
So when we draw by hand, we do so reaching out to the environment around us, and in doing so, says Hewitt, “We experience sensory and cognitive ideas concurrently.” The brain, “is not merely a circuit board that processes zeros and ones like a computer chip; it is also a supporting actor in a complex network of organs, nerves, chemicals and electrical signals that we know as the human organism.”

Hewitt’s plea, rooted through hand drawing – for “drawing as a medium of thought”, a “loop between biological memory and external memory” – is for a humanistic architecture all too often lacking in an era when “novelty and originality are ultimate tests of artistic worth”, when architects, often tied to a computer, feel the need, or pressure, to write and speak in arcane jargon to explain what a pencil drawing by Brunelleschi, Michelangelo, Alvar Aalto or Louis Kahn could do without a word of theoretical explanation.
