Architecture

March 7 – May 31, 2025
Woskob Family Gallery

“[The grid] … is a virtual site where architectural experiences and events circulate, combine, and recombine. It is the plane of Event. This plane hovers just above or just below the actual elements of architecture, more like a field of potential charged by invisible forces than a thing or even a geometry.”
– K. Michael Hayes, “Mies van der Rohe and the Grid as Site”

“Perhaps interruption and disruption… are the conditions of maternal creativity.”
– Julie Phillips, The Baby on the Fire Escape: Creativity, Motherhood, and the
Mind-Baby Problem

Daily Drawings is Cathy Braasch’s series of durational works on paper in ink and graphite. Braasch constructs each image by adding one layer per weekday over the course of a month. Together, these drawings become a personal, graphic record of time, experience, and perception, rendered with deliberateness and happenstance alike.

The earliest version of the Daily Drawings began in 2013. At home with a baby, Braasch developed this method to create the mental and physical space for creative production. The series’ scale, medium, and process fit in a small domestic space and accommodate the unpredictable rhythms of caregiving. The series, represented here by work from August 2022 to January 2025, has continued to be productive for Braasch as a starting point for other projects and a means to create continuity even in the most erratic phases of life.

Conceptually, the drawings operate simultaneously across three interconnected scales. First, the personal experience — a meditative ritual that accepts the variations and incongruities of daily life and is a receptacle for memory. Then, imagined as architectural studies — the accumulation of simple geometries generating complexity. Finally, at the scale of the city — a reflection of the inspiring, incremental development of the built environment and the productive qualities that arise from this growth.

This series illuminates the gap between one day’s modest effort, as humble as a few lines, and the density and breadth of persistent efforts over time. For Braasch, the ritual of daily drawing has provided both support and stimulus. The work encourages the appreciation not only of the outcomes but also of the experience of creative production.

Special thanks to Grescia Aguilar, Prem Krishnamurthy, Marc Miller, & the Penn State Department of Architecture for their guidance and support.

Photos courtesy of Avery Belser