Architecture in Drawing


Riet Eeckhout is an architect and Associate Professor at the Faculty of Architecture, KU Leuven, Belgium. Her research in Drawing Architecture explores the critical and generative potential of drawing beyond representation, positioning it as an epistemic and operative mode within architectural practice. She exhibits, lectures, and publishes internationally on drawing as a form of architectural research.

In 2018, she co-initiated the ongoing Drawing Architecture Collective with Arnaud Hendrickx, bringing together internationally recognised architects for a series of conversations centred on drawing as a core architectural practice. These were published in Drawing Architecture: Conversations on Contemporary Practice (Lund Humphries, 2022; eds. Dorrian, Eeckhout, Hendrickx). The collective’s work also informed AD Radical Architectural Drawing (vol. 92, 2022), edited by Neil Spiller, and more recently AD Reimagining Architectural Drawing: Print and Process (vol. 95.3, 2025), guest-edited by Dorrian, Eeckhout and Hendrickx.

Her drawings have been exhibited internationally, including at the Venice Biennale; La Galerie d’Architecture, Paris; the Tchoban Foundation and the Museum of Architectural Drawing, Berlin; the Architekturmuseum der TU Berlin; the Design Centre UQAM, Montreal; Art Omi: Architecture; and A83 Gallery, New York.

In 2014, she concluded a PhD titled ‘Process Drawing’ under Dr. Martyn Hook within the invitational Practice based Research program at RMIT University (Melbourne), led by Leon van Schaik.

Contact:     riet.eeckhout@kuleuven.be            Instagram https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6382-5638

https://www.drawingmatter.org/drawings/sketchbooks/drawing-out-gehry/

  • exhibitions:

The Sixth Somewhat Annual Meeting

A83 Gallery and printmaker, New York (Soho)
February 14 – March 21, 2025
https://www.a83.site/

A83 presents "The Sixth Somewhat Annual Meeting,” an exhibition that serves as a spatial setting to display and reflect on the material by-products of encounters between intensely mediated architectural drawing practices and printed objects.

The exhibition features 16 new or re-imagined works by Laura Allen, Bryan Cantley, Nat Chard, Peter Cook, Mark Dorrian, Riet Eeckhout, Adrian Hawker, Arnaud Hendrickx, Perry Kulper, CJ Lim, Shaun Murray, Owen Nichols, Mark Smout, Neil Spiller, Natalija Subotincic, Michael Webb, Mark West, and Michael Young.

Curated within a scenography by Clara Syme and Arnaud Hendrickx, the exhibition invites visitors to explore the processes underpinning these works. An aluminum hanging system presents the 16 individual contributions, while a central table showcases artefacts, test prints, and archival material that trace the layered journeys of their creation. Complementing this, a dedicated room highlights Records of The Sixth Somewhat Annual Meeting, a limited-edition folio serving as both an exhibition catalogue and a collectible.

Since 2019, this collective of architects has convened somewhat regularly to discuss their ongoing drawing production, with the meetings serving as a forum for shared reflection and critical interrogation of their images in development. Through collaboration with A83 and engagement with the John Nichols Printmakers and Publishers Collection held within the archive at 83 Grand Street, the conversations expanded to explore shared questions of materiality (the archive of printed objects), medium (fine art printmaking techniques), and mediatedness (the affordances of a medium).

As drawings evolve through collective discussions, the appropriation of printmaking techniques, and engagement with the archive, the exhibition uncovers methods for activating an archive, enabling non-normative readings of printed objects, and exploring the cross-medial relationships born from media transformations. It also brings to the surface the complexities of distributed authorship and dependencies, revealing the interconnected and evolving nature of architectural artefacts. In this way, The Sixth Somewhat Annual Meeting is more than an exhibition—it is a celebration of architectural drawing as a dynamic, collaborative, and ever-transformative practice. (Text by Arnaud Hendrickx)

Autour du dessin | Drawing Conversations

Design Centre Montreal, Canada
15 September - 6 November 2022
https://centrededesign.com/drawing-conversations-autour-du-dessin/

On Representation and its Investigation | Pratiques de la représentation, pratiques de conversations
Curated by Carole Levesque and Thomas-Bernard

Drawing Conversations is an invitation to talk about drawing, through drawing. Presented at UQAM’s Design Centre, this exhibition brings together the work of 16 architects and academics in an exchange on contemporary drawing practices in architecture. The exhibition leads us to consider drawing beyond its qualities as a graphic object to glimpse the open conversation it sets up, a dialogue that is as much individual (with oneself as a practitioner) as it is collective (with other drawings, people and practices).

