Architect Drawings : A Selection of Sketches by World Famous Architects Through History

necessary information. The museum of Egyptian archaeology in Barcelona possesses a
‘Representation of the god Imhotep’ from approximately 600 BC. Imhotep, the first recorded
architect, who also was deified, has been sculpted holding a roll of papyrus. Knowing he was
responsible for the design of much Egyptian architecture, it would be reasonably safe to propose
he was carrying architectural drawings. It may be equally rewarding to presume he was
pictured with written documents concerning construction.
Some drawing instruments survive from this period. Maya Hambly, writing on the history
of drawing tools, acknowledges that a scale rule, a drawing instrument and a form of plan have
been located and dated from Babylon, approximately 2000 BC (1988). The architectural historian
Spiro Kostof proposes that Egyptian architects used leather and papyrus for record drawings,
where ‘sketch-plans were incised on flat flakes of limestone’ called ostraka being the
communication on the job site (1977, p. 7). Egyptian builders employed plans and elevations
that were obviously diagrammatic outlines and layered drawings indicating spatial relationships.
Egyptian painting has displayed plans of gardens, but whether these images were intended as
descriptions of a finished site, or as preparation for building, remains difficult to surmise.
Builders in China used silk and paper for architectural drawings (plan and elevation), and
drawings cast or etched into bronze exist from the Warring States period (475–221 BC). The
Chinese had developed techniques for making paper as early as 100 AD. Making its way to
Europe (1100 AD in Morocco and 1151 AD in Spain), this technology arrived in Italy approximately
1256 AD, where linen rags provided the fiber necessary for production. Beginning
in the fourteenth century, paper was available in abundance, but it was not until the midnineteenth
century that wood pulping expanded its manufacture (Hutter, 1968; Dalley, 1980).
Compasses used to construct circles had been employed by the early Egyptians, although they
were constructed simply of two hinged metal legs. Mathematical instruments such as astrolabes
were developed in the third to sixth century during the rise of Islamic civilization
(Hambly, 1988). In the study of vision and light, the Chinese understood that light traveled in
parallel and straight paths as early as the fifth century BC (Hammond, 1981). In anticipation of
the camera obscura, Mo Ti documented the understanding of an inverted image projected
through a pinhole. Comparatively, Arab physicists and mathematicians comprehended the
linearity of light in the tenth century (Hammond, 1981). In the thirteenth and fourteenth
centuries, lenses were common, but Roger Bacon has been erroneously credited with invention
of the camera obscura. Although not completely documented, it is very possible they were
commonly used to observe eclipses of the sun and subsequently transformed into an apparatus
for copying.
Greek architects, some of whose names are known, designed temples heavily influenced by
tradition. The temples served as templates, precedent models, for subsequent construction
(Smith, 2004; Coulton, 1977; Porter, 1979). Additionally, these architects employed threedimensional
paradigma to describe details and syngraphai, written specifications (Hewitt, 1985).
Examples of full-scale building details have been found inscribed on a wall of the Temple of
Apollo at Didyma (Hambly, 1988). It may be surmised that, with the study of geometry by
Euclid, Greek architects utilized geometrical instruments and that builders would have used
scale rules and set squares to achieve precision construction (Hambly, 1988). Kostof mentions
these anagrapheis/descriptions, but wonders how the refinements in temple design could have
been accomplished without drawings. The role of the Roman architect was less immersed in
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