Why we still draw by hand
A defence of the soft pencil, the long table, and the slow drawing, written for an audience of one impatient junior architect.
By Ida Lindqvist
A junior architect joined us in October and within a week asked, politely, why we still keep four drawing boards in a studio of fifteen people. The boards are heavy. They take up floor space. The pencils need sharpening. It is a fair question and the answer is longer than I expected.
The pencil thinks slower than the cursor
A pencil line takes about a second. A line in the model takes a tenth of that. The pencil is slow on purpose. It will not let you commit to a wall before you have looked at it. It will let you change your mind in the middle of a line. The model will not.
The drawing is for the building, not the client
We do not show the hand drawings to clients. They are the first conversation the project has with itself, and they belong to the studio. By the time a client sees a drawing it has usually been through six pencil iterations and three models. The pencil drawings are not deliverables. They are the building thinking out loud.
“If you cannot draw it by hand, you do not yet understand it. If you can, you may begin in the model.”
The junior architect has, since October, asked twice more whether the boards are worth the floor space. The second time was last week. She was at one of them, with a 4B pencil and a section through a stair, and the question was hypothetical.
