As architectural designers, we strive to represent spaces that interest us and fail to represent those that do not. These are stories we've told and tell ourselves, and that perhaps we ought to tell differently. This project attempts using architecture to tell other stories of seemingly familiar places, employing uniquely architectural tools of representation (for example, section cuts, break lines, orthographic projection, material coding, cross referencing, scale) in three drawings to make visible qualities, limits, and potentials of what we consider to be familiar space.

By encountering these places as as-builts with found conditions to be surveyed and verified in field, the project hones in on qualities of place that can be recorded through architectural tools but often are overlooked in conventional academic and professional practice. Just as as-builts and surveys conventionally inform the transition between old and new constructions, the intention of this project is to reveal possible transitions between old and new ideas of place.

Moving up in in scale, these three drawings depict the on-ramp to I-580 in West Oakland, where the author lives; the Stones Oil Rig, operated by Shell in the US Gulf of Mexico and currently the deepest deep-sea oil and gas project in the world; and the planet Earth. In each drawing, an unconventional application of the conventional section cut produces figural expressions of poche (blocks, linear angles, mirrored hemispheric curves) that defamiliarize the subjects.