Padraic Mittag-McNaught
Has a background in Sculpture & Printmaking from St. Olaf College (B.A. 2020), and is currently a Masters of Architecture I Candidate at Yale School of Architure (M.Arch I 2025). Through architecture, I explore ideas of urbanity, with an unwavering belief in the city.
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Instagram Preface: Drawing In Situ
Fall 2023
New Haven, CT
Drawing is the natural language of architecture… all language, to fulfill its object must be in
perfect harmony with the ideas of which it is to be the expression. Architecture, being
essentially simple, enemy of everything without use, of all affectation, the type of drawing
used must be free of every kind of difficulty, pretention and superfluity; then it will
contribute singularly to the speed and ease of studying it and to the development of
ideas...
J. N. L. Durand, Précis des Leçons d’Architecture vol. 1, 32
When building a house, the language of drawing becomes crude and haphazard.
This is a collection of job site drawings from the Yale School of Architecture’s 2023 Jim Vlock Building Project. They represent construction details, process diagrams, cut dimensions, and patterns to be resolved. They are coarse, out of scale, unrefined, and raw. Manufacturer graphics, material textures, and hand drawn lines create a synthetic composition where the surfaces on which the drawings are made share equal presence with the drawings themselves.
We often ask, ‘Who made it?’, ‘What is the medium?’, or ‘What does it show?’ On the job site, questions of authorship, viewership, and visual and tactile qualities are simply unimportant. These drawings are not precious; as Durand points out, they are free of “pretention and superfluity.” Like a house, they are constructions: lines overlaid in careful order, coming together to form a didactic tool. In this sense, these drawings are the residue of moments in space and time; artifacts from lessons on flooring, sheathing, and roofing; a physical manifestation of the transfer of knowledge.
Typically, drawings are displayed in frames. However, the drawings in this collection are drawn in situ. They get sprayed with insulation, wrapped by cladding, covered with cabinets, enclosed with flooring, buried in paint. They become encased within the very object they helped create. The following drawings were photographed before their entombment.