Hand Drawings Matters

Why hand-drawing still matters to teaching architecture

I am a proponent of hand drawing,  as the first means of representation that architecture students should learn. This is rapidly becoming a radical position in architectural education, it appears. Anyway I think about it all the time and I’ve recently discussed it with somebody important who didn’t understand what I was trying to say. So it’s time to get some thoughts down.
Here are some reasons why hand drawing still matters in architecture schools:

 1.  Hand drafting is the quickest way to learn about line-weight  i.e. about different  kinds of line and how to deploy them to establish a meaninful hierarchy or set of relationships in a drawing. AutoCAD and other software can do this too, but they do not put the same onus on the student to establish a set of line weights and then to stick to that decision for the duration of the production of the drawing.


2.  Hand drafting is the only way to really understand how projected drawings, axons, perspectives really work. I.e. it makes the difference between a 3D software “user” and an architect.

3.  Hand drafting is still a skill most architects have and care about and can critique, even though they don’t use it much in their work. So it is still relevant to discussions among architects and to architecture culture.

4.  Hand drafting gets students to focus on the work and the drawings themselves without getting bogged down and stressed out with printing problems. It also fosters a palpably intense work atmosphere in studio because the students are all in there producing work at a scale that makes it easy to peer-review.

5.  There is a pleasure in hand drawing that the computer does not replicate, though computers offer other pleasures.  The specific nature of the pleasure of drawing is akin to dance and improvisation, and I will try to unfold it in a later post.

6. There is a way of thinking about line in hand drawing that the computer cannot replicate easily. Namely, each line in a hand drawing is laid down over time on the paper, as the deposit of a controlled gesture.

7. There is a rigor in planning and work-flow that hand drawing imposes that, despite its anachronism in a modern office setting, teaches the young architect a great deal in terms of time management. Hand drawing is inherently self reflective .