Today, I’m sharing an essay I wrote for the Dark Mountain Journal’s “Techne” issue. I was honored to be included and grateful for
’s kind editing. I’ve had some interesting discussions about this with my students, who are still persuadable to draw by hand. I’m excited to see other Substackers writing on similar subjects. More on that below. I hope you enjoy this deep dive, which may best be viewed in a browser.“Il faut mettre les mains dans la pâte.”
When I was in architecture school, we drew everything by hand. I used a computer in grad school to write my thesis, but it was several years before computers showed up in the drafting room. In my early days of practice, we designed and drew buildings entirely by hand, including perspective views and detailed construction drawings.
Computer drawings are prose to the poetry of hand drawings. As with writing, the language and syntax have a profound affect on what is being expressed. Using a computer affects the process of both thinking and drawing, and by extension the places that are created. Since the mid-1980s, drawing by hand has been seen as anachronistic, impractical, slow, and old-fashioned, which is too bad because it’s a very pleasurable act.
Drawing, as a way of exploring and communicating stories of identity, goes back millennia. Paleolithic cave paintings attest to a yearning to make our mark on the world, even while the world is making its mark on us. The handprints in those caves remind us that our hands are designed for making. Tinkering, tidying, cleaning, cooking, planting, sewing, drawing, and painting all have the potential to bring us joy from the sensual experience of putting hands on raw materials and fashioning them into something new and useful. Ours is an increasingly abstract world, mediated by technology, and yet we are meant to create, to work with our hands. Part of the distress of modern life is that we don’t do enough of it.
Drawing is a reciprocal act: when drawing, you are being drawn. The image, a landscape or exploration of an abstract idea, has commandeered your body for its expression. You must give yourself over, surrender to it. This is the same possession by the Muse invited by poets, musicians, dancers, and all artists. Creation of any sort requires the vessel of the body.
Drawing is a conversation: between student and mentor, architect and client, and with a place. The many uses of drawing—to think, analyze, channel, create, and communicate—flow through a cycle that is self-nourishing, shifting from specific to universal to archetypal and back again.
My presentation drawings of architecture school projects were intricately inked in four or five different line weights on heavy paper, a craft no longer practiced. Looking at them is like stepping into a time machine. I am moved by a wave of nostalgia for the full tactile experience of this kind of drawing, a body prayer of planning, focus, practice, and trust. There was no White-out, no pen eraser, no real way to correct mistakes back then, short of cutting out the bad part and splicing in new.
Once I left school for work in an office, we drew with plastic leads on Mylar. Before my time, working drawings—the hard-edged plans, sections, elevations and details for construction—were inked on linen. Plastic lead was much easier to deal with than technical pens, which always clogged and required constant fussing, maintenance, and replacement. Plastic was the Ford Escort to pen’s Alfa Romeo. Mylar is a stiff, also plastic medium that allows for multiple erasures and corrections while retaining its original integrity. And it gives paper cuts like a run-in with a kitchen knife. Mylar’s translucence makes it possible to see down through layers of a drawing, to better coordinate the work of electrical, mechanical, and structural engineers.
I didn’t know it at the time, but this system was the first step away from the sensual connection to craft, towards the artificiality of the computer.
Looking back, it wasn’t only the day-to-day frustrations of commerce—budgets, schedules, and expectations of clients—that exhausted my love for architecture. It was the waning of the craft of drawing itself. There is a special spirit-mind-body relationship that is best experienced with a pencil or pen in hand. I have never felt transported by this connection when drawing on a computer. There is no dispute about the convenience of being able to copy, cut, paste, and revise across three dimensions simultaneously, not to mention modeling complex forms. But there is an inevitable distancing, a separation of subject and object that leads to a lack of caring.
When the very medium of production distances us from our subject, how can we hope to achieve a greater intimacy with place through architecture?
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Place, belonging and memory
“The highest reward for a man's toil is not what he gets for it but what he becomes by it.” ~ John Ruskin
Drawing is the best way to hold a conversation with a place, to discover a deep relationship with it. As an undergraduate, I went on a summer program to Italy, where I was taught by masters to appreciate and value drawing for its unique ability to help me tune in with all my senses, not only sight. We convened early one morning amid the bustle of Vicenza’s market piazza to study and sketch a great public building by Palladio, famed son of that city. Our professor, Carlo Pelliccia, demonstrated methods of pacing out distances, using our thumbs to measure facades, setting up proportions on the page, seeing as opposed to looking, and sketching from different angles exploring various types of drawings. He cautioned that we would never remember buildings we merely photographed. The more attention you focus on a subject, the more you see, the more details, patterns, and relationships reveal themselves. At a certain point, it dawns on you that you are on a continuum of noticing. You can never, in the time you have at a site, notice it all. Somehow, there is always more to take in, more to understand and be delighted by.
