The Hand that Draws the Future - Part 2 of 10

The October 2019 issue of Architecture Boston, Nalina Moses wrote an article entitled Strokes of Genius, which she subtitled “In today’s digitized landscape, drawing is akin to an act of resistance.” An act of resistance. That intrigued me – the thought of resistance not as rebellion, but as a term used to refer to measurable opposition to the flow of current in an electrical circuit, a controlled pushback against overload. This could be the case with hand drawing – not as opposition to computer-aided methods, but as a historically reliable gate-keeper to the design process, as resistance protecting us from a potential short-circuit in an increasingly tech-dominant design industry.

Sidebar: Two books I have really enjoyed and highly recommend: Stick Figures: Drawing as Human Practice, in which D.P Dowd gives an easily digestible and entertaining summary of the evolution of drawing and its importance to the evolution of human beings. In Draw in Order to See, Mark Alan Hewitt brilliantly tracks the cognitive history of architectural design and construction from the Roman and Greek cultures through the Industrial Revolution.

The history of drawing tracks back thousands of years, from cave paintings tens of thousands of years ago to Sumerian art and Egyptian hieroglyphs (3000 BCE) to the pictographs and petroglyphs of Barrier Canyon caves of Utah (2000 BCE) to the ancient drawings of China and India, (1000 BCE) to the precision drawings of the Roman and Greek empires (400 BCE), the icons of the Middle Ages (500’s CE), the order of the Renaissance, (1400’s CE) the flamboyance of the Baroque (1600’s CE) and the contrarianism of the Industrial Revolution (1800’s CE).

What interested me, however, was Hewitt’s chapter tracking the history of pedagogy used to train architects over the last few hundred years. Hewitt begins with the most influential system of teaching architectural education for 150 years beginning in 1819 - the Ecole de Beaux Arts, with its inculcation of visual judgement in young architects through the disciplines of drawing from the cast, habits of mind, adherence to the concours (or design competition) system and reliance on sanctioned precedents.

The Beaux Arts system remained influential until about the middle of the 20th century when waves of technological advancements began resisting the old methods. With the rise of the Engineer and the polytechnic in the 1820’s that adopted a more scientific way of approaching design and the advent of computer visualization in the 1960’s, emerging digital technology challenged analog methods. Ivan Sutherland’s 1963 MIT thesis “Sketchpad” paved the way for the formation of Autodesk and the inauguration of CAD software in the 1980s. By the early 1990’s, beginning with Columbia University, CAD courses became firmly established as part of a design education curriculum. Rapid expansion followed with adoption of CAD by architects worldwide including the likes of Frank Gehry (Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao, 1997) and Zaha Hadid (Serpentine Gallery, London, 2000).

Soon however, voices arose lamenting the diminishing role of hand drawing in design pedagogy. Not in any way objecting to CAD but the lamentations were focused on the importance of hand drawings in the training of beginning design students and young architects. I found scores of such commentary on the Internet spanning well over two decades and in Part 3, we will consider a few of those sentiments.