquiry for designing. According to the duo, the drawings resist the model-driven paradigm that dictates much of contemporary architectural production.
The exhibition is framed as “archaeological” or as an ongoing process of excavation for design, where ideas are recovered and recombined rather than just finished. Procedural openness and incompleteness will be illustrated as productivity rather than weakness in the design process.
During the public lecture, Marcus and Kudless will trace their shared research history over 15 years with generative methods of design and graphic representation from their archive of architectural ideations. They will also discuss their previous exhibition project and book, “Drawing Codes.”
Marcus is an architect, educator and director of Variable Projects, an award-winning design and research studio that focuses on computation, digital fabrication and robotics in relation to ecological and public interaction. He is currently the Favrot Associate Professor at Tulane University, where he is the research director of the Center on Climate Change and Urbanism. He is also a partner at Future Norths, a public art collective that explores the aesthetics of data.
His individual and collaborative work has been recognized with several awards including: an American Institute of Architects (AIA) Innovation Award; AIA Small Projects Award; and an AIA Minnesota Honor Award. He also earned other honors from AIA California, the American Society of Landscape Architects, The Architect’s Newspaper, Architect’s Magazine and the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture.
Kudless is the director of Matsys, a professional design studio that pursues a trans-disciplinary and trans-scalar practice that blends art, design, architecture and engineering. Matsys has received several national awards including: the 2019 AIA Honor Award for Architecture and an AIA Committee on the Environment Award in 2023. Matsys’ work is in the permanent collections of the San Francisco Museum of Art, the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the FRAC Centre in Orleans, France.
Kudless also became the first American designer to contribute to Louis Vuitton’s “Objets Nomades” furniture collection in 2019.