This exhibition highlights exemplary projects from HCE 743: Experiential Sketching, a course led by architect and professor Nicholas Wickersham at North Dakota State University. The course explores how drawing, particularly through sketching, serves as a powerful tool for perceiving, experiencing, and communicating architectural space. Students were tasked with sketching both the interior and exterior of the Plains Art Museum, engaging deeply with its structure, environment, and unexpected viewpoints.
Through sketching, students transcend the limitations of representation, gaining a richer, more nuanced understanding of space. This process of seeing and drawing fosters discovery, transforming the building into a dynamic subject of study, that continuously reveals new insights.
Students were required to create a series of sketches tied to specific perspectives within the museum, asking essential questions: How do you approach this space? What perspectives define the experience of being within it? How can the hidden surprises and nuances of a building be communicated visually? The works on display represent particularly strong responses to these questions, each offering a unique interpretation of the museum’s architecture and spatial experience.
Nicholas Wickersham’s approach draws inspiration from architectural theorists such as Kenneth Frampton, who emphasizes “critical regionalism”—an approach that values local characteristics and geographical context over the universalizing design trends of the International Style Movement (1920-70s). Wickersham is also influenced by Glenn Murcutt’s focus on sustainability and Peter Zumthor’s emphasis on sensory experience and material tactility. These sketches reflect not only a rigorous process of observation but also a thoughtful meditation on how architecture shapes, and is shaped by, human experience.
As you view these pieces, consider how each student conveys their personal experience of the museum. Through their eyes, Plains Art Museum becomes a site of exploration, interaction, and meaning.
