Freehand Drawing as Founding Practice of Architectural Thought

Abstract

This consideration starts from the observation of the progressive disappearance from the contemporary cultural debate of the discussion around architectural design as a complete artistic manual practice, on its foundations and perspectives. Caught up in the euphoria of how digital drawing would modify and transform a role, a relationship, a way of conceiving and observing the world, we have forgotten to produce the ‘experience of architecture’, both in teaching and research, in a direct form with one’s body, with the senses, with the hands, with one’s spirit, with a close and very rapid relationship between thought and action. We are certain that mind, arm, hand and sign are the substance of the relationship between theoretical thought and the ability to synthesize in formalizing a concrete point of view on reality. We intend to promote and practice hand drawing in architecture schools, as an irreplaceable means and tool for a reconciliation of the relationship with the time of our being in the world and with the poetic grandeur of direct observation through drawing which, besides restoring the immediacy of thought, can fill both the computer anonymity of the project and the analysis of reality. Every form of knowledge, in architecture as in all disciplinary fields, does not end in information, in the acquisition of perceptual data, in historical-critical elaboration, but relates to a theoretical thinking structure, articulated through the contributions of experience of ‘doing’, also through drawing. It is an ethical reasoning on teaching and training in architecture, through hand drawing intended as a creative work in arts and science, from thought to spirit. It is legitimate and essential to set up and share reasoning on the constitutive structure and the evaluation criteria of these productions, both from a theoretical point of view and from a critical, didactic and evaluative perspective.