Portrait
Analog Studio

Prof. Mark Raymond
, Soumya Dasgupta 
Jan, 2021

As part of the Analog Studio series of work, students created a series of drawings  to enhance our awareness of spatiality, architectural sensibility, and personal history. The six drawings included a one word title prompt, sequentially portrait, assembly, personal room, common room, urban, and landscape. 

As the project brief of the figure was introduced and I started to observe my face more, I became interested in capturing the temporal element on my face - hair. Although one could make the argument that one’s perception of oneself is always in flux, especially if the self-portrait is carried out in a live drawing, I am drawn to the constant state of change hair is always in. This fascination partly stems from the fact that I have never grown my hair out before. My shoulder-length hair is the result of the covid-19 pandemic and visually documents the duration of the ongoing pandemic.

Cotemplating deeper on my fixation on hair as a subject, I came to realise that my long hair is a celebration of liberty and individuality. If I had not been away from home (Taiwan), I would have happily obliged a family member’s prompt for a haircut. It was only because the US was affected much worse than Taiwan by the pandemic that all businesses shut down, making it impossible for me to get a haircut at first and gave me this opportunity of growing my hair out. It is with the excuse of not being able to get a haircut did I get this chance of rightfully challenging gender appearance norms.

My long hair is also a different way to connect to my family and culture. In ancient Chinese culture, long hair is the norm, as one’s body is considered to be a gift from one’s parents and discarding parts of it – hair included - was thought to be an ungrateful act towards your parents. My long hair also gave me a new connection with my mother, who taught me how to brush and care for my hair over the webcam, an activity and connection I never had with my mother before.

In my self-portrait, I treat my hair as an independent organism – a choice I made early on. This is because I have come to realise that long hair behaves very differently from short hair and is often untamed. I decided I would depict my hair “styles” with multiple attempts, with a constant of using calligraphy brushes and ink. The choice of medium is both cultural and familial, as I practised calligraphy when I was very young but stopped because I felt unconfident when compared to my mother, who is a very skilled Chinese calligrapher in the Yen style.

Each depiction is drawn by a calligraphy brush and ink, although the ink deviates from traditional calligraphic practices because is it washed down, the style of drawing keeps traditional calligraphic conventions – When writing Chinese calligraphy, each stroke is single and final, so no space-filling or edge-fixing is allowed. The depictions follow this calligraphic rule. Finally, red geometric lines are annotated over the overlaid depictions, as an attempt to explore patterns that might emerge out of the various hairstyles. These annotations mark out the total width and height of the hair volume, while the diamond marks out the parameters of the face. Each hairstyle is also coupled with textual data, indicating the time of day, and time since the hair was washed, transforming this personal and artistic exercise into a scientific analysis.

Assembly
Analog Studio

Prof. Mark Raymond
, Soumya Dasgupta
Feb, 2021

As part of the Analog Studio series of work, students created a series of drawings  to enhance our awareness of spatiality, architectural sensibility, and personal history. The six drawings included a one word title prompt, sequentially portrait, assembly, personal room, common room, urban, and landscape. 


Tea, with its widespread accessibility, is an essential and everyday beverage for me and many others. This common and ordinary beverage became more relevant to me as I entered my teenage years and was looking for a replacement for unhealthy sugary beverages. This was when I realised that my family members all drink tea heavily throughout the day and prompted me to adopt the practice. During my middle and high school years, I used simple tea bags for convenience, while exclusively drinking European black tea, such as Earl Grey, as an attempt to “set myself apart” from my family members’ practices of tea drinking. As I got accepted to a Canadian University and the time left for my departure from my family became clear, I started cherishing the activities my family and I shared more. Tea-drinking was one of the important social acts we all shared.