What you do see teaches you as much about yourself as about the place.
Something I discovered from my time drawing Palladio’s villas in rural places like Maser and Emo is that even though a villa is a man-made artifact, the catalog of things to learn has become as vast as Nature herself. A 16th century Italian villa feels as inevitable and mysterious as any forest. Great architecture has this way of integrating culture and nature. Drawing is a doorway into greater appreciation of artifacts that are so embedded in their place as to have been granted to ultimate blessing of belonging.
Like all sincere conversations, travel sketches are remembered in the body. When you design by sketching, you have at your disposal all those lessons of past study. A whole vocabulary of solutions to place-making: symmetry or asymmetry, centrality, rhythm, pattern, the play of light and shadow, how to turn a corner with elegance, as well as how a place feels, how alive it is.
This is how drawing was taught and learned for centuries, passed down by a master to an apprentice. It takes time and dedication that is rewarded with full, sensory experiences and stored in the deep memory cells in the body. This kind of drawing is a true craft. By contrast, learning to draw on the computer is a skill learned via training sessions. In the early days, we were sent to windowless classrooms for expensive weeklong seminars, given thick binders of commands and manuals that could double as doorstops. Today, you can find any tutorial or demonstration you need on YouTube and teach yourself. These lessons are always strictly about the tool itself, never about the craft of building. Certainly not about the intimate relationship between a building and its site, let alone the culture, history or psychology of the people it shelters.
Drawing mirrors the craft of building
“A gentleman is someone who can play the accordion, but doesn't.” ~ Tom Waits
In undergraduate school, architecture students were faithful to our design studios and lackluster about all other subjects. We reserved our worst scorn for Technology class. Now called “Building Science,” this is the study of the physical realities of buildings. Tech Professors were the geeky wash-ups from related professions like mechanical equipment sales. Stumbling into class from all nighters in the design studio, we weathered their lectures in a sleep-deprived haze. We pried our eyelids open in cavernous basement classrooms to view forensic slides of rotted insulation and rusting metal structures, failures that could have been avoided with better window flashing.
In grad school, Jim Tuley changed all of that with his detailing class. A transplanted Californian, he approached this intricate thinking-through of how a building is put together with the focus of a Zen monk and the casual profanity of a 1960s Malibu surfer. His signature question was, “How’re you gonna get the damn water off the damn roof?” He was full of stories. Once, he turned down a job with the great architect Louis Kahn because the salary wasn’t reliable enough.
Tuley taught a methodology in his seminar of approaching the wall section as a large-scale freehand drawing on a two-foot by three-foot piece of vellum paper. The drawings studied the logical assembly of materials from the inside out. A good wall section is the embodiment of how the architect plans to keep the wild elements of nature in their rightful place outside while sealing the people inside, safe and warm and dry.
We followed Tuley’s technique to make drawings that revealed everything: beams and columns; insulation; window shims; placement of windows (flush to the outside, centered, or deepset); flashings at window head, sill and jambs to shed wind-driven rain from the assembly; sheathing; a moisture barrier layer of plastic sheeting (depending on climate); exterior finish material (brick, wood siding, tile, metal panels, old chalkboards); interior finish material (drywall, plaster, tile, wood paneling); floor structure; floor finish; ceilings; roof structure; drip edge; gutter; and roof (membrane, shingles, tile, or metal). In the process of making these wall section drawings, we had to consider dozens of variables and alternatives. The drawings also included lighting and mechanical systems running through walls, such as the ductwork that would bring warmed or cooled air into the space.
The wall section, I learned, was a tool for thinking through the many systems that comprise a building, especially how they interrelate. Architects are fond of saying that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts, and nowhere is that more evident than in the wall section. During the inner conversation of drawing, the architect is considering the many ways that water will penetrate into the wall, and its many forms: as rain, as vapor, from outside, from inside.
