paper, often developed in parallel with model-making, are
the beginnings of a story of design development. Drawing
is essentially a form of language and, like all languages,
there are recognised codes and conventions. It has been
suggested that architectural drawing evolved for
description rather than as a guide to new construction
(Rattenbury 2002 pxxii). In this sense, the primary role of
drawing was to record or analyse an existing building as
opposed to anticipating the form of a new one. The
drawing was a record of culture: human activity was
recorded through drawing not, in the earliest examples
at least, projected by them. Drawing, like language,
was an account of things seen, not a blueprint or
instruction to others.
One can, however, take the parallels between drawing
and language too far: drawing does not offer the
complexity of a spoken language but what it lacks in
complexity it makes up for in power and communication.
Drawing, like the language of words and mathematics,
seeks to give meaning and order to very complicated
worlds. It is a tool that is both representational and,
looking forward, allows for the ‘meaningful ordering of
things in the environment’ (Lawson 1980 pp173–4). Since
drawing is a type of language, it is used in different ways
by different architects. Some employ drawing as an
analytical tool, others as a form of intuition. Inspirational
drawing, which may be just a few lines and referential
marks, varies from the type of drawing Frank Gehry
makes to those of Norman Foster. Foster’s design
drawings quickly bring order, particularly spatial and
constructional order, to the early chaos of a typical brief.
Gehry’s drawings, on the other hand, display a search for
meaningful randomness, translating the functional
demands of a design brief into a graphic form of non-
linear logic. Both types of design drawing have their own
logical processes and inner fluency, yet they instil
architectural order in different ways. Hence, the resulting
buildings that start from these sketches end up looking
quite different even if they share similarities in function.
One has only to compare Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum
in Bilbao with Foster’s museum in Nimes to see how
powerful is the vehicle of drawing.
Freehand drawings tell us a great deal about the way
individual architects think. They tell us, too, that architects
think quite differently from engineers and artists. Their
sketches lack the engineers’ striving for mathematical
exactitude or the artists’ freedom from graphic
convention. It is often said that you can measure whether
an architect thinks like an architect from his or her
drawings and this is one reason why sketches are often
preferred at crits or job interviews to CAD images. The
sketch contains the message that an architect is a
designer and not just a draughtsman or technician.
The drawing is also the means by which the arch-
itect visualises, tests and orders imagined relationships
(Lambert 1998 pp8–9). The drawing is a construct that
starts in the mind of the architect and becomes manifest
on paper, where it can be shared with others and further
developed. To become a building there is the participation
with two other key figures – the builder and client. As
such, the drawing presents the artistic and intellectual
ideals behind the design to those whose tasks are
necessarily rather more mundane. However, as Forty
notes, the drawing was the prime means by which
the genius of the architect was set apart from the building
trades (Forty 2004 p30). Sketching and visualising
through drawing is what defines an architect and,
arguably, should be the first skill to be developed in
schools of architecture.Why draw? 29