Understanding Architecture Through Drawing

attention upon design in public fields such as architecture.
Hence the world of the professions has been opened to
challenge by an informed public, with design no longer
the monopoly of people with letters after their names.
Before the modern design professions were
established, students and practitioners employed the
sketchbook as a matter of course. They were not
topographical artists but people in search of creative
material. The Arts and Crafts architect George Devey
studied under John Sell Cotman in Norwich in the 1830s,
thereby absorbing not just Cotman’s approach to
freehand drawing, but a whole collection of details of
windmills, barns, country houses, castles and cottages
which later proved invaluable to Devey the architect.
Similarly, Richard Norman Shaw, Ernest George, John
Keppie and, later, Edwin Lutyens continued to use the
sketchbook to record the towns and buildings not just of
Britain, but of Europe and the Middle East. One can trace
the origins of the architectural sketchbook back to the
Renaissance, but its blossoming as a creative force in its
own right owes much to the nineteenth century.
The sketchbook is a personal record – a dialogue
between artist and subject. The nature of the dialogue
determines the quality or use of the finished drawing. By
engaging in the subject, the artist, architect or student
develops a sensitivity and understanding difficult to obtain
by other means. The blind copying of subject is not
necessarily useful – a critical stance is required. One may
never use the sketch produced of the town or landscape –
at least not directly – but, like reading a good book, the
insights gained may prove invaluable later on.
The designer needs to be accomplished in the three
main areas of drawing mentioned earlier. To be able to
render a convincing perspective is an essential skill; to
explore the detailing of an unbuilt structure through
sketches avoids pitfalls in the final design; and to use
freehand drawing to learn from past examples helps the

architect or urban designer to give better shape to

townscapes of the future. The environmental awareness

that is a feature of our post-industrial society has

encouraged a return to questions of firmness, commodity

and delight. These are the qualities the Arts and Crafts

architects sought to discover through their sketchbook

investigations. This book seeks to pick up the threads of a

drawing tradition, and to use them to teach us lessons

about the contemporary city, its buildings and landscapes.

DRAWING TODAY

Drawing is a technique that allows the visual world to be

understood. It is a convention, based upon a degree of

abstraction and analysis, which focuses the mind upon

aesthetic values. Whereas numbers are useful to

economists, words to politicians and poets, lines are what

artists and designers employ. Visual literacy is developed

through the medium of drawing.

A distinction needs to be made between drawing as a

tool for designers and drawing as a technique employed

by artists. Although both artists and designers use

drawing to help develop ideas, they do so in quite

different ways. Artists are concerned with mark making,

rather than descriptive drawing, and such marks are

usually the genesis of later inspirational work. Their

drawings are invariably abstract and experimental even

when based upon observation. Even when fine art

conventions are followed, the drawings made by artists

tend to be fairly free form, employing mixed media and

integrated with other visual material such as photography

or collage. Fine art drawings, as against the drawings

designers make, are likely to employ scraffitto (texture),

impasto (surface), and shade (light and dark to give the

effect of modelling). Designer drawings, on the other

hand, employ a more mechanistic response based upon

disciplined observation of what is before the observer.

This is not to suggest that architects’ drawings are

10 Understanding architecture through drawing