Trajectory • Punctum. An Exercise in Drawing Research

Doctoral research is often described as a trajectory. It unfolds through time, across readings, conversations, drawings, references, hesitations, revisions, and unexpected returns. Yet while a PhD is commonly narrated as a coherent progression, it is rarely experienced as such. From within, research tends to appear discontinuous, dispersed across parallel lines of inquiry, constantly shifting between scales, methods, and moments of concentration. One of the central difficulties of doctoral work lies precisely here: while inhabiting the process, it becomes difficult to perceive its structure. Writing partially resolves this condition. It organises, orders, and stabilises research into narrative form. However, coherence often arrives before the work itself has fully clarified its internal logic. In this sense, writing may conceal as much as it reveals. The workshop Trajectory • Punctum, developed within the framework of the CA²RE conference, emerged from the desire to explore another possibility: drawing as a way of reconstructing the trajectory of a research while keeping its internal tensions and movements visible.

The workshop approached drawing as an operative and interpretative act. Participants were invited to engage with their research through movements, repetitions, ruptures, and moments of intensity, allowing the work to appear temporarily as a drawn configuration. The objective was never to summarise a PhD in graphic form. What mattered instead was the possibility of rendering its internal structure momentarily legible through a ‘portrait’ capable of holding together movement and concentration. Thus, the notion of trajectory was central to the workshop. A trajectory exceeds the idea of a timeline or a chronological account of events. It unfolds as a field of movements: deviations, accelerations, interruptions, returns, and transformations. Architectural drawing has long offered tools to engage with such conditions. In works concerned with movement and perception, drawing often approaches a reconstruction of spatial experience itself. Movement, once translated into drawing, becomes observable as a sequence of relations, intensities, and transformations distributed across a field.

This condition also suggests a broader shift in the role of drawing itself. Drawing gradually moves away from the passive recording of something already given and becomes an active process of constructing relations. Robin Evans described this condition with particular clarity when discussing architectural projection. What passes through drawing is never transferred neutrally from one form into another; it undergoes transformation (Evans 1997). Projection produces displacement, reorganisation, and reinterpretation. Thought changes while being drawn. This understanding of drawing became fundamental for the workshop. Mapping a research trajectory did not mean documenting every component of a PhD. Instead, participants were asked to construct a readable field in which certain relations could emerge. Through drawing, research could be approached as a configuration rather than as an accumulation of information. Selectivity became essential. Reduction, emphasis, displacement, and repetition all contributed to the formation of a portrait capable of revealing how the work moved internally.

One of the most interesting aspects emerging during the workshop concerned the gradual transformation of the drawings themselves. Many participants initially approached the exercise through descriptive diagrams or chronological schemes. As the work progressed, however, the drawings slowly shifted towards more synthetic and concentrated configurations. Certain fragments, gestures, recurring forms, or tensions began organising the field unexpectedly. The exercise therefore did more than visualise trajectories already known in advance. Through the act of drawing, participants often discovered structures that had previously remained implicit within the research process itself.

Yet trajectories alone were not sufficient. Within every research process there are moments that acquire a particular intensity: a fragment, a detail, a sudden shift, a recurring obsession, a discovery capable of reorganising everything around it. Roland Barthes described something similar through the notion of “punctum” in Camera Lucida (1980): a point within an image that interrupts continuity and suddenly brings an entire field into focus. Unlike the studium, which belongs to the broader cultural structure of meaning, the punctum condenses intensity. It punctures the flow of the image and renders it newly legible. Within architectural discourse, Marco Frascari’s reflections on the detail intensely resonate with this idea. Details are never merely small technical components subordinated to the whole. They operate as sites where architecture thinks and where meaning concentrates (Frascari 1984). A fragment may carry the logic of an entire work. This relation between fragment and whole became particularly relevant within the workshop itself. Many participants discovered that apparently marginal aspects of their research—a recurring reference, a small drawing, a spatial condition, a methodological hesitation—eventually acted as organising principles for the entire trajectory. What initially appeared secondary gradually acquired density through repetition and proximity. Certain details became capable of revealing the structure of the work more effectively than comprehensive overviews.

During the workshop, the relation between trajectory and punctum therefore became an operative framework rather than a purely theoretical distinction. Participants first drew their PhD as a trajectory: a selective field of relations emerging through lines, clusters, layered fields, fragments, notes, or recurring graphic gestures. What mattered was the capacity of the drawing to reveal how the research moved. A second step focused on identifying one or several puncta within this field: moments where the trajectory changed direction or intensified. These points gradually reorganised the drawings from within. Interestingly, they rarely corresponded to official moments in the PhD process such as chapter completions or methodological shifts. More often, they emerged through apparently marginal discoveries, unresolved tensions, recurring images, or persistent questions that continued structuring the work beneath its formal organisation. Participants then were then asked to produce a final condensed drawing capable of standing on its own. These drawings occupied an ambiguous territory between notation, projection, mapping, and portrait. In several cases, they moved away from explanatory diagrams altogether, approaching instead forms of graphic concentration where trajectories and puncta coexisted within a single image.

A central aspect of this process concerned the role of the hand. Drawing externalised thought while simultaneously constructing it through movement, pressure, hesitation, repetition, and insistence. The hand functioned both as an instrument of distance and as a medium of proximity. Researchers could step slightly outside the flow of their work while remaining physically engaged with it. This embodied dimension of drawing recalls Frascari’s reflections on architectural embodiment (Frascari 2011), together with broader considerations on making and perception developed by authors such as Juhani Pallasmaa (2009) and Tim Ingold (2013). Understanding emerges through contact, adjustment, and physical engagement as much as through conceptual reflection. Several participants described how drawing slowed down the research process enough for latent relations to become visible. Others noted that aspects previously considered secondary unexpectedly emerged as structuring elements once translated into graphic form. The exercise therefore operated as a temporary suspension of the ‘linear movement’ of the PhD, creating a moment in which the research could be observed from a slightly displaced position.

The workshop concluded with an instant exhibition and collective discussion. The drawings were displayed as provisional operative images through which research trajectories could be collectively re-read and discussed. What emerged from this setting was not only the singularity of each project, but also the diversity of ways in which research can be mapped, condensed, and repositioned through drawing. Ultimately, the portraits produced through this process did not attempt to explain the PhD. They made it visible differently. The drawings became devices through which researchers could recognise what actually structured the work: where it moved, where it gathered, where meaning intensified, and where the trajectory itself had already begun suggesting directions not yet fully articulated in writing.