Critic|all is an initiative lead by the Architectural Design Department of Madrid ETSAM–UPM. The sixth edition of this peer-reviewed conference is organized in collaboration with the Department of Architecture and Design of the Politecnico di Torino. This research event aims to bring together both young and established scholars from every discipline dealing with architectural thought, including approaches from history, historiography, theory or design.
The CfP proposes to turn our attention to visual research methods, and more specifically towards drawing, as a basic instrument for the construction of architecture culture and theory, therefore recognizing the potential of any graphic document as beholder of a specific knowledge. For that reason, we forward the term grapho-logics as the title for the Conference, thus suggesting the urgency to put the visual-graphical information back at the core of architectural criticism, either as a source, as a tool or as a result of critical research.
grapho-logics
deepening into architecture’s visual research methods
The growing fascination about visuality is a global trend that has no signs of slowing down in a context in which images are consumed and replaced at the same frenetic speed at which they are produced. The recent impact of AI on this continuous flow only reinforces it and, at the same time, presents the phenomenon as an inevitable fact, with hardly any mechanisms for critical evaluation of all this visual material. The general shift from text to images could be read as withdrawal from criticality towards sheer visuality, contributing to generate an implied context of unspoken words and concepts that nevertheless determines research agendas.
Almost forty years have passed since Robin Evans’ revindication of the distinctive power of drawings as a ‘medium’. According to Evans, drawings work as translators between architectural ideas and their built result, even at the price of needing to be considered as an autonomous and sometimes contradictory outcome of the architect’s work. The problems of translation multiply when the visual and other sensorial information embedded in drawing and architecture are processed by language, the primal critical tool. The image that opened Evans’ famous 1986 article, a photograph of Jasper Jones’ sculpture The Critic Sees (1961), stresses such problems by suggesting the ironical distortion of vision produced by linguistic anxiety. Critical vision, represented by plastic glasses, is ultimately blinded by words: two gesticulating mouths replace the eyes behind the glasses, the critic’s speech replaces observation.
Observation together with the possibility of evaluating and processing visual information, are frequently inhibited by the need to verbalize, and thus to define, classify, categorize, also in architecture. The tendency, accelerated by communication technology and media since the 1960s, can be exemplified by the compulsive tagging of architectural forms, graphics and images in social media and the consequent abortion of critical analysis. In this context, it is urgent to put the visual-graphical information back at the core of architectural criticism, either as a source, as a tool or as a result of critical research.
Grapho-logics claims the power of graphical, and more generally visual materials to embed and unveil not only the hidden subjectivities and tacit features of architecture (similar to the ones the science of graphology investigates) but also the logics of design, its rational split into parts and processes, the kind of objectivation that allows explicit communication and the advancement of collective knowledge.
The 6th edition of the Critic|all Conference welcomes contributions that critically address the logics underlying the graphic material that revolves around architecture, either through the study of original drawings or the production of new ones that shed light on a work, specific project, building or author.

Organizing committee: Silvia Colmenares (ETSAM-UPM), Giovanni Corbellini (PoliTO), Mariacristina D’Oria (UniTS), Saskia Gribling (PoliTO), Sergio Martín Blas (ETSAM-UPM)