#architectural form

Dérive is essentially a way of interaction with the environment where you engage with it, so you're no longer thinking about it as usual functional roots to go to work.

"Let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there"

Guy Debord, Theory of the dérive (1956)

It's an environment for possibility and discovery.

We can find:

environmental typography

environmental wear and erosion

architectural form

We can find many typography and signs on buildings, and that can tell us something about a place and how people interact with it.

Architectural erosion can tell us how a place has been maintained and, therefore, how it is regarded as socially useful or may record trace of people's movement through the space or the interactions people have with it.

Architectural forms can relate to each other, creating spaces from narrow alleyways to wide-open spaces, which can tell us how people are encouraged to move through the environment or stop from doing so.

We can document what we find in a  Dérive by:

sketching

photography

collecting objects,

sound and video recordings and even taking rubbings of text,

texture or surfaces (this process is called frottage

“Lisbon’s main cycling route has been transformed with this brilliant typography that makes the city’s 7,362-meter bike path along the river Tagus all that more fun and easy! A collaboration between Lisbon-based communication and environmental graphics studio P-06 Atelier and Global Landscape Architects, the Bikeway Belém is awash with symbols and text painted directly onto the street.”

Images of João Silveira Ramos

House of Terror, museum located at Andrássy út 60 in Budapest, Hungary.