Book Launch: Bodies and Space in Architectural Drawing

Celebrate the official launch of Bodies and Space in Architectural Drawing: Line, Movement, Scale by Marian Macken and Carl Douglas.
About this Event

5.30pm doors and drinks
6pm speeches

Objectspace, Ockham Gallery, Ground Floor
13 Rose Road, Ponsonby

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Envisioning architectural drawing as a full-scale, bodily, and spatial practice, Bodies and Space in Architectural Drawing explores how architects imagine, perceive, and shape space through drawing, positioning the body not just as a subject but as an active medium for design. It advocates for full-scale, performative drawing methods that expand the boundaries of architectural practice. Drawings are inhabited, present, and embodied – redefining how space is measured, represented, and understood.

This book reinstates drawing as a spatial, temporal, and bodily act. It reframes the role of scaled artefacts – models, maps, and drawings – as intermediaries that mobilise architectural thinking. Rather than treating the body as a static reference point, it explores how moving, thinking bodies generate and reside within drawings.

Published by Bloomsbury Publishing.

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Marian Macken is Associate Professor in Te Pare School of Architecture and Planning, Waipapa Taumata Rau University of Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand. Her creative practice research and writing focus on architectural drawing, time and architecture and design pedagogy. Her books include Binding Space: The Book as Spatial Practice, published as part of the Routledge Design Research in Architecture series, and Our Concealed Ballast.

Carl Douglas is Senior Lecturer in the School of Art and Design at Te Wānanga Aronui o Tāmaki Makau Rau Auckland University of Technology, Aotearoa New Zealand. His research turns on architectural drawing and imaging; material imagination; and speculative design. He has published on scale, lidar scanning, and the informal street architecture of the Paris Commune. He recently co-edited Fixing, issue 21 of Interstices: Journal of Architecture and Related Arts on practices of repair, maintenance and care.

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This event is presented in partnership between Objectspace and Te Kāhui Whaihanga New Zealand Institute of Architects Auckland Branch, as part of the 2026 Aotearoa Festival of Architecture.