This double issue of arq includes a number of papers first presented at a conference held in Nottingham in November 2005 which was hosted jointly by AHRA (the Architectural Humanities Research Association) and the School of the Built Environment at the University of Nottingham, in conjunction with the Nottingham-based Image Studies Network.

The theme for the event was set by Professor Marco Frascari, Director of the School of Architecture at Carleton University, Ottawa, and also a Leverhulme Visiting Professor at the University of Nottingham in 2005–06. Both ‘models’ and ‘drawings’ have been interpreted in a particular way by Frascari, who wrote in the event’s Call for Papers:

‘Nowadays, we know what kinds of drawings architects make. They have been codified by tradition, by profession and by legislation. Although this canonisation is a relatively recent event nevertheless it has reached a condition where innovation is almost impossible. The architect’s drawings have become “models” and generate “models” to be preserved in museums, magazines and archives. To challenge this idle condition it is necessary to question the imagination of construction and the construction of imagination and how these processes affect and effect the envisioning of architecture in absentia’.

The conference thus addressed relationships between drawings and buildings around four key themes: the tendency of architectural representations to become ‘models’ for imitation, following Frascari’s interpretation of that word; the claim of new imaging technologies to make visible what could be described as the previously unseen; the cognitive spatial implications of traditional imaging practices relative to CAD; and the critical potential of the architectural image.

Rethinking the teaching of materials and construction to reunite the intellect with the senses provided a stimulus for the design of a private house in Adelaide.

A series of residential extensions demonstrate the relationship between idea, detail and experience and enable reflections on how working drawings can choreograph inhabitation.

Since the Renaissance, descriptive geometry has become a generative architectural idea and a systematic representation of production. CAD’s precision is the apotheosis of this trajectory.

The rich, long history of scale as the imaginative inhabitation of a drawing provides a critique of the seductive but illusory exactness of ‘full scale’ representations in CAD.

A new means of representing architecture digitally, derived partly from historical techniques of quadratura and photogrammetry, is described and explained through words and diagrams.

Walter Benjamin’s notion of a distracted and de-focused architectural experience informs the author’s writing and spatial installation projects.

A study of Renaissance debates surrounding disegno reveals much about how twentieth-century design practices envisage the mutual relationship of imagination, drawing and design.

Drawings are often accorded intellectual status in architecture while models are associated with the material. A levitating model reappraises assumptions about materiality.

Interviews with leading UK architects suggest the continued relevance of traditional techniques in the age of CAD draughting and modelling systems.

How might flexible housing be achieved? ‘Determinate’ and ‘indeterminate’ approaches are examined using twentieth-century examples