The Unending Square has entered the first voting stage of the One Drawing Challenge Competition by Architizer, which would last from 26th August to 6th Sept 2019.

To visit The Unending Square over the One Drawing Challenge: https://bit.ly/2NzCpqu
The viewer could vote for multiple entries and once per drawing per day.
Top 100 voted work will go into stage 2 to be judged by the jury panel.

I was encouraged by multiple university's professors in participating in this competition. During the registration, the voting wasn’t written as part of the judging process. Anyway, I think the good thing about the current year format is that all the 484 global entries are all uploaded and available for all to see. As a student, I would appreciate the ability to experience and explore all the singular yet powerful architectural drawings and attempt to learn and understand the logic behind all the individual drawing.

I guess everyone would like to see how far this project and the drawing could go, to see when the unending project would eventually end. I do think it’s worth it to find out the limit of exposure and reach this project has, from an academic, institutional and individual point of view.

I could recall back then I was often asked to push my limit into creating a design that would score as high as possible under the three metric of “Newness, Uniqueness, and Otherness”.

The questions I asked myself during the construct of this representational material during my study year are:

-What is the limit of a single architectural drawing could do?

-To what extent should an idea be reduced to be within the comprehension of the viewer? Who is the viewer? Does it really matter?

-Which aspect of a design illustration should be compromised? Abstraction? Shock value? Aesthetic? Composition? Elements? Content? Clarity? Narration? Impression? Visibility?

-How much should a drawing be up for open interpretation?

-Why does human innately avoid incomprehension and do not necessarily see the beauty of the unknown/undefined element?

-How do we combat the increasingly short attention span of the upcoming generation? Is that an issue or that itself would become the human context of the digital age? What are their consequences?

-How does one possibly consolidate work of countless hours, weeks, months, year time to be contained among panels and 10-15minutes time of presentation? How much does it matter on how the audience perceives your work?

-Why are human obsessed in creating alienating language and jargon that creates exclusivity and elitism disguised in the name of knowledge creation?

-How much should a student’s decision making in work creation be justified and affected by the academic context that one sits in? I suppose it should be all okay as the general intention of a student and an institution is to gain exposure to maximize potential monetary gains, right? What would be the side effect if all school and all student were to focus entirely on that?

My questions about social media content:

-Why do we continue to support the many parties that glorify visual drawing representation that much that primarily only serving their agendas?

-Perhaps it is only contextual to human to design in a way that maximizes viewing pleasure? or is it not?

-“Louder! Shinier! Tastier!” What is the repercussion of us continue placing the importance of visual representational over actual content-making?

-How do we illustrate and express the value of the other equally important or pressing metrics beyond visual pleasure?

-How do we make actual content sells?

-How do we avoid misleading people especially the younger generation into thinking that fame and the arbitrary number of likes/followers equals to mastery?

-How much faith should we have that the viewer would have their individual critical thinking to assess content seen online without being affected by the various social “evidence” and fully relying on peer validations?

-why do we continue to give power to such volatile and subjective elements to create permanent elements that would have continued and lasting effect and impact? Especially in this current world with ever-changing of perceptions and definitions (highly manipulable) with the increasingly overwhelming power that we’ve given to the people over the architect/designer?

For more information of the competition or to the public gallery of the One Drawing Challenge, check out https://onedrawingchallenge.secure-platform.com/a/gallery?roundId=1

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