Such technical drawings do more than separate out each layer and step of structure and enclosure. They make it possible to imagine a narrative of construction sequencing, expanding a two-dimensional representation past the third dimension to include the fourth: time. Yet they delineate only the building process itself. Beyond transmitting technical excellence, wall sections have nothing to say about the ravages of time after the building is finished. This is where humility comes in.
As Tuley frequently said, Nature always wins.
After that semester, I got a summer job working for him. He had set up his office in the open-plan living and dining rooms of his house, a Miesian box designed and exquisitely detailed by him, perched atop a hill with spectacular views of the countryside north of Charlottesville. He owned every album Tom Waits made and didn’t mind if we played them while we worked. He presided over the four of us like a general, pulling up a chair, pencil in hand to lean over our drawing boards. “Now, let’s suss out this detail,” was a common refrain.
The apprenticeship that began in school continued for many years. They say it takes twenty years of practice before an architect gains enough knowledge and experience to competently put a building together, let alone master the métier. One must doggedly trek through miles of requisite information and experience; there are no shortcuts. Every firm I worked in had grey-haired veterans who made all the years of learning bearable.
When computers first came along, many firms housed them together in another room, partly for climate purposes—the machines threw off a lot of heat and needed to be kept cool in order to work properly. Also, the guys (rarely women) who first learned the drafting programs had a geeky, macho culture all their own. In one firm, we called them “CADD jockeys,” the acronym for Computer Aided Design and Drawing. They had the design architects at their mercy. If they told you they couldn’t draw something the way you wanted them to, what could you do?
Training everyone in CADD and bringing computers into the design studio quickly became a goal. The good intention behind it was to better integrate design with the technical development of a project, and to make sure that the extensive knowledge of the grey-hairs was reflected in the drawings. The separation of phases of design and drawing was rightly seen as a mistake that had to be corrected.
Those of us who had come up in firms under the more intimate apprenticeship facilitated by a conversation with pencils in hand soon noticed something odd happening. Newly hired interns were debating and sharing amongst themselves the best way to adjust line weights in a .DWG file, or to build a 3-D model from an imported PDF of a site plan, rather than seeking out advice from veterans about the best way to waterproof and insulate a below-grade wall in a northern climate. The demands of learning and mastering the software crowded into their time to learn the craft of putting a building together.
Worse, it began to affect the very design of buildings. Drawing by hand connects and synthesizes as it facilitates a sensual relationship between the idea, the form, and the techniques of building. Drawing by computer separates, as it requires learning a purely technical language to facilitate mastery of the software. Being entirely self-referential, divorced from the physics of construction and materials, weather and inertia, it tends to encourage wild fantasies of three-dimensional forms. The work of Frank Gehry is but one example among many. The Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, considered one of his masterworks, was so challenging to structure and detail that a special aeronautical drawing program had to be utilized. In the end, in order to meet the physical realities of gravity and weather, the museum was actually constructed as two complete buildings, one inside the other.
Choosing tools in an era of both/and
“Wholeness . . . is not achieved by cutting off a portion of one’s being, but by integration of the contraries.” ~ C. G. Jung
The hyper connectedness of technology, 3-D printing, and “Big Data” in our time has given rise to a touching nostalgia for local handmade items. Reverence for craft is a part of the human experience that can never be supplanted fully by technology. The art theorist, painter and social thinker, John Ruskin, was a great advocate of craft: “When love and skill work together, expect a masterpiece.”
Ruskin decried that mass production severed the intimacy of heart and hands. A machine may be able to match or exceed workmanship, but it can never approximate love. In his time, the Industrial Revolution was in full swing, to the great enthusiasm of some and horrible suffering of others. The move back to handcraft was a reaction against dehumanizing machines and mass production.
Nostalgia is a signal that something is out of balance.
Young people come to architecture school now having trained to draw entirely by computer. They don’t sketch in the studio. They don’t sketch in the world. When they travel, they Instagram pictures of famous buildings. They don’t take the time to draw them. A few quick cellphone photos, like speed dating, reveal very little of depth of substance. Looking later at a travel album on Flikr while manipulating a 3-D model using the program Revit isn’t the same experience as recalling buildings through the intimacy of sketching.
Computer drawings can do so much. They dazzle us with their magic, with the ability to generate and animate 3-D models instantly. It’s fun to fly clients through their building in a virtual animation. But in reality the architect, and the client for that matter, are on the outside looking into an abstraction. This has a profound affect not only on the experience of designing, but on the buildings we design and the places we build and inhabit.
