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The Post Office
Kelly Bair & Kristy Balliet
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The Post Office is one in a set of four drawings exhibited in the 2016 Venice Biennale in the United States Pavilion. The drawing is dense with information, designed as an artifact to stand on its own as well as participate in a larger narrative about the relationship between existing and proposed buildings on the site. The tactic to divide the site into quadrants of communication was a way to parcel out the various chapters of the project’s story and partition an overwhelming quantity of visual information including program, geometry, and material. The worm’s-eye oblique, a shift from the frontal oblique view used for the other drawings, prioritizes the perspective of the interior, revealing deep volumetric cuts into an existing post office building and emphasizing the underlying geometry of their construction. The drawing flickers between an expression of exterior massing and a framing of in-between spaces. Architectural drawing standards such as notation, structural gridlines, and orthographic projection of the elevation were choreographed with nonstandard drawing techniques such as stereotomic construction lines, relational lines between parts, and contouring to reveal the formal depth of each volumetric cut relative to the existing elevation’s flatness.

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