A research poster from the School of Emergent Priorities reads one engine builder's cutaway illustrations as an art historian would read a workshop's surviving sheets.
A study of 412 engine cutaway sheets follows one motif across six decades and into engines that gave it nothing to depict
The School of Emergent Priorities has extended its programme of close looking to the engineering drawing. No Front to Draw: The Flame Motif in Six Decades of Engine Cutaway Illustration, a research poster by Ylva Ogunbanjo, Doctoral Candidate, with Dr Brynjar Obiora, Senior Research Fellow in the School of Underlying Conditions, and Dr Anneke Tolan, Senior Research Fellow and Deputy Convenor, Futures in Committee, treats one engine builder’s drawing-office files as an art historian would treat the surviving sheets of a workshop.
The School has found that it can sit with a drawer of drawings for a long time before it needs to be told what any of the parts do. I count that as a capability, and I would like it recorded that we came by it honestly.
— Ylva Ogunbanjo, Doctoral Candidate, School of Emergent Priorities
The poster brings connoisseurship, motif analysis and a loupe into alignment across 412 cutaway and sectional sheets. Each combustion chamber was assigned to one of four ways of picturing what burns inside it, and seven unsigned hands were told apart by how each drew a nut. Of the 61 sheets showing low-temperature engines, 19 kept the radiating burst and 42 filled the chamber with the dot screen the office had long reserved for coolant.
The University recognises in the work its established view that a discipline travels best when it leaves its subject matter at home. Dr Tolan said the poster “leaves the School well placed for whatever it is shown next”.
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.u7vop9.