The Rise of Architectural Drawing

Over the last four decades, the emergence of digital design technologies has fueled debates about the fate of drawing in architectural practice. These discussions often presume a narrow definition of drawing as something executed by hand, typically with a pen on paper. As an architectural medium, however, drawing has historically encompassed a wide range of graphic acts of mark-making that engage a variety of scales, materials, and surfaces, long preceding the proliferation of paper and the authorial figure of the architect. Employing a longue durée approach that embraces a capacious and porous definition of drawing, this seminar seeks to reevaluate the development of architectural drawing in Europe. Rather than beginning in sixteenth-century Italy, as many standard narratives do, it ends there, offering a fundamentally different view of Renaissance practice. The seminar also seeks to deepen our understanding of architectural drawing through direct, object-based study, making use of the rich collections of Avery Library, New York Public Library, Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Cooper Hewitt, as well as the exhibition Gothic by Design: The Dawn of Architectural Draftsmanship (opening April 16) at the Met.