The Hand that Draws the Future - Part 3 of 10

In the last unit, I briefly summarized the history of the pedagogy of drawing by hand and the evolution of CAD within the design industry, and how voices from within academia and the profession began sounding out over the dearth of analog drawing and advocating for its re-integration as a crucial part of the design process.

Drexel professor and architect Eugenia Ellis in 1997, “Students do not draw by hand but rather enter the empty void of hyperspace in order to experience their own building designs, which appear on the screen as if in a movie. Haptic, aural, and other sensory cues are absent from their understanding of the architecture they hope to create.”

Mark Alan Hewitt recalls: “In 2006, during a conference at UC Berkeley, with artists, architects, delineators, teachers, landscape architects and animators: All were lamenting the absence of hand drawing in the training of young artists and designers and emphasizing the importance of hand skills in their own work.”

In 2012, over 500 design professionals participated in a symposium at Yale University entitled Is Drawing Dead? during and after which an overwhelming consensus arose in support of the retention of drawing by hand within design school curriculum. Robert Stern was reported to have said that design educations was in a crisis situation with respect to drawing, and that “…if every student is working in the computer, one has to wonder whether they have lost touch with the age-old relationship between the hand, the eye and the brain.”

In 2018 Michael Graves in the New York Times said: “Architecture cannot divorce itself from drawing, no matter how impressive the technology gets. Drawings are not just end products: they are part of the thought process of architectural design.”

In an interview in 2022, Sir Peter Cook said about drawing by hand: “The importance of drawing to architecture is almost fundamental… The struggle to depict something by hand gives you time to think into it… When you draw, you can decide on almost anything.”

Then there are these Frank comments.

Frank Lloyd Wright, from Alberto Izzo, in Three Quarters of a Century of Drawings, 1976 “…everything he has imagined, created and discovered comes through clearly and immediately from his drawings…His drawing gives ample testimony of a more direct contact with reality…drawing intended as ‘both an operative and critical instrument which serves to create and interpret architecture.“

Frank Gehry is often quotes as saying “I think my best skill as an architect is the achievement of hand-to-eye coordination. I am able to transfer a sketch into a model into the building….I know I draw without taking my pen off the page. I just keep going, and that my drawings I think of them as scribbles. I don't think they mean anything to anybody except to me, and then at the end of the day, the end of the project, they wheel out these little drawings and they're damn close to what the finished building is...”

Frank Ching, whom many of you are likely familiar with, from his book Architectural Graphics published in the 1970s, and now in its seventh edition wrote: “Sketching from life trains you to observe, analyze and evaluate while recording your environment…Beginning students often have difficulty in sketching accurately, since they believe they can comprehend without careful observation, confusing psychological impressions in the mind with what they really see.”

What is it about drawing by hand that evokes such strong sentiments from design practitioners? Are these just sentimental preferences? What goes on in our brains when we draw by hand? Is there a neurological connection between our brains and our hands? Can drawing by hand make us more creative? Could drawing by hand have intrinsic value to design?

Next up in Part 4: The hand that thinks and the brain of an architect.