Architecture Through Drawing

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.

This second edition is fully revised and updated and includes new chapters on sustainability, history and archaeology, designing through drawing and drawing in architectural practice. The book introduces design and graphic techniques aimed to help designers increase their understanding of buildings and places through drawing. For many, the camera has replaced the sketchbook, but here the author argues that freehand drawing as a means of analyzing and understanding buildings develops visual sensitivity and awareness of design. By combining design theory with practical lessons in drawing, Understanding Architecture Through Drawing encourages the use of the sketchbook as a creative and critical tool. The book is highly illustrated and is an essential manual on freehand drawing techniques for students of architecture, landscape architecture, town and country planning and urban design.

The book is a guide for students and teachers to understand the need for, the role of and the methods and techniques of freehand analytical sketching in architecture. The presentation focuses on drawing as an approach to and phase of architectural design. The conceptual goal of this approach is to use drawing not as illustration or depiction, but as exploration. The first part of the book discusses underlying concepts of freehand sketching in design education and practice as a complement to digital technologies. The main component is a series of chapters that constitute a typology of fundamental issues in architecture and urban design; for instance, issues of "façade" are illustrated with sketch diagrams that show how façades can be explored and sketched through a series of specific questions and step-by-step procedures. In the expanded and updated edition, a new part explores the questions and experiences of large architectural offices in applying freehand drawing in the practice of architectural design. This book is especially timely in an age in which the false conflict between "traditional vs. digital" gives way to multiple design tools, including sketching. It fosters understanding of the essential human ability to investigate the designed and the natural world through freehand drawing.

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.

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.

Focusing on the creative and inventive significance of drawing for architecture, this book by one of its greatest proponents, Peter Cook, is an established classic. It exudes Cook's delight and catholic appetite for the architectural. Readers are provided with perceptive insights at every turn. The book features some of the greatest and most intriguing drawings by architects, ranging from Frank Lloyd Wright, Heath-Robinson, Le Corbusier, and Otto Wagner to Frank Gehry, Zaha Hadid, Coop Himmelb(l)au, Arata Isozaki, Eric Owen Moss, Bernard Tschumi, and Lebbeus Woods; as well as key works by Cook and other members of the original Archigram group. For this new edition, Cook provides a substantial new chapter that charts the speed at which the trajectory of drawing is moving. It reflects the increasing sophistication of available software and also the ways in which 'hand drawing' and the 'digital' are being eclipsed by new hybrids—injecting a new momentum to drawing. These 'crossovers' provide a whole new territory as attempts are made to release drawing from the boundaries of a solitary moment, a single-viewing position, or a single referential language. Featuring the likes of Toyo Ito, Perry Culper, Izaskun Chinchilla, Kenny Tsui, Ali Rahim, John Berglund, and Lorene Faure, it leads to fascinating insights into the effect that medium has upon intention and definition of an idea or a place. Is a pencil drawing more attuned to a certain architecture than an ink drawing, or is a particular colour evocative of a certain atmosphere? In a world where a Mayer drawing is creatively contributing something different from a Rhino drawing, there is much to demand of future techniques.

How architectural drawings emerged as aesthetic objects, promoted by a network of galleries, collectors, and institutions, and how this changed the understanding of architecture. Prior to the 1970s, buildings were commonly understood to be the goal of architectural practice; architectural drawings were seen simply as a means to an end. But, just as the boundaries of architecture itself were shifting at the end of the twentieth century, the perception of architectural drawings was also shifting; they began to be seen as autonomous objects outside the process of building. In Drawing on Architecture, Jordan Kauffman offers an account of how architectural drawings—promoted by a network of galleries and collectors, exhibitions and events—emerged as aesthetic objects and ultimately attained status as important cultural and historical artifacts, and how this was both emblematic of changes in architecture and a catalyst for these changes. Kauffman traces moments of critical importance to the evolution of the perception of architectural drawings, beginning with exhibitions that featured architectural drawings displayed in ways that did not elucidate buildings but treated them as meaningful objects in their own right. When architectural drawings were seen as having intrinsic value, they became collectible, and Kauffman chronicles early collectors, galleries, and sales. He discusses three key exhibitions at the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York; other galleries around the world that specialized in architectural drawings; the founding of architecture museums that understood and collected drawings as important cultural and historical artifacts; and the effect of the new significance of architectural drawings on architecture and architectural history. Drawing on interviews with more than forty people directly involved with the events described and on extensive archival research, Kauffman shows how architectural drawings became the driving force in architectural debate in an era of change.

Drawings, doodles, and ideograms argue with ferocity and wit for traditional urbanism and architecture. Architect Léon Krier's doodles, drawings, and ideograms make arguments in images, without the circumlocutions of prose. Drawn with wit and grace, these clever sketches do not try to please or flatter the architectural establishment. Rather, they make an impassioned argument against what Krier sees as the unquestioned doctrines and unacknowledged absurdities of contemporary architecture. Thus he shows us a building bearing a suspicious resemblance to Norman Foster's famous London “gherkin” as an example of “priapus hubris” (threatened by detumescence and “priapus nemesis”); he charts “Random Uniformity” (“fake simplicity”) and “Uniform Randomness” (“fake complexity”); he draws bloated “bulimic” and disproportionately scrawny “anorexic” columns flanking a graceful “classical” one; and he compares “private virtue” (modernist architects' homes and offices) to “public vice” (modernist architects' “creations”). Krier wants these witty images to be tools for re-founding traditional urbanism and architecture. He argues for mixed-use cities, of “architectural speech” rather than “architectural stutter,” and pointedly plots the man-vehicle-landneed ratio of “sub-urban man” versus that of a city dweller. In an age of energy crisis, he writes (and his drawings show), we “build in the wrong places, in the wrong patterns, materials, densities, and heights, and for the wrong number of dwellers”; a return to traditional architectures and building and settlement techniques can be the means of ecological reconstruction. Each of Krier's provocative and entertaining images is worth more than a thousand words of theoretical abstraction.