Architecture Through Drawing

Book excerpt: Architecture through Drawing examines how drawing - as both action and object - encapsulates complex ideas relating to culture, technology, space and the built environment. Bringing together an array of beautiful and rarely seen drawings dating from the sixteenth century to the present day, all representing different geographical locations, techniques, methodologies and purposes, the book defines a new field for the subject of the drawing in architecture. It reveals the motives for architectural drawing beyond the requirement to document the processes that underpin the realisation of the architectural object. This book asks, fundamentally, whether drawings can illuminate new interpretations of architectural experimentation. Examples range from initial sketches by architects to analytical and construction drawings, perspectives and schematics, collage and more complex presentations and paintings often carried out in association with others. Dialogues include Fabrizio Ballabio on Filippo Juvarra's Ottoboni Theatre; Desley Luscombe on Ludwig Mies van der Rohe; Mark Dorrian on Michael Webb; Nicholas Olsberg on Victorian architects William Butterfield, Norman Shaw and GE Street; Charles Rice on James Gowan; Laurent Stalder on perspective in postwar housing; Helen Thomas on the covers of San Rocco; John Macarthur on clouds; Markus Lähteenmaäki on Superstudio; and Erik Wegerhoff on the Viennese Auto-Expander. The volume is rounded off with an epilogue, 'The Limits of Drawing', by Adrian Forty and Sophie Read.