Randy M Sovich

Work samples

Oneiric Dwellings: Architecture as Body

Zoomorphic dwelling.
Word Houses: Architecture as Language

Exploring meaning of House
Touch and Trace: Architecture as Interface

fleurs panel: touch screen process-produced biophilic pattern for ornament installation
Ornament Systems: Architecture as House Filling

A system of architectural ornamentation for our time.

About Randy

I work between architecture, drawing, and speculative practice, using the house, the pattern, and the interface as instruments for examining how imagination operates under contemporary conditions. Although my training and professional life are rooted in architecture, this work steps outside its conventions, treating architecture not as a service discipline but as a cultural medium shaped by language, memory, and mediation.

Drawing is my primary mode of inquiry. I work with a fountain… more

Zoomorphic Dwellings: Architecture as Body

These drawings explore architecture as a bodily presence rather than a neutral container. The forms stand, lean, brace, and balance; they appear alert, vulnerable, and responsive to gravity. Rather than borrowing animal imagery, the work treats zoomorphism as a behavioral condition—architecture that behaves as if it has posture, weight, and intention.

Legs, supports, and projections function as organs rather than structural features. Openings read as apertures of attention rather than windows, and mass is organized to suggest stance rather than symmetry. The figures resist completion or stability, occupying a threshold between stillness and movement.

In this work, architecture is not animated through narrative or metaphor, but through bodily logic. These dwellings do not symbolize animals; they register the conditions of being embodied—exposure, imbalance, and the effort required to remain upright. By foregrounding posture and vulnerability, Zoomorphic Dwellings asks how architecture might feel rather than what it might represent.

Posturing

A house daydreaming about becoming a cat.
Model

House with a saddle.
Parade Master
zoomorph sketch
Chincoteague Billboard Dwelling
Chamonix in light

Homage to Ruskin's infatuation with Chamonix, a house of light.
Reflections on the infinite house

Digitally created image exploring the reflective potential of digital image creation software.
Narcissist House

House-tower infatuated with itself

Word Houses: Architecture as Language

Word House explores architecture constructed from language rather than material. Words operate as structural elements—walls, thresholds, and enclosures—organizing space through syntax and meaning instead of mass or program. In these works, architecture is not represented by language; it is produced through it.

The drawings collapse distinctions between plan, section, and text, treating reading as a spatial act. Words define interiors, establish boundaries, and shape movement, suggesting that language itself can function as an architectural system. Scale and use remain deliberately unstable, allowing the work to operate between diagram, fiction, and structure.

Rather than illustrating ideas, Word House tests how architecture persists when stripped of physical construction. Space here is something assembled through interpretation—entered cognitively before it is imagined physically. The project proposes language as a primary architectural material, capable of organizing experience with the same rigor as form.

House Flies Sketches
House Fly
Ski Lodge
house as bouquet
Ballerina
House Party
housekateer

Touch and Trace: Drawings for a Mediated Age

Architecture as Interface

Touch and Trace examines the interface as a contemporary architectural condition. The drawings are generated through everyday touchscreen actions—swiping, tapping, and repetition—using the phone as both tool and site. These movements are not expressive gestures but conditioned behaviors, learned through habitual interaction with digital systems.

Through layered filtering and procedural sequencing, individual actions accumulate into fields and patterns. What begins as fleeting touch is slowed and recorded as trace, making visible the structures that organize contemporary attention and movement. The work resists the illusion of digital neutrality by foregrounding how interfaces discipline both perception and authorship.

Here, architecture is understood not as enclosure or form, but as mediation: a set of rules that shape how bodies encounter systems. Touch and Trace situates drawing within this condition, asking how imagination operates when the primary threshold between self and world is an interface.

Mazel Tov: a drip from above.
Ornamental Frieze Study

One of the patterns created for Issue #3: Pattern is Maddening!
Ornamental Frieze Study
Ceiling pattern study
Glass Panel Study insitu

Ornamental glass panel installation
Glass Panel Study insitu

interior view of ornamental glass panel installation
Touch and Trace: Architecture as Interface

fleurs panel: touch screen process-produced biophilic pattern for ornament installation
Ornamental Frieze Study
Wall panel study

Touch screen produced pattern mock up for focal wall.
seed germ

Ornament Systems: House Filling with Cosmos

Ornament Systems investigates ornament as the process of House-filling. Ornament, missing from modern architectural thought is the filling of house: the idea goes back to an ancient Mesopotamian inscription of Naqî¥a-Zakûtu: “That house I built, I completed. With splendor I filled it."

