The Necessity for Drawing

Abstract

in a recent, rather tedious faculty meeting, I made a number of marks on my pad that resembled the beginnings of a plan organization. After making several passes at my drawing, I found that I had reached an impasse. I handed the pad to a colleague who added a corresponding number of marks and returned it to me. The game was on; the pad was passed back and forth, and soon the drawing took on a life of its own, each mark setting up implications for the next. The conversation through drawing relied on a set of principles or conventions commonly held but never made explicit: suggestions of order, distinctions between passage and rest, completion and incompletion. We were careful to make each gesture fragmentary in order to keep the game open to further elaboration. The scale of the drawing was ambiguous, allowing it to read as a room, a building, or a town plan.

This essay was first published in Architectural Design, June 1977.