Since then, tea drinking became a highly ritualised and special experience to me. I started observing how my grandparents brewed tea, each of them different according to personal taste. While my maternal family treated tea as an on-the-go beverage, often utilising carryable filters or mugs, my paternal grandparents treated tea drinking as a ritualistic act. My paternal grandmother insisted on only drinking a specific high-mountain green tea from a Taiwanese mountain and only drank it in the “Japanese room” (an elevated room that is made out of wood with sliding doors, a common design in many older Taiwanese residential buildings as Taiwan was once colonised by the Japanese). The specialisation of tea drinking did not end with a dedicated space, a specific sequence of brewing high mountain green tea then followed:

1. Boil water
   
2. Pour boiling water into an empty teapot, warming the pot
   
3. Transfer the hot water from the warm pot to the “tea ocean” ( a vessel that would hold excess tea to prevent it from over-brewing and becoming bitter in the pot), and then to the teacups
   
4. Pour out and discard the (now) warm water into the double-layered tea tray
   
5. Put dry tea leaves into the teapot
   
6. Pour in boiling water
   
7. Wait 30 seconds, to “awaken” the tea leaves
   
8. Pour out the tea brewed by the first 30 seconds
   
9. Pour hot water into the teapot again, now brewing 60 seconds
   
10. Transfer the tea from the pot to the tea ocean
    
11. Distribute tea to the cups from the tea ocean
    
12. Repeat steps 8 to 11 for more brews, adding 30 seconds to each additional brew
    

It was in the Japanese room of her house, with this specific sequence of tea brewing, did I reconnect with my paternal grandmother, as I did not spend much time with her growing up due to my parents’ separation. Many times, she would not be the one performing this ritual, as she would be busy talking. Instead, my grandfather carried out this ritual quietly while listening to her. I adopted her way of tea-drinking as a meditative practice, as it made me feel closer to home. This was especially important when she suddenly passed during my fourth year in school and I could not leave in time to see her. The act of tea-brewing was no longer just ritualistic, but it became a healing process. 

In this assignment, I had gone through quite a few iterations. My first instinct was to catalogue the objects that make tea itself – the tea leaf. I was interested in documenting abstract forms it existed in, both in the dry state it is packaged in and in the wet state in which after it is brewed. This attempt was, however, too close to the first exercise, as the drawings and stains the tea leaves left were extremely figural. I then hoped to contextualise this ritual by capturing the space the brewing process takes place in – the Japanese room, and the tools that are used - the teapot, the tea ocean, the tea tray, and the teacup. This iteration was highly dramatic, as I sketched the elevated step of the Japanese room as a theatrical proscenium arch. However, the contradicting scales of the room and the object presented challenges in the composition, while the sketch also started becoming extremely spatial, losing focus on the object.

In my final composition, I combine two important aspects of all my iterations – the idea of cataloguing and the act of a performative process. Cataloguing the objects and steps that go into this tea-brewing ritual is indicative of my systematic thinking which comes from architectural training, while the idea of process and narrative was an important common theme among my group. The sequence of tea-brewing is drawn from the angle of the tea-brewer, often encountering the object straight from above if the brewer is performing with good posture. The drawings of each brewing sequence, drawn with actual tea, are overlaid and shifted to indicate movement and the idea of an ongoing process. Finally, the double-layered tea tray is drawn in section, to show how it catches excess tea water during the ritualistic brewing process. Water levels are drawn and annotated in the section of the tray, transforming the object into a landscape.

Personal Room
Analog Studio

Prof. Mark Raymond
, Soumya Dasgupta
Feb, 2021

As part of the Analog Studio series of work, students created a series of drawings  to enhance our awareness of spatiality, architectural sensibility, and personal history. The six drawings included a one word title prompt, sequentially portrait, assembly, personal room, common room, urban, and landscape. 


With the introduction of the assignment, I initially debated between several rooms to work with – the Japanese tearoom at my grandmother’s house, an imagined future room of my own, and the room I am occupying currently in Champaign, IL. The topic of my previous assignment – tea – initially drew me to depict the tearoom, but as I realised I could not experience the room at the moment and I lacked photos of it, I left the tearoom for an exercise in the future. This was similarly the case for an imagined room, as the spatial qualities would be difficult to grasp in this exercise. I thus chose to study my one-bedroom apartment in Champaign, which I have spent most of the pandemic in.

