Welcome to Drawn to Design

 

"Drawing a building is a way of remembering it properly. To draw you have to look very hard and I think it is in the looking itself that the building is impressed upon the mind. Often I measure it and made a plan, putting the dimensions on the drawing, because I know from experience that only by doing that can I understand what I’m looking at."

– Caroline Mauduit, An Architect in Italy

 

Welcome to the "Drawn to Design" Blog

The intention of this blog, like my book Drawn to Design, is to help designers, design students and others develop an appreciation for observation and learning about the designed environment through freehand drawing.

By "observing" I mean, as Caroline Mauduit notes, that we consider the designed, and by extension, the natural environment carefully with a critical and inquisitive eye. Unlike the casual glance or even the latent, passive photograph, even the fastest, literal drawing is an inherently careful and active engagement. Drawing is a way of digesting the environment in order to come away with a greater understanding of how the environment might have been formed, what it contributes or does not contribute and what lessons might be embedded in it.

An essential focus of this blog and the book is freehand drawing. Freehand drawing is helpful because, when all is said and done, the hand is connected to our minds and is both accurate and inaccurate; it intrinsically related to who we are and how we think. The freehand drawing is as close as we can get to the thing itself without building and as an unmitigated process, the slip of the finger, the varied weight of a line or the wiggle resulting from too much coffee allows the building to remain alive.