ABSTRACT
As instruments that reveal the imagination of construction, the architect’s drawings are intricately grounded on two critical underpinnings: the cultural context of design and the corporeal act of drawing. This idea is explored by contrasting the role of images as tools and the nature of mimetic images. Plato criticizes the utility of mimetic images as contrary to reasoning. However, he endorses images as devices to mediate between experience and intellect. In the medieval icon paintings of Christ, portrayed to attract the onlooker to enter the divine realm through imagination, images are employed as instruments stirring the onlooker’s imagination. In Chinese culture, similar kinds of figurative images are illustrated as methods to raise imagination, suggesting a meaning beyond that represented. The twelfth-century Chinese architectural drawings are contextually analyzed with twelfth-century Chinese architectural paintings to elaborate on how the imagination of construction is revealed through drawings and their details. Quite often, details such as mortise and tenon joints that are neglected in the paintings are meticulously arranged in the drawings to induce the observer’s imagination of the construction technique.
