Drawing Imagining Building

Reviews / Votes

"This remarkable book closely examines hand drawing practices in architecture as crucially important, embodied sites of meaningful, ethical creativity. Considering their formative aspects from the Renaissance up to the mid-20th. century, probing orthogonal drawings, qualitative lines, the agency of tools and scaling, and relationships to building, the author reveals connections between the architectural imagination and embodied hand skills that remain fruitful well into modernity, suggesting ways to overcome the reductive assumptions dominant in contemporary architectural design and representation." - Alberto Perez-Gomez, Professor, School of Architecture, McGill University, Canada

"Architectural drawing is a practice that is no less poetic than practical. In this topically structured narrative, wide-ranging in historical scope, Paul Emmons describes the uniqueness of the architect's intelligence and skill, in comparison with the methods and techniques that define other arts, such as farming and hunting, sewing and surgery. The art of constructing buildings is shown to be a model for drawing practice, insofar as the drawing board substitutes the building site, ink lines on paper forecasting ropes on a site, and much that will follow, though not all. Customary associations with painting and other representational arts are recast, for architectural drawing, Emmons insists, is not mimetic but projective, insofar as its objects indicate what could be built rather than what already exists. Embodied tacit knowledge is the chief protagonist in the drama of drawing, making plans, elevations and sections, with alternately legible, occult, and flowing lines. But the emergence of the rather more abstract and rationalized techniques of modern times is also explained. Students, scholars, and practitioners will find in this immensely learned and persuasively argued book an enlarged sense of the architect's craft, a way