ornament integrated
A system of architectural ornamentation of our time.
A system of architectural ornamentation of our time.
A system of architectural ornamentation of our time.
multiples super-added ornament system
super-added ornament system
expression in steel framing elements

ornamental component: decorative frame supporting ornamental elements connecting to cosmos.
Procedural pattern

Design for an urban 'rug' integrating follies, houses, and towers. The piece was installed outside the Southeast Community Development Center in Highlandtown.
rowhouse grouping study

Study for two-dimensional ornamental pattern added to existing Baltimore rowhouse grouping.
mediated pattern

Publications: Architecture as Dialogue

These publications treat editing, writing, and graphic composition as architectural acts. Rather than documenting work, they construct spaces of inquiry where images, texts, and arguments encounter one another through exchange. Architecture here is not resolved in objects, but articulated through dialogue—between authors, disciplines, and readers.

Projects such as T3XTURE and DRAW • MODEL • PROMPT: Tectonic Speculations operate as designed environments, shaped by sequencing, juxtaposition, and editorial judgment. Drawing, theory, and emerging tools are placed in conversation, allowing meaning to emerge through friction rather than consensus.

In this work, publishing is not ancillary to practice; it is a site of practice. Dialogue becomes a structural condition—one that resists closure and invites participation. By framing architecture as something argued, tested, and shared, these projects extend the portfolio’s inquiry into the public realm, where imagination remains open, provisional, and collective.

Publications

Sovich's publications include his work as Co-editor of T3XTURE, an international journal exploring ornament, texture, and pattern in an architecture of our time.

He also published

DRAW•MODEL•PROMPT : Tectonic Speculations

In the world of architectural design, the relationship between drawing, computer modeling, and AI is complex-- is it progression or evolution? The earliest architectural drawings were drawn on the ground at the site. Pencil and watercolor drawings required a talent that favored one designer over another. Computer-aided drafting permitted an ease of creating repetition, simplifying the process. Recent innovations introducing artificial intelligence accelerate the process, effectively making hundreds of iterations possible in a short time span and allowing the designer to act as a curator. Yet the AI tool is still so new, how will it affect the practice? The drawings, computer models, and models generated with text and image prompts in this book explore the interconnected nature of these processes.
The Reading Room Exhibit, Itinerant Architecture, Royal Spanish Academy, Rome, Italy, 2022

T3XTURE was selected, in an open call, to be included in the "Reading Room" exhibit--part of the New Urban Challenges Festival created by Itinerant Office. The festival featured emerging architecture practices, innovative publications, and editorial projects through events at the Royal Spanish Academy in Rome.

"...emerging publishing projects, developed in new and experimental forms, open unprecedented windows on the issues of the present and outline the potential "new urban challenges" of the future."

Cecilia Rosa, Il Giornale dell'Architettura.com
Ornament is Splendid, Visit with Kent Bloomer Studio

T3XTURE #2 "Ornament is Splendid!" article by Sovich. Photos courtesy of Kent Bloomer Studio. The body of the article, the text, becomes the decorative frame of the page supporting outsized parentheses as biophilic elements ornamenting the liminal spaces of the text.
From "One Liners"

From the piece "One Liners" in "T3XTURE 2, Ornament is Splendid!," this spread is a portion of a critique of trendy late-twenty-first century architectural treatments–by generations of architects ignorant of the role of ornament in architecture.
T3XTURE 1 spread

In this think piece and illustrations by Randy, he imagines a new Baltimore housing model rising from repurposed rubble of tens of thousands of vacant brick row houses.
HACKED! a satirical critique by Randy Sovich

“HACKED!” from T3XTURE #3 Pattern is Maddening”—In this satire, Randy Sovich imagines patterns that were rejected in the editing process of the book, “A Pattern Language” and then lifted from the office trashcan and leaked by a disgruntled employee. Mimicking the language and layout of “A Pattern Language,” Sovich casts a gimlet eye on contemporary architects’ infatuation with formal and stylistic trends which bear no relation to the needs of the client, user, or occupant in these “scrapped” patterns.
spread from DRAW•MODEL•PROMPT

A spread from Sovich's book, DRAW•MODEL•PROMPT with oneiric house compound.
spread from DRAW•MODEL•PROMPT

A spread from Sovich's book, DRAW•MODEL•PROMPT with veiled oneiric house.
spread from DRAW•MODEL•PROMPT

A spread from Sovich's book, DRAW•MODEL•PROMPT with totemic oneiric houses.