ENCOUNTERING ECHOES: ECHOING ENCOUNTER



Following Rolf Hughes’ notion of exposition (2015) as the act of creating a field of encounter, this inaugural issue reframes exposition as a space of echoing—a resonance between the seen and unseen, the said and unsaid. To encounter is to come up against what resists assimilation—an idea, a material, a history, a theory, or another being. To echo is to let that encounter reverberate and transform. Between encountering and echoing lies an ethics of care, speculation, and reciprocity—a willingness to stay with what is incomplete, uncertain, or even misread.



In line with the Arts of the contact zone (Pratt 1991), encounters are never neutral; they unfold in zones of tension, translation, and transformation. Similarly, Studio Note treats encounter and echo as creative and critical forces that shape our practices, pedagogies, and therefore our identities. 



We invite contributions that explore encountering and echoing as speculative and performative acts of research. 


Studio Note Journal Nº 1 

 
Editors-in-Chief | Alphabetic Order:

Niloofar Amini
Gareth Jones
Jorge Valdovinos
Laura Yuile 


Associate Editors | Alphabetic Order:

Eman AlHabashneh 
Francesca Brunetti 
Ruehl Muller
Mohammed Ali Sharieff
Raynal Somiah
Yvan Tina
Zihong Yue


Typeset in: 
Editorial Team

Copy Editing: 
Editorial Team

Proof Reading: 
Editorial Team

Design: 
Editorial Team
Published by:
University for the Creative Arts | ICI

Publication location: 
Farnham, Surrey, UK
Xiamen, Fujian Province, China

Online publication date: 
Summer 2026 

ISSN: 2978-8080 (Print)
E-ISSN: 2978-8099 (Online)



studionote@uca.ac.uk
www.studionotejournal.org

            

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Two Overdrawings: Tracing Aldo Rossi
Cameron McEwan - c.mcewan@northumbria.ac.uk

I first encountered the Aldo Rossi in America catalogue (1979) during my PhD, around 2010. To understand Rossi, I started to redraw his drawings from the catalogue, which includes thirty drawings, an even number suggesting a rational choice. I have since repeatedly returned to the catalogue, always finding something new that I hadn't found before. I used the catalogue as a point of departure to trace Rossi’s drawings, redrawing them, understanding them, and transforming them. It’s my way of building a dialogue with Rossi’s ideas and projects. I call this method close-drawing after the text-based practice of ‘close-reading,’ which is both analytical and generative, and I transpose it to the spatial and material practice of drawing architecture (McEwan, 2024).
     One technique I use is overdrawing, and this Notecard comprises two drawings from that series. I use pencil on layout paper. I centre Rossi’s drawings on the page and trace an element from each, one after the other on the same page. On one hand, discrete elements and typologies are redrawn and formal-visual knowledge accumulates. On the other hand, the definition of discrete elements reduces with the gradual accumulation of objects, lines, and typologies. In Overdrawing No. 1 (Background Types), I study background elements such as horizon lines, ground lines, construction lines and various incongruous items appearing behind the focal object (Fig.1). In this drawing, what is normally background becomes the foreground. In Overdrawing No. 2 (Foreground Types), I study the frontal or focal element in each drawing (Fig.2). In this drawing, the focus of the original is reduced to the background by the multiplication of many elements.
     In the Overdrawing series, I am interested in how fabric is transformed into object and vice versa, how subsidiary elements become reversed or inversed in importance, and how close-drawing acts as a method of accumulation and affirmation that simultaneously produces negation and erasure, endowed with generative possibility.






1.
Rossi, A. (1979) Aldo Rossi in America: 1976–1979. Edited by P. Eisenman. MIT Press. 
2.
McEwan, C. (2024) Analogical City. punctum books.
Figure 1. McEwan, C. (n.d.). Overdrawing No. 1 (Background Types).

Figure 2. McEwan, C. (n.d.) Overdrawing No. 2 (Foreground Types).



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