Reader, I went to see the exhibition Rendered Futures at Objectspace in Ponsonby, Auckland, and it has stayed with me. The fever of drawing and the way the exhibition made me feel linger gently, with curiosity and suggestion. The show fascinates me in a layered, almost haunting way. Drawings can be unfinished, raw, fantastical, forensic. And architectural training, as many of us know, instils a lifelong intrigue in this tension; how do we language the poetic without words? Rendered Futures is that: a space where languages without words abound. Or, as a friend outside architecture once said of architectural drawings: ideology. She said she loved architectural drawings for the way they “work with information”. I was struck by how proud I felt of the profession, the practice, the training. Because, here, drawings become more than tools; they become information, politics, intimacy. Their presentation, densely arranged like archival artefacts in custom-built vitrines or pinned to the wall as if in a student crit, gives the room a tempo and a kind of fever. It feels archival but not static. The vitrines themselves dog-leg through the gallery, resisting symmetry. They actively refuse the sterile clarity of traditional museum layouts.

Is this anti-taxonomy? What is an archive, after all, if not a record shaped by care, bias and belief? In Archive Fever, philosopher and theorist Jacques Derrida, writing at the intersection of psychoanalysis, memory and documentation, reminds us that archives are never neutral. They are shaped by power, desire and repression: by what he calls “the spectrality of the origin”.¹ In this sense, the exhibition doesn’t merely present drawings. It performs their suspension. It copies the moment of drawing, rather than displaying its product. It’s not a representation of presence; it is the trace of thought. On a return visit, the work of Chirag Jindal deployed LiDAR technology to trace Te Pare School of Architecture and Planning’s specialist library before its closure. I think to myself about the trace of memory. A trace of a trace.

Curated by interdisciplinary designer Micheal McCabe and Objectspace’s director Kim Paton, with research support from architectural historian Dr Lucy Treep, the exhibition offers both the drawing and the memory of drawing. It resists the conventional logic of curating. The presence of so much drawing makes the space feel lived-in. Vulnerable. Provisional. Files of clipped and loose drawings belonging to artist and architect Matt Liggins sitting outside of one vitrine underscores the sensation.

I’m struck by how much has changed since my own time as a student. The drawing board in my parents’ garage, once necessary, now sighs under the weight of its own obsolescence. Today’s AI-generated renderings make the manual feel almost mythical: fairy dust from a different age. And yet the drawings on display in Rendered Futures seem to say: “No, I desire an audience.” Each one carries its own drama, its own temporality. It’s deeply romantic.

Over two public programme events I attended, Paton and McCabe spoke about resisting the dominant image of the hyper-commercialised render. The perfect visualisation, they suggested, flattens. It sterilises. It removes doubt. Yet architecture, they remind us, and it’s something I welcomed hearing aloud, is not about certainty. It’s a practice of negotiation, risk and revision. There is a truth, even an ethics, in that fiction.

Architectural historian Robin Evans once noted that architectural drawing is not a substitute for the building; it is the conceptual space where ideas are tested, broken, revised.² Rendered Futures evokes the approach of contemporary architectural theorist and drawing specialist Perry Kulper: ambiguous, layered, full of multiplicity.³ Many of the drawings are not to be deciphered or explained. They are invitations: invitations to dwell, to return, to remain uncertain.

There is no dominant narrative here. Or perhaps the dominant narrative is process itself. As Paton offered during one public talk, in conversation with academic and architectural practitioner Dr Carl Douglas, whose own drawing seems alive, less an image than a shifting scene we are observing, “Drawing is a commitment to fragility.” I’ve carried that phrase around like a loose thread in my coat pocket ever since.

Because, what an idea: that, in an age of hyper-real, high-resolution renders, generative AI and strategic master plans, a single pencil line on paper can still hold such softness. Such humanity. Such potential. Such belief. Such romance.

But the exhibition shows us that fragility is not weakness. It’s a form of conviction. To draw is to imagine something into being: not just its form but its intention. I think of Julie Stout’s sketch titled House for Myself (Fiji, 1985). A dreaming platform open to the night. Palm fronds laughing at nocturnal thoughts. Heart-shaped leaves growing alongside the dining table.⁴ It is a drawing that proposes not just a house but a life: intimate, sensuous, unresolved.

Long before the Mitchell & Stout canon was formalised, here is its intimate precursor: sketchy lines, suspended fabrics, handmade gestures. This is not a diagram of a solution but the spatialisation of dreaming. The suspension of certainty in favour of wonder.

There’s a persistent myth in architecture: that architects make buildings. But we also, perhaps primarily, make drawings. And then, through politics, geotechnical reports, community consultation, money, clients, material shortages and meetings, those drawings, sometimes, and only sometimes, and tenuously become buildings. That slippage is the point. Drawing isn’t a tool of domination. It’s a gesture of possibility. And, in its fragility, it is profoundly generous.

And this, to me, is the opposite of most architectural representation today — the hyper-real, ozone-clear renders where the sky is always biblically blue and no one has a shadow. These are not drawings, they are seductive performances. They cast out doubt, ethics, empathy. They say: “Everything is already solved, it may as well be real.”

But Rendered Futures insists otherwise. It reminds us that architecture — real architecture — begins in the unresolved. In the tentative. In the cold cup of coffee left on a desk. In the slow process of sketching, arguing, making and remaking. Drawing is the work of genius but it is not genius in the way of the sole stararchitect. It is the work of a different genius — of being convinced that what is fragile means something. Sometimes messy. Always spectral.

References

1. Jacques Derrida, 1995, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (E. Prenowitz, trans.). University of Chicago Press.

2. Robin Evans, 1995, The Projective Cast: Architecture and its Three Geometries. MIT Press.

3. Hande Asar & Pelin Hursun Çebi, 2020, ‘Layering in representation: Rethinking architectural representation through Perry Kulper’s works’, A|Z ITU Journal of the Faculty of Architecture, 17(3), 141–153.

4. Julie Stout, 1985, House for Myself, Fiji. Personal archive.