Latour and Yaneva further state that architects need to utilise different manners of
representation and materials in order to reconcile all the different demands targeted
at the design during the construction process. Drawings and models constitute no
immediate means of translating ideas into material reality, but rather serve as tools for
the architect to develop these ideas and to explore different options.^57 I agree with the
authors in that architectural drawings do not, as such, equal material realisation, as the
process of realisation involves many other factors besides the nature of the material,
the production method, the executors of the design and the various demands on the
material and labour, such as low price or hygienic standards.
The article by Latour and Yaneva is philosophical in its angle and they distance
themselves from architectural praxis fairly substantially. This fact is manifest in, for
example, their specific discussion on geometric projections as a way of representation.
In a real building project, architects use other channels of communication in addition
to their drawings, including work specifications, negotiation with other designers, the
client and the authorities, and overseeing the building project and attending meetings.
Moreover, some of the working drawings will be made by others. Architects extend
their influence on drawings made by others through their role as the coordinator of the
design process. While the present study is partly based on Aalto’s drawing documenta-
tion, his “other” actions become especially interesting from the perspective of analysing
how the architect manages to influence and redirect other actors’ objectives to better
align with those of his own.
Latour and Yaneva ask what the advantage of such a method of representation that
communicates a building as continuation of transformations could be. In their view,
such a method would erase the gap between the “subjective” and “objective”.^58 It would
also pay more attention to the material side of things, and the multidimensionality of
material would no longer be reduced to 3D models. Since architectural design covers a
vast spectrum of factors, which theory seldom succeeds in emcompassing, they propose
a new type of model: “We should finally be able to picture a building as a navigation
through a controversial datascape: as an animated series of projects, successful and
failing, as a changing and crisscrossing trajectory of unstable definitions and expertise,
of recalcitrant materials and building technologies, of flip-flopping users’ concerns and
communities’ appraisals. That is, we should finally be able to picture a building as a
moving modulator regulating different intensities of engagement, redirecting users’
attention, mixing and putting people together, concentrating flows of actors and dis-
tributing them so as to compose a productive force in time-space...Only by generating
earthly accounts of buildings and design processes, tracing pluralities of concrete enti-
ties in the specific spaces and times of their co-existence, instead of referring to abstract
57 Ibidem.
58 They argue that phenomenologists are upholding the Descartian notion of res extensa. Latour and Yaneva 2008,
pp. 82–84 and p. 86.