These pencil drawings are the products of an independent study. Over the fall of 2010, I examined Paul Rudolph’s A&A Building through several sets of Mayline drafts. Each set comprised four drawings done on sheets of 18” x 24” paper with drafting lead.  This work culminated in a suite of thesis drawings that addressed the simultaneity inherent in the building’s composition and siting.  The idea was to begin with an open mind and let the drawings reveal ideas, motifs, and systems embedded in the building.  Over and over again, the sets of drawings suggested that the building managed to be both one thing and its opposite - open and closed, rational and convoluted, apart and a piece of the surrounding blocks, dependent on Gwathmey’s neighboring Loria Center and stubbornly solitary.  This study was a unique and invaluable learning experience, both in the way a building, like a person, is endlessly intricate and somewhat unknowable, and in the spatial lessons that the building teaches, which, appropriate to an architecture school, are many.