In the winter of 1971, Alvin Boyarsky was campaigning to take over leadership of London’s Architectural Association School of Architecture, known as the AA. The school, independent since its founding in 1847, had avoided subsumption by the public Imperial College only to emerge in financial disrepair, near to shutdown, in need of new direction and an entirely new structure.

In his notes, included in Drawing Ambience: Alvin Boyarksy and the Architectural Association, at the Rhode Island School of Design Museum, Boyarsky congratulates the AA for “maintaining a spirit of independent survival”. Independence, he writes, depends on “vigorous ambience”. A handwritten addendum reads: “Open up all the doors and blow the cobwebs away.”

As Boyarsky would have it, the doors – and windows – of Drawing Ambience are open. The exhibition showcases early sketches, drawings and prints by architects including Zaha Hadid and Rem Koolhaas from Boyarsky’s archive, RISD’s Fleet library and four AA publications. In its fluid unfolding, Drawing Ambience materialises the “vigorous ambience” of the AA during Boyarsky’s chairmanship, which lasted until his death in 1990.

Boyarsky considered drawing its own form of architecture. He encouraged students to experiment rigorously, developing their own intuitive language of representation without concern for the operational potential of an idea. Jeremie Frank’s The Macrophone (1981), which forms a possible entry into Drawing Ambience, is one of the exhibition’s more straight-faced commitments to fantasy: a large machine, like half an X-wedge engine, rendered in airbrush, collage, graphite and technical pen. Frank studied at the AA in the late 1970s under Peter Cook and Ron Herron, founding members of English neofuturist architecture group Archigram, also known for flights of technological fancy such as the 1964 Plug-in City, a hypothetical metropolis comprised of pure infrastructure.

Archigram embodied Boyarsky’s belief that playful, seemingly inconsequential, abstract or conceptual concerns were fertile ground for design. The imaginary structures and systems they developed through drawing feel no less real or habitable than the built world – and the projects are no less ambitious. Opposite a wall of posters by 1960s collective Superstudio, from the Radical period of Italian design, a drawing by former Archigram member Michael Webb almost disappears. The delicate pencil markings have become faint, but, in their faintness, Webb’s exacting geometry and manipulation of formal representational elements radiate.

The work is part of Webb’s Temple Island project, which was first exhibited at the AA in 1987, based on his childhood memory of the titular landmark at Henley-on-Thames. In an adjacent vitrine, spreads from the catalogue, Temple Island: A Study, describe the dizzying substructure of Webb’s project: filtering memory through optics to develop a spatiality of time.

Inside the exhibition’s “courtyard, loosely inspired by the AA’s Bedford Square, a grey-carpeted display box contains 20 offset lithographs from AA alum Bernard Tschumi’s La Case Vide: La Villette folio (1985). In 1983, Tschumi had won a competition to redevelop the Parc de la Villette in Paris (a negative photostat of the Office of Metropolitan Architecture’s runner-up site-plan is displayed on the opposite wall). His plan comprised points, lines and surfaces, where the “points” were so-called follies, or structures of open-ended, non-prescribed usage – folie, poststructuralist philosopher Jacques Derrida explains in the folio text, implies psychosis and delusion. As ground was being broken at the site, Tschumi exhibited new imaginings of his system at the AA – at once a reflection on and prediction of the physical design, and an invitation to connect the dots.

Across Drawing Ambience, physicality has little to do with a drawing’s relationship to real structures and more to do with the presence of the hand. Looking at one of John Hejduk’s sketches for his Victims project (1986), it is difficult to imagine a more evocative and living representation of his 67 unbuilt structures, designed for the grounds of the Gestapo headquarters in Berlin, than his lexigram-like grid of quick lines in felt-tip and ink on notebook paper. In their drawing for the ICI Trade Pavilion in Stoneleigh, England (1983), Christopher Macdonald and Peter Salter have managed to invoke the labor of the ox, depicted in the drawing’s lower left-hand corner, with layers of erasure, collage and scraping – a way to remove technical pen – that have worn the surface of the vellum.

In the adjacent Paula and Leonard Granoff Galleries, Drawing Ambience’s curators Jan Howard and Igor Marjanović have extended the physical space of the exhibition by installing architectural drawings and related materials from RISD’s collection among the ceramic teapots and Mark Rothko paintings. Constructivist architect Yakov Chernikov’s The Construction of Architectural and Machine Forms (1931) is open at a page of structures more than likely instrumental to Tschumi, Archigram and many other figures in Drawing Ambience.

Across a plinth, Friedrich St Florian’s Underlay for the New York Birdcage (1968) articulates the essentially urban concern of so much imaginary architecture. As St Florian pointed out at the exhibition’s opening, he wanted to visualise the holding patterns of planes over New York – forming the “birdcages” – to understand an imminent but not-yet-visible reality: in 1968, Buckminster Fuller was working to convince the world that, in the future, all travel would take place in the sky.

The flying car did not eventuate, and by the end of Boyarsky’s life, the world’s focus was on a far more advanced machine. Computers became central to architectural education, and drawing software introduced whole new sets of aesthetic, technical and representational possibilities. By the 1990s, architectural discourse had shifted to emphasise the operation of an idea over its representation.

Although the works in Drawing Ambience may be read as part of a historical chapter, their time is not finished. If it is possible to say “flying cars did not materialise”, it is also possible to say “flying cars did not materialise yet”. Drawing Ambience upends familiar ideas about progression, succession and antecedence; the works’ questions and propositions are asking to be taken up, retranslated, rejected or otherwise lived in the present. The exhibition’s expanded space means Drawing Ambience ends as it opens: with an invitation to the body, and, by extension, the hand.