Sketches

I draw by hand, but I don’t like free-hand sketching. Of course, when designing, it is inevitable to make sketches, especially when collaborating with someone. A quick sketch remains the most efficient way to communicate to others early ideas or observations about a design scheme. Free-hand sketching has become so normal that it feels like sketching is a ‘natural’ thing to do, something that has always existed in the discipline and profession of architecture. However, this is not true. The rise of the sketch is concomitant with the rise of the architect as author, which happened between the 15th and the 16th century. The earliest known sketches by architects date back to the early 1500s, and the artist and architect who exploited this technique more than anyone else at that time was Michelangelo Buonarroti. The famed artist – who was a painter, sculptor, and architect – was however reluctant to be involved in architectural design, because he felt that this profession lacked the expressive immediacy of the other mediums. For this reason, when designing architecture Michelangelo used the same technique that painters and sculptors used to design their works: free-hand sketching. In this way, Michelangelo contradicted the established practice of drawing architecture with pen and ruler. In fact, since ancient times, architectural drawing had only been conceivable as geometric, i.e. as precise and eventually measured notation. Although not always drawn to scale, as it is common today, an architectural drawing was always expected to be very different from the kind of drawings painters or sculptors produced. Leon Battista Alberti argued against pictorial representations of architecture and encouraged designers to rely only on the precision of geometric notations. Michelangelo broke from this tradition and drew architecture in the same way he would draw a human figure. His architectural drawings are very pictorial, as in his famous elevation of his project for Porta Pia in Rome. In order to stress the pictorial nature of his drawings, Michelangelo was the first to use pencil – the famous ‘sanguigna’, a red pencil made of hematite. Since then, the architect’s drawing became synonymous with sketching, so every great architect, from Francesco Borromini to Frank O. Gehry is known to be the ‘true’ author of their architecture because they have sketched it, first. This is the subliminal message of the architect’s sketch: “I’m the author, I’m the originator of the building I design”. Nevermind the countless people that work on a project or building – from designers to builders – until recently the sketch guaranteed the indisputable authorship of the architect. From mere tool of instant elucidation, the architect’s sketch became, in the last four centuries, a real fetish – and today hand sketching is still believed to be a surplus of authenticity when submitting a project to a client or a competition. I don’t like sketches because they give a rather unprecise and too picturesque impression of architecture. Often, the person who sketches is more concern with free-hand bravura than with what the sketch is meant to convey. But, above all, sketches elude the fundamental condition of architecture as a measurable thing. If I really have to sketch, I do it in the most simple and crude way without any embellishment. Otherwise, I avoid free-hand drawing, and draw architecture with a ruler using a 8H pencil, eventually retracing my drawing with a 0.25 Rapidograph. I love the mechanical nature of the architectural drawing, its geometric essence, its hardness, the fact that it has to be precise and immediately measurable. In my hand-drawings I don’t like mistakes. There is something deeply reassuring in the precision of the architectural drawing, something that approximates happiness because, as a medieval theologist once said, only perfection brings happiness.