This developed surface interior drawing is a record of an installation which was on display in the Marble Room at Slocum Hall, at Syracuse University School of Architecture, in the fall of 2020. The installation explored the ends of the design spectrum and questioned “when design is finished?” Multiple surfaces of the exhibition space – floor, wall and ceiling – were designed and re-finished with varying degrees of labor, design investment and consideration, resulting in an under-and-overdesigned room.

Leon Battista Alberti famously described beauty as “the adjustment of all parts proportionally so that one cannot add or subtract or change without impairing the harmony of the whole.” In other words, a project is complete and well-designed when nothing can be added or removed without disrupting its integrity. In an attempt to gain a deeper understanding of design and its process, this exhibition ignored ‘good design’ all together and instead devoted its attention to the extremes of the design spectrum: under-and-overdesign. While both limits have negative connotations and are active terms within our architectural jargon, they have never been investigated nor defined.

Overdesign reflects the moment the author has gone too far by producing an architecture that is unnecessarily complex, overdone and too often ostentatiously intellectual or ornamental. This hyper-specificity is not only highly controlled, but also restrictive to future modifications. Underdesign, on the other hand, gravitates towards an architecture which is dull, nonspecific and careless, if not decidedly lazy. The underdesigner doesn’t impose any perception on his audience, is anonymous, and opts for the easiest solution at all times. In contrast to its opposite, underdesign has the embedded potential to evolve over time. It’s flexible, cheap and unfinished.

In the interest of interpreting the diametrical extremes and their processes, each element was simultaneously designed in different gears to allow the extremes to exist side-by-side, cheek by jowl. The design process of the three surfaces was counterintuitively shortened and extended to achieve the desired opposite design limits. Underdesign was fast and intuitive, while overdesign was unhurried, convoluted, hyper specific and required continuous editing and optimization. Through this extreme value analysis, visitors of the exhibition were able to appraise the repercussions of the different design velocities applied throughout the room and hopefully evaluate for themselves the negative (and positive) implications of the ends of the design spectrum.

Through abstraction, the drawing doesn’t only illustrate quantitative key features of the room, but also renders its materiality through hatching and subdivisions. Additionally, the drawing captures time through color, as the black line work represents the existing condition of the exhibition space and the red lines, the installation’s additions and enhancements. As described by Robin Evans, the developed surface drawing seeks an illusion of flatness and fractures space into its respective surfaces. Through its augmented three-dimensionality, this developed surface interior drawing aims to disrupt this flatness and create a drawing/ model hybrid. While the design extremes exist concurrently within the surfaces of the room, the developed surface interior drawing displays the surfaces – floor, wall and ceiling – in tandem with each other.