Includes bibliographical references and index.

"Architectural Drawings as Investigating Devices explores how the changing modes of representation in architecture and urbanism relate to the transformation of how the addressees of architecture and urbanism are conceived. The book diagnoses the dominant epistemological debates in architecture and urbanism during 20th and 21st centuries, tracing their transformations from Le Corbusier and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's preference for perspective representation, to the diagrams of Team 10 architects, to the critiques of functionalism, and the upgrade of the artefactual value of architectural drawings in Aldo Rossi, John Hejduk, Peter Eisenman, and Oswald Mathias Ungers, and, finally, to the reinvention of architectural program through the event in Bernard Tschumi and the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA). Particular emphasis is placed on the spirit of truth and clarity in modernist architecture, the relationship between the individual and the community in post-war era architecture, the decodification of design process as syntactic analogy and the paradigm of autonomy in the 1970s & 1980s architecture, and the concern about the dynamic character of urban conditions, and the potentialities hidden in architectural program in the post-autonomy era. The book is based on extensive archival research in Canada, the USA and Europe, and will be of interest to architects, artists, researchers and students in architecture, architectural history, theory, cultural theory, philosophy and aesthetics"-- Provided by publisher.