Following my previous assignments, in this exercise, I am continuously interested in capturing the temporal element. In the context of a room, the temporal was initially the location of the body – where I sit and where I stand. Later another topic emerged, which was to depict shifting eye movements, where I would emphasise architectural elements as well as objects in my house that lead my eye to linger. These “portals” were divided into 3 main categories – the digital portal (screens), the exterior portal (windows), and the transcending portal (artwork).

The two topics – the movement of the body and eye – proved to work well in my group, where we had an overarching theme of shifting movement, impressions, and ambiguity. KB analysed the use of his apartment and how programs bled into one another, contrary to what real-estate agents sold to him, while Lesego studied the varying impressions of a room from memory remembered by different people.

Interestingly, my first instinct to analyse a room was to jump straight to the plan. As an architectural student, conventional drawings such as the plan, section, and axonometric have become an instinctive way to understand space. This was also common among my group, where Lesego started with both the plan and section, while KB produced axonometrics. Initially, my approach to annotating my eye movement was extremely diagrammatic, where I laid red lines over a plan. However, as our project progressed with feedback, I became more interested in capturing the experiential element. I started depicting slightly distorted perspectival views of my room from my desk.

To make my analysis more personal, I looked back into my previous exercises and decided to revisit the use of the calligraphy brush and ink as a medium. While the use of a wet, stain-like brush stroke is a constant among my first three exercises (the figure, the assembly, and the room), the brush stroke is applied differently. Here the brush stroke plays between the figural and the analytic, unlike my first two exercises, which leaned to the former. The brushstroke was successful in capturing the temporal and shifty quality of my eye movement, while its figural presence pulled one’s focus. This created an interesting ambiguity of the subject: While the subject is the room, the brush strokes figural quality seeks to replace the room as the subject, inverting the importance between the physical room and temporal sensory experiences.

The effectiveness of the first drawing, which documented eye movement, then prompted me to produce more drawings that analyse different sensory experiences in the room. Two other drawings, both focused on thermal and haptic experiences, emerged as a result – a drawing of heat and a drawing of the lack of heat. All three drawings use the brush stroke to bring focus to invisible and visceral forces while its dual composition indicates two experiences. Each drawing is composed of a view from my desk, while the backdrop of my workstation is presented as a reflection, with the common element of my figure linking the two views together.

The decision to include the backdrop of my workstation relates to our pandemic experience. With virtual meetings becoming the prominent method to communicate, we are more aware of our appearance and spatial qualities due to the heavy use of webcams. In my final composition, I present the three drawings twice, with the bottom row of the drawings inversed, presenting the view of me from a webcam as the primary perspective. This duality allows multiple points of view, showcasing the spatial experience of my room both from my perspective, as well as my conference attendees’.  

Common Room
Analog Studio

Prof. Mark Raymond
, Soumya Dasgupta
Mar, 2021

As part of the Analog Studio series of work, students created a series of drawings  to enhance our awareness of spatiality, architectural sensibility, and personal history. The six drawings included a one word title prompt, sequentially portrait, assembly, personal room, common room, urban, and landscape. 


I have always been fascinated with airplanes. My family used to tell me that after a long-haul Toronto to Taipei flight, 5-year-old me would re-enact everything the flight attendants announced in the air. This fascination with airplanes goes beyond the excitement of flying or the intricate engineering that enables it: it is the satisfying repetition inside the cabin space; it is the carefully contained space for each individual; it is the fabrics and patterns along the seats and walls that connect the plane to the airline and its home nation. Since I have never been intrigued by fighter jets, I believe I have been fascinated by the indescribable spatial quality of the commercial airliner cabin space itself since I was young. It was not until last year when I discovered Marc Auge’s theory on non-places was I able to put my long fascination with airplanes into words and further theorise it.

