Online text version available at actinmess.com/donquixote-sitedrawing.pdf
Collaboration with Michael Caplan is a technological methodology for spatial design. The practice is based on a GPS receiver fixed to a telescopic stick tracking the movement of the participant within a site. Like a pen on a paper, the movements are recorded in 3 dimmensions to be able to design the spatial project with centimeter accuracy. Digital design is based solely on a simulation created by satellite views, cadastral plans or other data extraction. By performing the design in situ, the model is accurate and site specific, canceling the need for a simulation. The practice has been influenced by the ethics of ecovillages: a critical approach to tools, an ecological locality and an embodied human-scale design. Therefore, the tool has been tested back within ecovillages to conduct landscaping, interior design or small scale architecture design with their residents. What is presented is both the performance of drawing and the digital documents produced from this moment in different contexts playing with the normative aesthetic of architectural drawing. The participant, the weather, the amount of satellites received, the site specificity and the aim of the drawing are all components manifested within the drawing. Using GPS for in-situ architecture in communities engages in a double subversion. First, it subverts the extra-planetary scale of GNSS by using a system designed for synoptic vision to create artifacts that are only legible relative to the context they are created in. Second, it subverts the destructive origins of satellite navigation -marking locations for precision guided weaponry by using the technology to create imagined futures, rather than destroy the existing one.