This short essay, written by the author and critic Jonathan Glancey, coincides with the launch of the inaugural Architecture Drawing Prize – a competition curated by the World Architecture Festival, the Sir John Soane's Museum, and Make. The deadline for the award is the 17th of September 2021.
“Is graphicacy a word?” asks Ken Shuttleworth, founder of Make Architects and instigator of The Architecture Drawing Prize. It is. “Like literacy”, he says, “, it’s certainly what I’m interested in when looking at and judging drawings. It’s about a fluency in making and understanding them.” The Architecture Drawing Prize is in its fifth year now. “We tend to see very few hand drawings by young architects - they mostly use computers - and, today, most architectural students come from more of a maths and physics than an art background. I still believe, though, that hand drawing is very important.”
Why? “I think of the pencil as an extension of the body and mind. My brain works by drawing. The drawing and the idea are one and the same thing. Drawing is a process of discovery. It allows me to think quickly about what a building wants to be. You can revise and change drawings quickly as you think through a project. We used to talk about architecture drawn on the back of a “fag” (cigarette) packet. We say “napkin” now, but the idea is the same. If you look at some of the famous instant sketches through architectural history, you’ll see how sometimes those very first drawings shaped great buildings. I’m thinking of [Jørn] Utzon’s competition entry drawings for what became the Sydney Opera House.”
