"Drawn from the Ground”: Auszug in Late Medieval Architectural Design

The few surviving design booklets and stonemasons’ ordinances from 15th-century Central European cathedral workshops frequently reference a concept called Auszug (“drawing-out”).
The Early New High German term denotes not only a geometrical procedure—to construct one drawing out of another—but also holds a metaphor for imagining how graphic form becomes architectural matter: architecture is being “ausgezogen aus dem grund” (“drawn, or: pulled from the ground”). Auszug is thus an “assemblage” (Gilles Deleuze) of both a material practice and a discursive formation—just as is its ‘modern’ counterpart, orthographic projection. Yet, while structurally analogous to Projection, being both a drawing technique and a metaphor of representation, Auszug represents a substantially distinct and historically specific conceptualization of what architectural drawings are and do. Precisely through this alterity, it lends itself to challenging prevailing notions of projection being the universal and transhistorical analytical condition of architectural drawings.
This dissertation project systematically examines the Auszug paradigm through its textual and graphic traces, reconstructing its historical significance as a “cognitive artifact” (Terence Cave), and tracing its deliberate perpetuation as well as its tacit persistence in late medieval and early modern architectural practice.