What is so very remarkable about these century-old visionary drawings is that they portray a future building type – verging on the ethereal and more or less impossible to realise at the time – in the earthiest of drawing materials. It had been a stroke of genius to use charcoal to evoke an architecture of lightness rising from the embers of the trenches that would revolutionise the way we shaped tall buildings and with them our city streets. Such is the power of drawing by hand.
In her new book, Single-Handedly: Contemporary Architects Draw by Hand, the New York architect and writer Nalina Moses, has collated some two hundred hand drawings by contemporary architects from around the world that have at least something of Mies’s power to stop us in our visual tracks. However slick and clever, computer drawings, she argues, cannot yet approach let alone match the “formal intelligence, assertive sensuality and emotional immediacy” of hand drawing. Where the former have proved to be largely indispensable in the construction process, they remain geometric constructions no matter how cleverly they are programmed. Hand drawings are constructs of the imagination.
“A hand drawing”, writes Moses, “because it is linked to centuries-old traditions of picture-making, has a powerful imagistic potential”. Unmediated, it can also “move as swiftly as a stream of thought” while “setting the architect at the center of a building’s mythology”. And, for Moses, summing up the rich catalogue of entries to her book, hand drawing returns the building to an organically conceived, yet freely formed, whole. “The empty page is an unregulated space, a field with infinite imaginative potential. It makes possible all architectures, whether rigidly pragmatic, unquestioningly traditional, or disruptively innovative.”
Any architect wondering if they should put their head above the CAD parapet and show their ability to draw and to think about architecture and individual buildings through hand drawing, might want to turn the pages of Single-Handedly to witness the sheer range of techniques and styles and ways of seeing through the hand their peers from the around the world are capable of.
The book is also a reminder of what to look for in drawings. As Moses notes of the many beautiful drawings that came her way while compiling her book, “Of these some also possessed an expressive energy” – as, of course, did Mies’s Friedrichstrasse competition drawings – “as if they needed to be drawn. It was these, whether rendered in pencil, acrylic paint, coffee, ink or correction fluid, if not charcoal, that made their way into the book.
Single-Handedly
Contemporary Architects Draw by Hand
Nalina Moses; foreword by Tom Kundig
ISBN: 978-1-61689-726-0
8 X 10 IN / 256 PP / 220 COLOUR IMAGES
£35.00 / HARDCOVER
Princeton University Press
PUBLICATION DATE: 7 MAY 2019
This article was originally published on ArchDaily.
It forms part of our series on The Architecture Drawing Prize: an open drawing competition curated by Make, WAF and Sir John Soane’s Museum to highlight the importance of drawing in architecture. The competition is now closed and winners will be announced soon. Sponsored by William Hare Group.