Marc Auge’s theorises non-places as spaces that have no significant historic or anthropogenetic value. While places evoke history, non-placesare hyper-focused on the present, where the most important spatial quality is often efficiency and technological modernity. I believe that air transit spaces, both the airport and the airplane cabin generally fall under the category of non-places. The generic polished floors and the large curtain walls in the airport as well as the rigidly aligned seats in the airplane do not point to historic significance and are often indistinguishable. However, an important aspect I interpret as a method of place-making in a non-place such as an airplane cabin is branding. I am interested in how the airline’s branding and its associations to nationality become the sole indicator of identity for the cabin space. In my drawing, I have chosen to depict the maple leaf rondelle of Air Canada, one of the two main airlines I fly with (the other being EVA Air, but their branding approach is not as explicitly national).

The drawing consists of two mediums – the digital drawings and the analogous brush stroke. The digital is intentionally used to depict generic and premanufactured elements in the common room of the cabin space. This includes the seats, airline branding elements, as well as flight attendants. The flight attendants are digitally collaged figures and do not have a face. This choice was to indicate that flight attendants in the cabin space are often seen as a representative of the airline’s brand identity instead of individuals. The corporate identity maintains an overpowering effect, eclipsing spatial elements such as walls, furniture such as seats, and further onto humans such as flight attendants. To further emphasise corporate identity as the main characteristic in the cabin space, the Air Canada maple leaf rondelle is the only element in the drawing that is coloured.  

Another aspect that the digital portion brings out is how individual identity is expressed in a non-place such as a cabin. This is most evident through cabin class distinction. Individual identity is first inherently expressed through the financial capability of affording an expensive high-class seat and then expressed in physical space through enhanced levels of privacy and spatial areas. The higher the cabin class, the more financially capable the flyer, and the more privacy and spatial area is dedicated to them in this non-place.

The final element depicted with the digital is the collaged objects – “debris”. These belongings, in a more personal way (compared to cabin class differences) again showcase how people express individual identity in a non-place such as a cabin. People express individuality quite literally by leaving their mark. There is also differentiation in the debris that people litter the non-place in. In economy class, where comfort is lackluster and individual space is compressed, most belongings are dedicated to improving comfort, such as pillows, or for entertainment, such as ipads and earphones to pass the time. In business class, where there is extended comfort, passengers can remain productive and work on their laptops. First class objects reflect a more luxurious and pleasurable experience and is in parallel to how airlines market first class seats. Debris more densely populates the back of the plane, reflecting general cabin occupancy in flights and sales.  

Finally, the analogous brush stroke are indications of human activity. Most of the stroke acts as an ambiguous backdrop to the debris, while figures are shown at aisles at the back of the plane as well as areas where cabin classes are separated. This is to reflect the involuntary but inevitable social situation on long-haul flights, where passengers in economy line up to use the lavatories. The absence of figures at the front of the plane indicates the lesser number of passengers as well as dedicated lavatories in higher class cabins. The figures do not have clear facial detail to reflect Auge’s theory onnon-places, where people occupying non-places are cloaked with anonymity. The figural depictions of the passengers are more ambiguous and gestural compared to the more detailed, digitally-placed flight attendants. This is to reflect the fact that we often have a pre-conceived image of flight attendants (dressed neatly in their airline uniforms with a plastered smile), while the appearance of travellers are much more varied.

The overall elevational view of the cabin space is to emphasise the aspect of repetition of the airplane cabin. It attempts to combine the perspectival experience of the space and the plan view we see when selecting seats on a website. The choice to show the front elevational view instead of a view of seat backs, which we experience mostly during a flight is intentional. It showcases repitition in the generic non-place airplane cabin, while also allowing me to depict how passengers occupy the space and place-make in their own way. This drawing is thus my attempt at mediating between non-place and place, generic and individual, clean and messy, standardised and organic, and the digital and the analog.

