Abstracting Words

Abstracting Words is a set of conceptual architectural drawings produced by Aditya Setalvad during a design studio at CEPT University in Ahmedabad, India, in 2019. The studio brief asked students to represent given words through architectural drawing without relying on conventional plans, sections, or elevations. Instead, the exercise pushed each drawing toward a richer visual argument, where the form of representation itself carries the meaning of the term. Every image here was rendered in Photoshop.

This kind of work sits at the heart of architectural education. Before a student designs buildings, the studio trains the eye and hand to translate ideas into space, and drawing becomes the primary language for that thinking. CEPT, founded in Ahmedabad, has long treated drawing and representation as serious tools of inquiry rather than mere documentation. Abstracting Words extends that tradition by asking how a single word can be unpacked into atmosphere, narrative, and structure on the page.

Reading the Words Through Drawing

For “memory,” Setalvad drew and rendered a view of his old school with its doors closed, evoking silence and a sense of the past, paired with a figure holding a picture of the primary school. The image captures how one longs to return to places that survive only as recollection. For “material,” he imagined a construction site and used both dictionary meanings of the word at once, showing material as something with feel and texture and as the element required to build, displaying wood, concrete, brick, metal, and earth together.

For “density,” the drawing cuts a typical section through a building, with every floor crowded with people in their homes and the road below full of people and animals, the way an Indian street often is. The exterior activities are specific to Indian life, from hanging clothes and animals moving across wires to people arguing through windows. Inside, the rooms hold meetings, gatherings of friends, couples arguing, families spending time together, and pregnant women being cared for. Density here is not an abstract number but a lived condition.

Taken together, the series shows how architectural drawing can move beyond technical convention toward storytelling, and how architectural education in Ahmedabad nurtures that experimental sensibility. These drawings remind us that the words architects use are spatial all along, waiting to be made visible.