Architects Draw

Architects Draw offers a practical and invaluable way to help students and would-be sketchers translate what they see onto the page, not as an imitation of reality, but as a comprehensive union of voids and solids, light and shadows, lines and shapes. For nearly forty years revered Cooper Union professor and artist Sue Gussow has taught aspiring architects of varying abilities how to fully observe and perceive the spaces that make up our physical environment. Gussow skillfully applies architectural language to twenty-one drawing exercises that tackle a variety of forms--from peas in a pod to monkeys, skeletons, dinosaur bones, and the art of Giacometti and Mondrian. She shows, for example, how cut fruit and paper bags reveal that the physical world is made up of planes, dimensions, and enclosed space.

Examines the social uses of architectural drawing: how it acts to direct architecture; how it helps define what is important about a design; and how it embodies claims about the architect's status and authority. Case study narratives are included with drawings from projects at all stages.

An architect's defense of drawing as a way of thinking, even in an age of electronic media. Why would an architect reach for a pencil when drawing software and AutoCAD are a click away? Use a ruler when 3D-scanners and GPS devices are close at hand? In Why Architects Still Draw, Paolo Belardi offers an elegant and ardent defense of drawing by hand as a way of thinking. Belardi is no Luddite; he doesn't urge architects to give up digital devices for watercolors and a measuring tape. Rather, he makes a case for drawing as the interface between the idea and the work itself. A drawing, Belardi argues, holds within it the entire final design. It is the paradox of the acorn: a project emerges from a drawing—even from a sketch, rough and inchoate—just as an oak tree emerges from an acorn. Citing examples not just from architecture but also from literature, chemistry, music, archaeology, and art, Belardi shows how drawing is not a passive recording but a moment of invention pregnant with creative possibilities. Moving from the sketch to the survey, Belardi explores the meaning of measurement in a digital era. A survey of a site should go beyond width, height, and depth; it must include two more dimensions: history and culture. Belardi shows the sterility of techniques that value metric exactitude over cultural appropriateness, arguing for an “informed drawing” that takes into consideration more than meters or feet, stone or steel. Even in the age of electronic media, Belardi writes, drawing can maintain its role as a cornerstone of architecture.

Part of the generation of architects who were trained to draw both by hand and with digital tools, Nalina Moses recently returned to hand drawing. Finding it to be direct, pleasurable, and intuitive, she wondered whether other architects felt the same way. Single-Handedly is the result of this inquiry. An inspiring collection of 220 hand drawings by more than forty emerging architects and well-known practitioners from around the world, this book explores the reasons they draw by hand and gives testimony to the continued vitality of hand drawing in architecture. The powerful yet intimate drawings carry larger propositions about materials, space, and construction, and each one stands on its own as a work of art.

An elegant presentation of stunning and inspiring architectural drawings from antiquity to the present day Throughout history, architects have relied on drawings both to develop their ideas and communicate their vision to the world. This gorgeous collection brings together more than 250 of the finest architectural drawings of all time, revealing each architect's process and personality as never before. Creatively paired to stimulate the imagination, the illustrations span the centuries and range from sketches to renderings, simple to intricate, built projects to a utopian ideal, famous to rarely seen - a true celebration of the art of architecture. Visually paired images draw connections and contrasts between architecture from different times, styles, and places. From Michelangelo to Frank Gehry, Louise Bourgeois to Tadao Ando, B.V. Doshi to Zaha Hadid, and Grafton to Luis Barragán, the book shows the incredible variety and beauty of architectural drawings. Drawing Architecture is ideal for art and architecture lovers alike, as well as anyone interested in the intersection of creativity and history. From the publisher of Exhibit A: Exhibitions that Transformed Architecture, 1948-2000.

Architecture through Drawing examines how drawing - as both action and object - encapsulates complex ideas relating to culture, technology, space and the built environment. Bringing together an array of beautiful and rarely seen drawings dating from the sixteenth century to the present day, all representing different geographical locations, techniques, methodologies and purposes, the book defines a new field for the subject of the drawing in architecture. It reveals the motives for architectural drawing beyond the requirement to document the processes that underpin the realisation of the architectural object. This book asks, fundamentally, whether drawings can illuminate new interpretations of architectural experimentation. Examples range from initial sketches by architects to analytical and construction drawings, perspectives and schematics, collage and more complex presentations and paintings often carried out in association with others. Dialogues include Fabrizio Ballabio on Filippo Juvarra's Ottoboni Theatre; Desley Luscombe on Ludwig Mies van der Rohe; Mark Dorrian on Michael Webb; Nicholas Olsberg on Victorian architects William Butterfield, Norman Shaw and GE Street; Charles Rice on James Gowan; Laurent Stalder on perspective in postwar housing; Helen Thomas on the covers of San Rocco; John Macarthur on clouds; Markus Lähteenmaäki on Superstudio; and Erik Wegerhoff on the Viennese Auto-Expander. The volume is rounded off with an epilogue, 'The Limits of Drawing', by Adrian Forty and Sophie Read.

Master the basics of architectural sketching with this proven 6-step framework: 01/Lines & 2D Objects 02/Basic Perspective Rules 03/Shadows, Textures & Materiality 04/Populating Your Sketch 05/Adding Vegetation 06/Awesome Perspective Sketch This book also includes 40+ specific tips & tricks, 15 worksheets, and countless finished sketches.

Draw In Order to See is the first book to survey the history of architectural design using the latest research in cognitive science and embodied cognition. Beginning with a primer on visual perception, cognitive science, design thinking, and modes of conception used by groups of architects in their practices, Mark Alan Hewitt surveys a 12,000-year period for specific information about the cognitive schemata used by Homo sapiens to make their buildings and habitats. The resulting history divides these modes of thinking into three large cognitive arcs: crafting, depicting, and assembling, within specific temporal frames. His analysis borrows from Merlin Donald's thesis about mimetic and symbolic cognition as critical to the emergence of the modern mind, and further employs theories of enactment and embodiment to clarify their relationship to architecture. Individual chapters treat the emergence of depiction during the Renaissance, the education of architects in the modern era, Baroque illusionism and scenography, the breakdown of artisanal literacy during the Enlightenment, and modern experiments with models, montage, and illusions of movement. The author concludes with a critique of contemporary design and education, and promotes design with embodiment as a tonic for a profession in crisis, facing the challenges of climate change, energy shortages, inequality, and housing a population of over seven billion in the coming decades. This groundbreaking and valuable study presents a clear view of current research in two related fields that have not heretofore been compared, and outlines a strategy for future research. An extensive bibliography offers readers an up-to-date reference to both the science and the architectural history behind the text.