Edited by Francesca Hughes, with an interview with Mary Beard and essays by Noam Andrews and David Edgerton

This collection of 60 large drawings produced over five years by AA Diploma 15 addresses the construction of context by architecture for its own very particular purposes.

No architectural category is more fickle or more artificial than ‘context’. A self-declared ‘render-free zone’, the unit’s interrogations of architecture’s seminal sites (antiquity, technology, the future and its proxies) examine the role of figuration and the exclusion of indeterminacy in the always already mediated question of context. Through the quiet business of counting, these line drawings – against the double ascendancy of parametricisation and the glossy rendered perspective – question architecture’s ambivalent relations to the artifice it installs between itself and the outside world.