Approaches to Drawing in Architectural and Urban Design

 Architects draw for a myriad of reasons and purposes. They draw to assimilate places and precedents. They draw to generate ideas. They draw to imagine, to express the spatial qualities of a design. They draw to develop a concept into a consistent project. They draw to communicate ideas and propositions to a team, to patrons, to clients and civil servants. They draw to manage and mediate the different construction stages with contractors, craftsmen, and engineers. They draw to produce elaborations for treatises, journals or personal portfolios. Most of all, architects draw because drawing enables them to explore and analyse matters related to forms and spaces. The object of this book is the role of images and drawing in the design process. Next to the physical buildings, architectural history, theory and culture are shaped by models, drawings and images that accompany the buildings. Examples of innovative, interdisciplinary approaches to representation in the design process can be found in the history, eventually reinforced by emerging new technologies. The history of architectural drawing reads as fascinating story of inventing and systemising precise and transferable rules, procedures, standards, formats, protocols, and media. From the 15th century onwards, the practice of describing architecture in words was first integrated and then largely replaced by images. This sort of ‘early visual turn’ was mainly shaped by hand made drawings, promoted by the circulation of cheap paper. Parallel with the intellectual redefinition of the figure of the architects and their primary tasks, a projective formulation, fostered by the Florentine perspective rediscovery, slowly moved the architectural drawing from an empirical to the scientific sphere. Added to this, a wide set of conventions, which include symbols, sheet sizes, units of measurement, scales of reduction, annotations, and cross-referencing marks, were developed to facilitate the envisioning and notation of architecture and to turn drawing into a distinct visual language we came to appreciate as architectural drawing. The emergence of digital drawing tools added exciting new layers to the architects’ drawing activities and possibilities. Digitalisation not only radically changed architectural practice but also called for a reframing of the conceptual thinking about architectural drawing – both as a tool for thought and as a tool for communication. Digitalisation introduced new methodologies and approaches to the design process. Digital technology transformed the visual interfaces and the practice of the architectural office as well as the relationship with clients, public, and society. They have expanded the architects’ tool box through digital collage, photo-realistic rendering, animation, rapid prototyping, digital simulation as well as Building Information Modelling (BIM) technology, augmented and virtual reality. In every design process, the definition of procedures and tools of analysis, design and visualisation of space is linked to a program, a specific economic and productive context the architect belongs to and her or his social and cultural agenda. This strict relationship between architectural drawing and the human society makes the design drawings an unedited and intangible cultural heritage of ideas. These ideas may surface from the peculiar formats adopted by designers, surveyors, restorers, critics, and disseminators, and the artistic and social agency architecture and urbanism can play. Graphic analysis and three-dimensional reconstruction of the projects and their inherent processes, especially the unbuilt ones, can reveal the ideas (and the minds) behind the projects in ways other sources cannot. Rooted in the principles of mimesis and semantic efficiency and addressed to the several subjects involved in shaping the territory, architectural drawings may be very sensitive to the social and cultural changes of the contexts in which they are practiced. Architectural and urban drawing has always proved ductile to variations, interpretations, customisations, contaminations, and hybridisations of the neighbouring artistic and, later, scientific disciplines. The Modern Movement broke with history and put invention and legitimation on the architectural agenda. Inspired by advances in cognitive psychology and experiments in the early 20th century artistic avant-garde, architects started inquiring drawing as a medium to invent, to explore formal, spatial and material possibilities. From the 1960’s onwards a discourse about the knowledge and making processes of design came to the fore. The architect emancipated from his/her role as applied artist to become half-scientist, half-philosopher. Inspired by popular culture and conceptual art alike architects started compiling references to artworks, literary aphorisms, schemes, diagrams and annotations to elaborate upon the design process and emphasise upon the concept behind the building. Even today, individual architects and design firms look for inspiration in the historical models of architectural drawing. They can find it both in the field of architectural drawing and in the extended field of visual arts and media. Besides being a way to think about form and space, architectural and urban design is largely an outcome of artistic practices and specific gazes which are constantly fuelled by other disciplines oriented to space and territory which also make use of drawing in their own distinct ways. The different voices and ideas that are collected throughout this book prove that drawing remains an indispensable and powerful medium and tool to record, explore, communicate and envision forms and spaces in architecture and urban design. To highlight the methodological and operational specificities of the scholars, we ordered the chapters into four main sections: the first – Practices and Conversations  – features interviews with active practitioners and professionals and explores architectural drawing as a ‘living’ matter and a language daily ‘spoken’ and ‘adapted’ to the contingencies; the second – Histories  – presents historical studies and theoretical studies involving a specific age, place or subject; the third –Theories  – includes theoretical and interpretative studies on drawing as a tool and medium; the fourth – Connections  – includes interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary studies, whose critical considerations are fundamental to frame the current practice of drawing.