NÍALL MCLAUGHLIN
A Recorded Lecture from FRAME CONCLAVE 2025 —
[AUTHORING 01: TO DRAW]
In this lecture, Níall McLaughlin talks about drawing and building as verbs, not nouns, arguing that their real purpose is not to produce perfect objects but to pull people together. Drawing from his own projects and collaborative drawing experiments, he makes a case for architecture as a social act that binds communities across time, especially as technology transforms the discipline.
The lecture series presents the full set of talks from the conclave. The published text is an edited transcript (adapted from spoken presentations) rather than a formal essay written by the author themselves. For complete documentation including visual material and video, please refer to the recording.
Edited Transcript
[01:43] What was extraordinary about today for me was that it featured expansive talks describing the fertility of everyday life and all its particulars through drawing. There was a contrast between those projects we saw this morning, which were spare templates that described absence, blockage, and loss through drawing, and the last presentation this afternoon, which was about spawning, expressive techno-optimism, also embodied through drawing.
For me, the fulcrum of the day was that moment when we had the two sign painters in Hanif Kureshi’s film. Referring to a choice of fonts between Arial and Helvetica, one of them said, “Arial,” because “When I have a choice of typing A-I-R or H-E-L, I find it easier to type H-E-L.” The other one was still holding on to the beauty of the painted sign, its durability, the colours, the way they worked with each other, and pleading that these signs were superior to the mechanically produced ones; but the thing he said as an aside was much more important.
He looked around and said, “I used to have 20 people working here.” I do not know how you all feel, but a shadow passed over me when I thought about that, because what technology can do to a sign painter, it can also do to an architect. We have to ask ourselves, at this point in history: what do we think we will be doing, and how can we resist or acquiesce to the way technology will fundamentally transform
our world?
thinkMATTER 