I am surprised at the other comments here that state sketching is a skill worth preserving. That's something the author of the article clearly states, hist call to discussion is about technical drawing by hand. And I'm surprised this is still a topic. I studied architecture more than 25 years ago and at that time hand drawing was already phasing out. I have never practiced architecture since then and never thought there would be a debate about drawing by hand again. From what I heard of friends being in the business, doing 2D-drawings isn't a thing in bigger projects anymore, as it is way more economical and less error prone to do the plans with 3D modeling.

CAD programs were designed to automate hand drafting processes. Most of the autocad commands made no sense until Drafting 101. It was a full semester of hand drafting, which did feel excessive. Hand writing hundreds of words in an engineering font is just a waste of time.

I've been practicing drawing on my iPad.

Not having to use stuff like whiteout and having undo is quite nice. Getting layers "for free" is nice. I've given myself permission to even do some digital manipulation like resizing on the fly rather than redrawing some eye.

But watching some pros go at it on paper + pen, I do get this feeling that when you don't have the undo button you really do gotta force yourself to get good at the nitty gritty. Really you need to get good at drawing lines nicely the first time when you're inking to paper.

Also, when going through this stuff slowly and annoyingly, or tracing other people's art, you really start internalizing things like how some visual effect is gotten by just a handful of lines. 6 well placed lines gives you a notion of very voluminous hair for example.

it does feel like touching the lower level parts of a craft can help so much with having good fundamentals at a higher level.

Who hasn't, as a kid, thought "Oh I can draw bubble letters" and then realize that it's actually kinda tough, and then after mastering it have some new appreciation for spacing lines out properly and knowing where the pen goes?

Seems like a useful way to get a feel for things. Everyone "knows" how perspective work, yet a lot of people can't commit it to a page. There's clearly some understanding for how things work hidden in being able to do the thing, isn't there?

My dad was an old-school architect. When AutoCAD replaced the drafting table—the ink, the ruler, the set square, the protractor—he thought it was crap, because now any total hack at drawing could do it.

For me, on the other hand, AutoCAD was amazing, because with AutoLISP you could draw with words. And now, with the LLM boom, I finally get him.

The way of seeing can be taught, requires discipline, and all the ways execution can fail--requiring tape, scissors, inks, or C-z--proves training is in the (deliberate) act.

Taste is another. It varies among many, but is often refined by the diet.

The author is quite right to pose this question, but I would remind everyone that out of all the "drawing professions" one could choose, those with the least drawing skills usually chose to study architecture.

And I would argue also that this scarcity of ability was already a problem for the last 100 years. The whole iterative process of ideation (ie. designing, sketching) gets so much less intuitive, if one has to pull out a ruler first, or boot up his machine.

While I can't say whether Bauhaus and subsequent modern styles are to blame, with their reductionist philosophies, or rather the lack of ability of the professionals driving "style" into that direction, it surely does rhyme with the general population's perception of modern architecture being faceless, and indistinguishable, boxes.

After all, none of our modern building's first designs consist of strokes that came from the rich muscle memory of a human arm. At best they came from arms with almost none.

The state of affairs is so bitter, often the buildings perceived to be the most creative ones of this era are most often results of letting some `Math.random()` on a PC do the drawing.

If I had to count one positive thing about being a graffiti "artist" since youth it's that you constantly practicing shapes and the perceived emotional impacts of even tiniest adjustments all embedded in your muscle memory. Once you gained that skill, no design tool can beat that ideation process. Not with a stylus, not with ai. Even the ms between a stylus's input until it appears on-screen are blocking you, the misalignment of the stylus's tip to where the drawn line appears, let alone the seconds++ an AI takes to turn your prompt into an image.

In dev-speak, removing hand-drawing from the skill set of architects entirely is as if you were deliberately removing HMR from your local web dev-setup.

I would thus argue the opposite: Architects badly need to draw more!

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