Richard Mapes

Working Drawing is an active reflection on Richard’s experience as an architectural designer, in which he questions where the role of storytelling is most clearly accessed in buildings. The principal medium of the architect is the drawing. It serves as the guide for how materials are to be assembled. But drawings, as works art in their own right, do not always present sets of information that are necessary for construction.

Sometimes, the information presented in a drawing such as a portrait is not quantifiable. In this case, the information presented is purely aesthetic rather than organizational. So where, in the architect’s drawing, does beauty present itself? Does the way an architect works influence the kinds of beauty we may behold in the final product called a building? Professionally speaking it’s somewhat absurd to wonder if an architect may produce construction documents with different forms of representation: painting, sculpting, or exposing photosensitive emulsions to light. But if under the suspension of belief we were to demand that the architect work in a different way, what kinds of stories could we begin to build? A building built with the information possessed by an impressionist building would likely not result in the Romanesque organization which the Kittredge Building currently possesses. Embracing unending possibilities,

Working Drawings reimagines the Kittredge Building as traditional drawings, impressionist paintings, and a mosaic work of art to speculate on what other possible forms of building we have yet to explore, and the living beings – both human and non-human – for whom different ways of working may being to make room.

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About the Artist:

Richard is a mixed-reality installation (or spatial) artist whose work uses cutting edge, real-time tools to focus on finding touch points between building and art practices. Through projection mapping, animation and interactive environment design, his work uses teal-time tools to reframe the designed world as a collection of portrait backdrops, which have the capacity to move lithely with culture and identity. Richard has been recognized with thesis prizes for his work in both the Masters of Architecture and Master of Science in Design Theory and Pedagogy at SCI-Arc for his continuing curiosity in the representation of queerness and personal experience in shared designed environments.

He has a cumulative ten years of design experience in architecture and allied art practices, has served as a Fulbright research Fellow, has served as faculty at SCI-Arc, worked with the renowned artist Analia Saban on a winning proposal for a large scale public art installation in Century City (CA), and is the founder of his own experimental design practice called Brain Bath.

Richard is currently practicing in Denver, Colorado and is exploring his art practice in the context of immersive and interactive installations in public art, and mixed reality stage design in theater. He has recently worked as an exhibition designer and curator with SCI-Arc as assistant to the Graduate Thesis Coordinator and organizer of the summer program “Space Lab,” an immersive media artist for theatrical productions with Inner City Arts in Los Angeles, and a projection and animation designer with the Denver Theatre District.

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