![#](https://make-arch.imgix.net/https%3A%2F%2Fwww.makearchitects.com%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2020%2F09%2FDrawSee_47_ed-scaled.jpg?auto=format&crop=center&fit=crop&h=279&ixlib=php-1.2.1&w=210&s=1bf05ba953be6cac6cc51308f662bab9 210w,https://make-arch.imgix.net/https%3A%2F%2Fwww.makearchitects.com%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2020%2F09%2FDrawSee_47_ed-scaled.jpg?auto=format&crop=center&fit=crop&h=558&ixlib=php-1.2.1&w=420&s=de78cd3accacf35e486a5fed7afe774a 420w,https://make-arch.imgix.net/https%3A%2F%2Fwww.makearchitects.com%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2020%2F09%2FDrawSee_47_ed-scaled.jpg?auto=format&crop=center&fit=crop&h=1021&ixlib=php-1.2.1&w=768&s=36fc86ec760cd4c9869d2af95dc7a970 768w,https://make-arch.imgix.net/https%3A%2F%2Fwww.makearchitects.com%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2020%2F09%2FDrawSee_47_ed-scaled.jpg?auto=format&crop=center&fit=crop&h=1361&ixlib=php-1.2.1&w=1024&s=7c2658fc1e39c7f567fa0c12edd10ef0 1024w,https://make-arch.imgix.net/https%3A%2F%2Fwww.makearchitects.com%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2020%2F09%2FDrawSee_47_ed-scaled.jpg?auto=format&crop=center&fit=crop&h=1861&ixlib=php-1.2.1&w=1400&s=02e51b742b58a49c0c8377f348186594 1400w,https://make-arch.imgix.net/https%3A%2F%2Fwww.makearchitects.com%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2020%2F09%2FDrawSee_47_ed-scaled.jpg?auto=format&crop=center&fit=crop&h=2127&ixlib=php-1.2.1&w=1600&s=b2f82bf5e60b013ef168268565f64a24 1600w,https://make-arch.imgix.net/https%3A%2F%2Fwww.makearchitects.com%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2020%2F09%2FDrawSee_47_ed-scaled.jpg?auto=format&crop=center&fit=crop&h=2552&ixlib=php-1.2.1&w=1920&s=fdac4aecad416d6873cbfea042ba270f 1920w)
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.”
![#](https://make-arch.imgix.net/https%3A%2F%2Fwww.makearchitects.com%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2020%2F09%2FDrawSee_147_ed.jpg?auto=format&crop=center&fit=crop&h=141&ixlib=php-1.2.1&w=210&s=d21027b7c2767c3ea136b93c3e939cb4 210w,https://make-arch.imgix.net/https%3A%2F%2Fwww.makearchitects.com%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2020%2F09%2FDrawSee_147_ed.jpg?auto=format&crop=center&fit=crop&h=282&ixlib=php-1.2.1&w=420&s=90396a43f8f1053e809502a69d1d209f 420w,https://make-arch.imgix.net/https%3A%2F%2Fwww.makearchitects.com%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2020%2F09%2FDrawSee_147_ed.jpg?auto=format&crop=center&fit=crop&h=516&ixlib=php-1.2.1&w=768&s=058e37c5e7dcd2e458aed262012f4313 768w,https://make-arch.imgix.net/https%3A%2F%2Fwww.makearchitects.com%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2020%2F09%2FDrawSee_147_ed.jpg?auto=format&crop=center&fit=crop&h=688&ixlib=php-1.2.1&w=1024&s=be3508f5ab0aff93446a965c92df9a9d 1024w,https://make-arch.imgix.net/https%3A%2F%2Fwww.makearchitects.com%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2020%2F09%2FDrawSee_147_ed.jpg?auto=format&crop=center&fit=crop&h=940&ixlib=php-1.2.1&w=1400&s=b933584489ea83bd67b57642d3283657 1400w,https://make-arch.imgix.net/https%3A%2F%2Fwww.makearchitects.com%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2020%2F09%2FDrawSee_147_ed.jpg?auto=format&crop=center&fit=crop&h=1075&ixlib=php-1.2.1&w=1600&s=1b0484b79cec91a78083f735270e438c 1600w,https://make-arch.imgix.net/https%3A%2F%2Fwww.makearchitects.com%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2020%2F09%2FDrawSee_147_ed.jpg?auto=format&crop=center&fit=crop&h=1290&ixlib=php-1.2.1&w=1920&s=035ccf5edb42cd52f5a3a64710d1629c 1920w)
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.
