The decreasing fortune of the drawing in the architectural processes. From control & development to verification

The architecture survey and the architecture design are both processes that move along the line that links a building to an exhaustive system of its representations but in the two opposite senses. The survey is concerning the knowledge of an existing architecture while the design is defining a whole building from a single original mental image. Both the processes historically adopted the drawing as the main instrument to control and develop the key actions and transmit the final product. The introduction of innovative technologies such as laser scanner and BIM has broken this practice and drawing seems today relegated to a secondary posthumous verification role while assemblage and data-base logics are threatening the continuous flow between mind, eyes and hand the drawing had been assuring for centuries. This chapter analyzes current practices of both survey and design to highlight their limits, equivoques, and risks.