TU Delft alumnus Antonio Paoletti was one of the select students who took part in the Addis Ababa Living Lab graduation studio, finalizing his graduate career with a remarkable design proposal involving a rather artistic approach. Amongst the range of methods used in his project, Paoletti ‘s primary tool was hand-drawing, with which he developed detailed illustrations of his experiences in the studio’s field trip to Addis Ababa. Unfolded into the form of a graphic novel, his illustrations reveal unique aspects of patterns of inhabitation, depicting parallels between human life and spatial qualities, and exposing valuable narratives of the everyday life of the city’s dwellers. The superb artistic talent that shaped much of his design process was recently elected the winner of the hand-drawn category of the international Architecture Drawing Prize, a very prestigious and certainly well-deserved recognition. Entitled ‘Reconfiguring Addis Ababa’s Narratives – Storytelling for Architecture’, his beautiful collection of sketches reveal a human-centered approach that is strongly reflective of the ethnographic methods encouraged in the Addis Ababa Living Lab graduation studio, a quality for which the course is well-known.