Single-Handedly: Contemporary Architects Draw by Hand
Art Omi, Newmark Gallery, Ghent, New York (USA)
co-curated by Warren James, Director, Art Omi: Architecture; and Nalina Moses.
January 11 – March 1, 2020

Drawing Out Gehry V (2019)

Single-Handedly collects original drawings from a group of accomplished contemporary architects who, in an industry dominated by digital technologies, continue to work by hand. Radically diverse in scale, materials, technique, subject, and spirit, these works overturn preconceived notions of what an architectural drawing is like. Some are dreamy, fiery and avant-garde, and others pragmatic, reductive and nostalgic. Deeply informed, but nonetheless unconstrained, by traditional architectural drafting techniques, these renderings exploit an unparallelled formal freedom. Each one contains its own world and tells its own story, rooted in personal imagination. This exhibit gives vibrant testimony to the still-vital craft of hand drawing in architecture. This exhibition is co-curated by Warren James, Director, Art Omi: Architecture; and Nalina Moses. Exhibiting Architects Architettura Matassoni, Apologue, Andrew Burdick, Anik Pearson, Anneke Vervoort, Aric Lasher, Ashwin Patel, Bishakh Som, Brad Cloepfil, Preston Scott Cohen, Brian MacKay-Lyons, Bruna Canepa, Chris Dove, Claudio Schneider, Dayton Eugene Egger, Denis Andernach, Eu Jin Lim, Frank Escher, Joyce Rosner, Karolina Kawiaka, Katie Shima, Lars Steffenson, Liesbeth van der Pol, Liz Swanson, Marie-José Van Hee, Nataliya Eliseeva, Pablo Castro, Peter Wilson, Richard Griswold, Rick Gooding, Riet Eeckhout, Sam Picardal, Stefan Davidovici, Tiffany Lin, Tom Ngo, Wendy Evans Joseph, Fernanda Canales, Anna Herringer, Jovi Cruces, Surambika Pradhan, Iza Iacinschi, Jim Taylor and Anne Ma.

EXPERIMENTAL DIAGRAMMING - Between Spatial Figuration and Abstraction
Architekturmuseum der TU Berlin, Germany

Curated and organised by Lidia Gasperoni and Sarah Gretsch of the Department of Architectural Theory with Anna Hougaard. The exhibition runs from 13th December 2019 to 13th February, 2020

Exhibition manifesto : Over the last decades, the diagram has developed into a constitutive, generative medium for architectural design and has thus become an everyday word in architectural design. As a visual medium, it allows a generative translation of perceived configurations in the thinking process of architecture and vice versa. But today, in the everyday use of this word, this generative meaning of the diagram has almost disappeared and the diagram is gradually serving to produce architectural forms. The exhibition presents experimental uses of diagrams that show their performative and transformative essence.

WORKS+WORDS 2019 Biennale in Artistic Research in Architecture, Copenhagen, Denmark.

Exhibition: November 28th 2019 to January 19th 2020. KADK The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts WORKS+WORDS 2019 present artistic research within the field of architecture in Europe. Artistic research aims at developing new ground in the field of architecture and is characterised by combining the making of works with reflections in words. Artistic research is defined as an integrated part of an artistic process, which leads to a public accessible work and is accompanied by intellectual reflection on as well the process itself as the presentation of the finished work. WORKS+WORDS 2019, Biennale in Artistic Research in Architecture operates with three criteria for artistic research within the field of architecture, as defined by KADK: Clarity, Density, Depth.

Selected Exhibitions

  • Tchoban Foundation, Museum of architectural drawing, Opening Lines: Sketchbooks of Ten Modern Architects (Berlin), Drawing Out Gehry II (2018)

    The sketchbooks represented are the work of Hans Poelzig, Le Corbusier, Alberto Ponis,                      Adolfo Natalini/Superstudio, Álvaro Siza, Tony Fretton, Marie-José Van Hee, Peter Märkli,                    Níall McLaughlin and Riet Eeckhout.

  • UCL, Disegno2018, Tournai, Belgium (Jan 2018) The space between his head and his two hands

  • DeSingel Arts Campus, Flanders Architecture Institute, Antwerp, Belgium (2017) Drawing Out Gehry I

  • Darc Space Gallery, Dublin, Ireland (2017) The Marconi Drawings

  • Venice Architecture Biennale 2014, Time Space Existence, Venice, Italy (2014) The Venice drawings

  • COAC, The chamber of Architects of Catalonia, Barcelona, Spain (2014) The space between his head and his two hands

  • Galerie d’ Architecture, Paris, France (2013) The Gate Drawings