Draw in order to see

Posted 21.09.2020

An extraordinarily modern cut away perspective of the, as yet unbuilt, central crossing of St Peter’s by Baldassare Peruzzi. Image courtesy of Oro Editions.

Why should any 21^st Century architect bother to draw by hand? There is, after all, an abundance of readily available digital tools that make pens and pencils seem little more than primeval artefacts. Fondly regarded, perhaps, yet as charmingly irrelevant to contemporary architecture as heavy horses are to today’s farmers or typewriters are to newspaper journalists.

And, yet, as the New York architect, historian and conservationist Mark Alan Hewitt is at pains to underline in his studious and polemical new book Draw in Order to See: A Cognitive History of Architectural Design, “Drawing strengthens neural networks and engages cognitive abilities just as playing scales and exercises keep musicians sharp.” Hewitt quotes Nicholas Carr, author of The Glass Cage: Automation and Us who reminds us that “The mind is not sealed in the skull, but extends throughout the body”.

Early 16th Century drawing by Baldassare Peruzzi thinking through four versions, in plan, of corner niches for the central crossing of St Peter’s Rome. Image courtesy of Oro Editions.

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.”

The mind is not sealed in the skull as has often been depicted, but extends throughout the body. Image courtesy of Oro Editions.

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.