Why Architects Still Draw

by Paolo Belardi, Zachary Nowak (Translator)

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 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 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.

Genres: Architecture, Nonfiction, Drawing

136 pages, Paperback

First published February 14, 2014

Reviews

[Melis Baloglu · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lisans öğrencisi iken okusaydım daha da heyecan duyardım. Keyifli okumalar!

[Lucas M]

"Since the dawn of civilization, 'drawing' has not merely meant 'reproducing.' Instead, as Paul Gauguin understood ('I close my eyes to see'), it means probing our internal world."

"Stop writing and listen as I repeat that point: what we perceive, copy in our sketchbooks, and memorize are the final architectural forms in front of our eyes. These forms, however, are not the result of processes of architectural addition only, but also of subtraction."

Belardi's project here is to engage readers as prospective students of his fictional courses on Inventive Drawing & Informed Drawing. He is so successful as to be triumphant in this goal, creating - in his words - "an intellectual conversation between a teacher and a student" which not only informs the student on the details of Belardi's philosophy, but drives him to invent his own response to the lectures, in Belardi's own mode. This book has driven me to draw more often and more constuctively even while in the midst of reading it, and it has driven me to want to study the authored and the anonymous buildings around me in turn.

[Ebru Şevli · Rating 4 out of 5]

here are some short parts of the book to give you an idea what it is like;

''because skeetching is, above all, a valuable notational system that somehow is ahead of the future''

''drawn impulsively as the real time transcription of unconsciously accumulated anergy''

''...such sketches reveal with their 'thickness' the tortuos process of design, revealing references and images that were not strictly part of it. Ideas abondened and retrieved, along with uncertainties, dissapointments and enthusiasm''

[Diane Henry]

Can’t rate this. I’m clearly not the intended audience, and so there were large sections opaque to me. Still, I could catch glimmers of what he was saying, thinking about social and pragmatic contexts of architecture beyond a formal and seemingly precise schematic. I could never quite capture the ideas, but what I glimpsed was sometimes really intriguing.

[Pía López Copetti · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's an interesting take on how we develop ideas by using our hands, the core of why we design, and how to understand creativity as a discipline.

[mahatmanto · Rating 4 out of 5]

bukunya kecil.
tidak tebal pula.

meski pun ditulis dengan keren dan ditulis untuk menjawab pertanyaan dari jaman ke jaman: mengapa arsitek selalu gatal untuk menggambar, buku baru [2014] terbitan MIT press ini bebas dari gambar. tidak ada gambar secuil pun di buku tentang gambar ini.

kalau pembaca mencari gambar, mereka disendirikan di PINTEREST. yang bisa diakses siapa saja di pinterest. com/whyarchitects/
dengan membebaskan dari gambar, buku ini layak tampil sebagai esai panjang mengenai nilai kultural dari pensil, serutan, kuas, kertas, kanvas dsb. ini buku isinya memang dirancang seperti kuliah bersambung tentang sketsa dan berpikir.

gambar adalah alat berpikir. benih-benih gagasan besar selalu sudah termuat dalam sketsa-sketsa awal arsitek, sebelum diterjemahkan ke dalam gambar instruksional yang menggerakkan para pembangun mewujudkan gagasan besar tadi.

[Andrew Bourne · Rating 1 out of 5]

Tepid, romantic even. I was hoping for something more Luddite.

[Simo Simo · Rating 5 out of 5]

An author who never disappoints!

[Luca Martini · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dischiude prospettive inedite, come ogni buon libro!