Every mark, drawing, scratch and score—six decades worth—speaks to the creative toil of all who sat at the student drafting tables in the Architecture 2 Building.

The 24-foot-long studio tabletops were replaced last summer when the workspace underwent a $1.3 million renewal, but not before architecture professor Lisa Landrum photographed their storied surfaces.

“These worktables, laboured over by design students year after year, are silent witnesses to a continuous life of learning and discovery,” she says.

Landrum likens them to dynamic palimpsests: a type of medieval manuscript with layered writings on animal hide, in which prior markings were never erased but rather embedded deeper over time.

“They reveal more than immediately meets the eye,” she says, “enabling discoveries beneath the surface.”