Commissioned as part of a group asked to consider what codes mean to contemporary drawing, Another Victorian adopts an expanded notion of ‘drawing codes’ to include political, aesthetic, and representational codes found in planning and preservation documents. Literal codes that swirl around architecture and which are implemented through architectural drawings. Another Victorian considers how drawing historically salient features or elements intentionally ‘wrong’ might pervert entrenched regulatory codes, or how manipulating conventional drawing techniques can frustrate the legibility of an architectural form. Another Victorian begins as a re-drawing the SF Heritage Haas-Lilienthal House, a Queen Anne style Heritage House. However, it is not a copy, but rather incorporates alternative meanings of ‘drawing codes’ by imposing and manipulating current San Francisco planning or preservation codes onto the Haas Lilienthal House. Formal, spatial, and compositional manipulations to bay windows, porticos, dormers, gables, fenestration, stairs, and turrets pair with abstractions to common building materials like shingles, and uncommon effects like fat rolls, rubble stairs, and shaggy shingles.

Exhibited at Hubble Street Galleries, University of Michigan, and the University of Virginia.

“It should represent every known and unknown order of architecture; It should be so heavily plastered with ornament so as to conceal its theory of construction; It should be a restless, uncertain, frightful collection of details giving the effect of a nightmare about to explode.”
Gilette Burgess, bay area humorist and author.