Additional Information

This object was made as part of Daisy Zheng’s MArch thesis at MIT in 2023. The project sought to interpret architecture as not as monumental, hermetic, or static, but rather as a locus of use and change. She examined a small apartment building in Mexico City and traced the threads of use in the co-created lives of the community and the building. Her project was meant to question the commonly held belief that the architect is the sole author of a building; instead, Zheng relocated authorship with the users. “This building is not just composed of 16 floor slabs and 40 walls. But rather, 160,000 broom strokes, 24,000 wipes, 10,000 hammerings, 200 pipe replacements, and so on.” Zheng used a variety of tools in her project: analog sketching, digital photography, film, animation, 3D mapping, and robotic plotting, as in the object presented here. The process of robot plotting poses interesting challenges to traditional categories of “drawing” and “print” and encourages rethinking of the role of the human hand and technological prosthetics in drawing.