We would do well to choose our tools with sensitivity to the experience of working with them, as well as to the affect they have on the end result. Any method of drawing is more than a means to an end. The very practice of hand drawing opens a heart-soul connection, a conversation between people, or between a person and a place.
Designing with hand drawings has a organic quality similar to a seed sprouting or a flower bud blooming. It opens up from a kernel of an idea, gathering vitality and possibility as the designer moves her pencil around on the paper. This is a humbling, questioning stance, full of wonder and curiosity. Anything can happen. The pencil or pen in hand is a kind of antenna; the architect is a receiver. The ego and rational mind rest in the background.
Hand drawing is receptive, allowing, intuitive, mysterious, feminine. It integrates, through its very medium, our thinking and feeling faculties. Computer drawing is iterative, WYSIWYG, hard-edged, competitive, showing off its impressive compatibilities, masculine. It is full of options and menus, tools to multiply and rotate and mirror and array. It demands much of our thinking function but ignores feeling altogether.
The Story of Progress tells us that we are in the Information Age, that computers are superior to slower, less accurate tools like hand drawing. The computer has effectively replaced hand drawing, which is seen as archaic and obsolete, best chucked in the trash with the rest of history that we have outgrown. This is a mistaken view, just as it would be wrong for me to argue a clean break from computers and a return to all hand drawing. The nostalgia for simpler, more tactile connections, can lead us astray, into fantasies of dropping out of modern life altogether.
Rudolf Steiner had something to say about this. In a lecture in 1914, he cautioned, “Any kind of advice to withdraw from modern life, or to engage in a sort of hothouse cultivation of the spiritual life, should never find favour in the sphere of our movement. In a true culture of the spirit there can never be any question of such procedure.” He went on to say that the great challenge posed by the hyper-materialism of technology ultimately serves well to help the developing soul become strong enough navigate the demands of modern life.
He advocated, in other words, for a dynamic balance of the material and the spiritual, of technology and craft, science and art. It is not a question of one or the other; our task as humans is to live in the in-between world of both/and.
No one would argue in favor of a return to hand-copied manuscripts instead of printed books, although some writers do their earliest drafts longhand because it helps them think and enhances the flow of words. But creation of something new is not the same as production, whether of a one-off building or a book meant for wide distribution. Drawing the architectural plans and details for construction benefits greatly from computer software. The coordination of technologies and services is theoretically far more accurate and efficient by computer than with the hand drawings we did in the early days. That’s assuming, of course, that the people doing the drawings have the knowledge, skill, and experience to put a building together. Some things never change.
These two very different ways of drawing have their unique value and purposes. I may be blind to many superiorities and virtues of computers because I learned to draw first by hand. That history does qualify me to argue for greater deliberation around the choice between the two. I have lived and worked on this threshold for the last thirty years. I know how I feel, physically and emotionally, after a session of sketching, versus how I feel after spending hours in front of a computer screen where the only manual skill required is the use of a keyboard and mousepad. Sketching is energizing and inspiring. Drawing on a computer is draining.
In the coming collapse of western civilization, those of us who still draw could help make a soft landing from our over reliance on technology to more self-sufficiency and local resilience. Some of us can still design a building without the use of electricity or access to the Internet, and wouldn’t even consider it a hardship. We love to draw by hand.
If you’re into drawing, you’ll love this post by Elizabeth Edwards on her Substack, The Drawing Board. And this post on urban sketching by Ana Vila from
.Did a 1st-grade teacher tell you your drawing doesn’t look like a sheep? She was wrong! Don’t listen to her! Best revenge is to draw something, like, today. Now. You might be surprised.
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The ultimate creative experience is when an idea conceived in the mind becomes a reality by the work of the hands. The best education is one that nurtures that connection between the mind and the hands.
Haha, my teacher likely told me my sheep didn't look like a sheep. I remember trying to draw horses as a child, over and over, and could never get their legs to look right. I think after that I stuck to coloring pictures other people drew, and writing.
This is a fascinating article about the pendulum swing in our world, from one to the other with minimal middle ground. It is my hope that we will find a middle.
Also, I can't believe when you were learning you drew those tiny little plans in pen! There's an exercise in creating inner strength and gumption.