Urban
Analog Studio

Prof. Mark Raymond
, Soumya Dasgupta
Apr, 2021

As part of the Analog Studio series of work, students created a series of drawings  to enhance our awareness of spatiality, architectural sensibility, and personal history. The six drawings included a one word title prompt, sequentially portrait, assembly, personal room, common room, urban, and landscape. 


I grew up in two cities – Taipei and Toronto. Initially my first instinct was to gravitate toward depicting Toronto. This is partly because it is fresh in my mind, as I lived there the past 5 years, but it is also because I went through my undergraduate degree and gained spatial knowledge there, which made me much more spatially aware of the city when compared to my hometown. One of the most prominent impressions I have of Toronto is the streetcar system. While Toronto has a subway line, the city is too spread out for the subway system to effectively work, which makes the streetcar the most important public transit system in Toronto.

The streetcars have prominent existence on the urban soundscape, even when walking on the streets of Toronto. The sound of the streetcar wheels grinding against the rails, the dings to indicate stops, and the sparks sometimes caused by the cables are all familiar sounds in Toronto. The streetcars also establish themselves visually. Streetcars take up an entire lane on the streets, while the skyscape of Toronto is covered in interweaving streetcar cables. This aspect of streetcar cables distorting the sky is what I wanted to focus on. The denser the cable lines and the heavier the distortion, the busier the area is, as more streetcars pass by the area. This led to my decision in including an aspect of sewing into the drawing. Similar to how the streetcar cables physically draw connections in the city fabric, the drawing would sew invisible connections together.

With a depiction of Toronto developed, I went back to analyse why I had a harder time depicting my hometown, Taipei. I contribute that mainly to the fact that I started my architectural education in Toronto, and I was less aware of spatial qualities prior to that. My years in Taipei were heavily centered around education, where most of my days are spent commuting between school and back home. In this busy schedule, a small relief would be the time in between walking from school to home, where I pass by a few streets that can be categorised as night markets. I remember vividly the messiness and visual clutter of these streets: Commercial store signs trying to out-compete each other with vibrant colours, the crowdedness of people, and the compressed space of commercial verandas. As I looked back into memory, it became clear to me that visual vibrancy and clutter is my main impression of Taipei.

I then moved to depict Shida Street in Taipei, a street by National Taiwan Normal University and is vibrant in street vendors, eatery, and apparel during the night. To emphasise the verandas, a typical archetype in the Taipei streetscape to improve the pedestrian experience in the rainy climate of Taipei, I depicted the Taipei streetscape by stacking a street elevation view, creating a blend between a plan and elevation. Scooters, a common element among Taipei and marks the main experiential difference between Taipei and Toronto for me, are parked under the verandas, while the calligraphic brushstroke marks human movement, much like my previous works.

With discussion and feedback with Professor Raymond, I decided to move on by combining my two urban experiences together into one drawing instead of only choosing to depict one. This choice is to reflect an autobiographical experience, where both Taipei and Toronto have important influences on my growth. I decided to depict the streetscape created by storefronts for both cities, with varying projection angles, and to physically connect to the two cities together by sewing.

While the streetscape of Taipei is a blend between a street elevation and a plan to emphasise the repitition of veranda bays, Toronto’s streetscape (namely Queen Street) is shown as a typical elevational view of storefronts. This choice is to reflect the experience of the Toronto streetscape when one is on a streetcar, where architectural details become less noticeable and the only remaining visual element is signage. As commercial signage is a common element for the two cities, they are highlighted with watercolours lightly, where it becomes apparent that the density of stores on a street in Toronto is much sparser than that of Taipei where the watercolour signages become murkier with an abundance of colours blending. Finally, the act of sewing starts to analyse the commercial activities of the two city streets: Red thread connecting points of eatery, green locations of apparel, dark blue as bookstores, pink as academic, and light blue as medical locations. This interweaving of threads starts to visually showcase experiential and commercial activity differences between the two cities, where stores are denser in Taipei and have a wider variety of store types, where Queen street in Toronto has more generous storefronts with an emphasis on apparel stores.