In 2020, The Mor­gan Library & Muse­um mount­ed an exhi­bi­tion of draw­ings by the French archi­tect Jean-Jacques Lequeu (1757−1826). I appre­ci­at­ed see­ing the work first­hand, hav­ing stud­ied it many years ago, and I paused for sev­er­al min­utes before a work titled Les Instru­ments du dessi­na­teur (1782) or The Tools of the Design­er. On the metic­u­lous­ly detailed com­po­si­tion of draw­ing and draft­ing imple­ments, Lequeu had writ­ten, ​“We see in this draw­ing the tools to draft, shade in and con­struct a geo­met­ric rep­re­sen­ta­tion or per­spec­tive on paper, with the care and atten­tion to detail of a good designer.”

Lequeu’s draw­ing and words touched me because, as an archi­tec­ture stu­dent, I loved draft­ing in pen­cil and pen and ink, build­ing mea­sured plans, ele­va­tions, sec­tions and axons, and con­struct­ing mod­els out of chip­board. Those of us who stud­ied design pre-Auto­CAD® know the feel­ing of glid­ing black ink across Mylar® with a Rapi­do­graph®, the smell of the lead point­er, the abil­i­ty to — with all our sens­es — cre­ate a nuanced com­po­si­tion of vary­ing line weights that helped us at each step of the process devel­op the archi­tec­tur­al project.

Despite three decades of CAD and BIM soft­ware that have indis­putably impact­ed the design process and built envi­ron­ment, some prac­ti­tion­ers con­tin­ue to employ tra­di­tion­al draw­ing and draft­ing tech­niques to design space. Archi­tect Nali­na Moses has assem­bled 220 draw­ings by over 40 design­ers of dif­fer­ent gen­er­a­tions in Sin­gle-Hand­ed­ly: Con­tem­po­rary Archi­tects Draw by Hand (Prince­ton Archi­tec­tur­al Press, 2019). Moses explores the con­tin­ued rel­e­vance of hand draw­ing and draft­ing, and how they inte­grate the designer’s inten­tions about mate­ri­als, struc­ture, space, light and shad­ow. The book under­scores the ben­e­fits of a more direct rela­tion­ship between the design­er and the pro­duc­tion of the rep­re­sen­ta­tion, with­out a soft­ware intermediary.

Read­ing Moses’ book remind­ed me of the feel­ing of being a draftsper­son at the end of the stu­dio work­day — and that to be one is also to be a craftsper­son and artist. Even con­struc­tion details could be put togeth­er on a sin­gle sheet of paper in a man­ner that demand­ed one’s atten­tion to scale, line weight, label­ing and com­po­si­tion… in short, each sheet had the poten­tial to be a work of art as well as a means to immerse one­self in the space-shap­ing process. 

In fact, in the mid- and late-20^th cen­tu­ry, many draft­ed and hand-drawn archi­tec­tur­al draw­ings found their way into gal­leries and were acquired by ded­i­cat­ed col­lec­tors. Today, gal­lerists are notic­ing a resur­gence of inter­est. Cody Min­er is co-direc­tor of Mod­est Com­mon, an art and archi­tec­ture gallery locat­ed in down­town Los Ange­les. He notes that young design­ers are inter­est­ed in hands-on mak­ing as a new cre­ative expe­ri­ence: ​“These are kind of lost art forms in this post-dig­i­tal age that we are work­ing through. Archi­tects are using these old tech­niques but explor­ing them in a new way. There’s def­i­nite­ly a move­ment away from the clean, crisp dig­i­ti­za­tion of architecture.”

Some design­ers describe the cor­re­la­tion between mak­ing by hand and con­struct­ing space as a seam­less tran­si­tion. Owen Nichols, co-direc­tor of a83 Gallery and founder of his firm, Chib­ber­noonie, uses screen print­ing as an exer­cise in vision­ing. ​“There is some­thing to the phys­i­cal con­struc­tion of an image which relates direct­ly to the con­struc­tion of a build­ing. The lay­ers of ink used to pro­duce a screen­print, for us, trans­late in terms of lay­ers and see­ing through the vol­umes of a space.”

Draft­ing or print­ing on paper or anoth­er mate­r­i­al not only serves as a ground­ing ele­ment, tying the cre­ator to the present; it can also enhance under­stand­ing of a design in a way that a dig­i­tal image can­not. ​“I do think there is a rela­tion­ship between these ana­log process­es, and ways of think­ing about approach­es to build­ing and mak­ing spaces,” says Jesse LeCav­a­lier, who runs his own research and design firm and directs Cor­nell University’s Urban Design pro­gram. ​“There’s a rea­son why peo­ple do mock­ups — to under­stand. I think there is a lim­it to what a sim­u­la­tion can do, and a phys­i­cal thing can often exceed it.”

Per­son­al­ly, I acknowl­edge my nos­tal­gia for hand draft­ing while main­tain­ing a prag­mat­ic accep­tance of dig­i­tal rep­re­sen­ta­tion. With rapid­ly chang­ing soft­ware tech­nol­o­gy and file types, how­ev­er, I do won­der how much of our dig­i­tal rep­re­sen­ta­tion — the bulk of our body of work — is going to last. Owen Nichols believes that design­ers will always exper­i­ment with a range of mate­ri­als and tech­niques to cre­ate form, but that the imprint of the hand has a last­ing impact. ​“I think peo­ple are start­ing to real­ize that the pro­duc­tion of actu­al arti­facts is valu­able because it allows for life beyond the orig­i­nal inten­tion of the image.”