![#](https://make-arch.imgix.net/https%3A%2F%2Fwww.makearchitects.com%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2020%2F09%2FDrawSee_74_ed.jpg?auto=format&crop=center&fit=crop&h=157&ixlib=php-1.2.1&w=210&s=1818f2a717c78cd959cfbbc4a2e35ef1 210w,https://make-arch.imgix.net/https%3A%2F%2Fwww.makearchitects.com%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2020%2F09%2FDrawSee_74_ed.jpg?auto=format&crop=center&fit=crop&h=314&ixlib=php-1.2.1&w=420&s=6d28893d2b13e1eb10c6a0b260f6a37c 420w,https://make-arch.imgix.net/https%3A%2F%2Fwww.makearchitects.com%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2020%2F09%2FDrawSee_74_ed.jpg?auto=format&crop=center&fit=crop&h=575&ixlib=php-1.2.1&w=768&s=704cd66795b90ce2e394767d8a8f766c 768w,https://make-arch.imgix.net/https%3A%2F%2Fwww.makearchitects.com%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2020%2F09%2FDrawSee_74_ed.jpg?auto=format&crop=center&fit=crop&h=766&ixlib=php-1.2.1&w=1024&s=bfb9b88d6a090d46f33213fc14c8d916 1024w,https://make-arch.imgix.net/https%3A%2F%2Fwww.makearchitects.com%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2020%2F09%2FDrawSee_74_ed.jpg?auto=format&crop=center&fit=crop&h=1047&ixlib=php-1.2.1&w=1400&s=cb5fe50a5a12f47183b793451f5fd9f9 1400w,https://make-arch.imgix.net/https%3A%2F%2Fwww.makearchitects.com%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2020%2F09%2FDrawSee_74_ed.jpg?auto=format&crop=center&fit=crop&h=1197&ixlib=php-1.2.1&w=1600&s=eba9e792cc2f81c65d4c7754dca358a0 1600w,https://make-arch.imgix.net/https%3A%2F%2Fwww.makearchitects.com%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2020%2F09%2FDrawSee_74_ed.jpg?auto=format&crop=center&fit=crop&h=1436&ixlib=php-1.2.1&w=1920&s=e13e2e26304ea950c0172edd3a1c9421 1920w)
The Architecture Drawing Prize 2020 encourages digital, hybrid and hand drawings, yet, significantly in the light of the Covid-19 pandemic, there will be a “Lockdown Prize” for a drawing completed during the lockdown or relating to the changes that Covid-19 may, or will, bring to architecture. During lockdown, many architects have turned anew to hand drawing, sketching objects, rooms, people, pets and plants around them, learning as if all over again how to reconnect with that “loop” identified by Mark Alan Hewitt “between biological memory and external memory.”
To draw by hand, as Hewitt points out, is not to regress in terms of architectural adventure. He reminds us how Frank Gehry’s radical Bilbao Guggenheim was the creative product first of hand sketches and hand-made cardboard models and only in the production stage, a design fed into computers. And he traces this tradition back to the masters of Baroque architecture who worked at a time when hugely imaginative buildings were the memorable product of embodied knowledge – ways of conceiving and making daring buildings handed down over centuries – and experimentation made through drawings that do indeed reveal hand and eye, mind and body working together.
Hewitt talked with Harley Jessup, the production designer for many of Pixar’s digitally animated films. His studio made 28,244 hand drawings for Toy Story 2, 46,024 for Monsters Inc and 72,000 for Rataouille. Jessup wants his designers to see and this means drawing by hand. Computers have their own wizardry, yet truly humane design and architecture need that embodied knowledge and sensory experience that comes from picking up a pencil and making marks on paper.
Draw in Order to See: A Cognitive History of Architectural Design by Mark Alan Hewitt, Oro Editions, 2020, £29.95
![#](https://make-arch.imgix.net/https%3A%2F%2Fwww.makearchitects.com%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2020%2F09%2FDraw-in-Order-to-See-cover-scaled.jpg?auto=format&crop=center&fit=crop&h=271&ixlib=php-1.2.1&w=210&s=32c1dee40f0a656eb7a85e8d83938baa 210w,https://make-arch.imgix.net/https%3A%2F%2Fwww.makearchitects.com%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2020%2F09%2FDraw-in-Order-to-See-cover-scaled.jpg?auto=format&crop=center&fit=crop&h=541&ixlib=php-1.2.1&w=420&s=d47a16b7ffa62740ecbb24da3232a1ee 420w,https://make-arch.imgix.net/https%3A%2F%2Fwww.makearchitects.com%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2020%2F09%2FDraw-in-Order-to-See-cover-scaled.jpg?auto=format&crop=center&fit=crop&h=990&ixlib=php-1.2.1&w=768&s=daa6869488f5cca1b0936ac48796424c 768w,https://make-arch.imgix.net/https%3A%2F%2Fwww.makearchitects.com%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2020%2F09%2FDraw-in-Order-to-See-cover-scaled.jpg?auto=format&crop=center&fit=crop&h=1320&ixlib=php-1.2.1&w=1024&s=5b6c63217bc1c3a7803fd03b4e3cdf68 1024w,https://make-arch.imgix.net/https%3A%2F%2Fwww.makearchitects.com%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2020%2F09%2FDraw-in-Order-to-See-cover-scaled.jpg?auto=format&crop=center&fit=crop&h=1805&ixlib=php-1.2.1&w=1400&s=1bd40adc182c9074ab12b66346d6dd6d 1400w,https://make-arch.imgix.net/https%3A%2F%2Fwww.makearchitects.com%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2020%2F09%2FDraw-in-Order-to-See-cover-scaled.jpg?auto=format&crop=center&fit=crop&h=2062&ixlib=php-1.2.1&w=1600&s=3c22e1888f8b781166c017d65e7332b2 1600w,https://make-arch.imgix.net/https%3A%2F%2Fwww.makearchitects.com%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2020%2F09%2FDraw-in-Order-to-See-cover-scaled.jpg?auto=format&crop=center&fit=crop&h=2475&ixlib=php-1.2.1&w=1920&s=596ca9448b9b3d4d453c2b45e6ac9d6d 1920w)
This article was originally published on ArchDaily.
This post forms part of our series on The Architecture Drawing Prize: an open drawing competition curated by Make, WAF and Sir John Soane’s Museum to highlight the importance of drawing in architecture. Entries for 2020 close 2 October.