Drawing beyond ruins: Speculative spatial practices in contested spaces

This paper investigates the potential of architectural drawing as a speculative and political practice in cities marked by conflict, displacement and spatial erasure. Moving beyond conventional understandings of drawing as a representational tool, it argues that drawing can serve as a mode of spatial resistance and reimagination – particularly in contexts where architecture’s material agency is interrupted. Focusing on Lebbeus Woods’s Sarajevo Project (1993), developed during the siege of Sarajevo, the paper examines how visual techniques such as fragmentation, layering and sequential narration enable drawing to function as a conceptual reconstruction of space. Extending this analysis, the paper considers how contemporary practices echo Woods’s methods in resisting spatial violence through visual means. The argument culminates in a reflection on my own creative practice: a collage-based drawing situated in the divided city of Nicosia, Cyprus. Here, drawing becomes a means of engaging with inaccessible terrain through speculative intervention. In doing so, it contributes to architectural discourses that grapple with the politics of form and space in conflict-affected geographies.