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

Although few sketches with architectural themes have been retained from this period,
one may speculate that proportions or geometries, as well as construction details, were
sketched to communicate conceptual propositions. It would have been difficult to convey
intention without some form of visual description. Drawings may not have been preserved,
perhaps, because they were later reused for recording – such as the text on the back of the
St. Gall plan. Possibly, they were destroyed when their usefulness was complete, or by the
architectural guilds in an attempt to keep their building practices secret (Kostof, 1977).
From the practice of hand-copying religious texts, sketches appear in the margins of illuminated
manuscripts from medieval monasteries. Acting as illustrations to further elucidate
biblical narrative, the margins allowed enough space for small decorations of ink and paint.
These visual musings occasionally acted as rude commentary in contrast to the serious text.
As decorative doodlings and caricatures, they were freehand sketches often in the genres of
political satire or comic relief (Randall, 1966).
Artists of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries were moving towards a sense of pictorial
realism. These artists, refining religious icons, had little need for a theory of perspective.
The Japanese painters and printmakers, attempting a three-dimensional view devised a language
of perspective where objects further in the background were zigzagged higher onto
the page. Similarly, medieval perspective indicated objects in the distance be rendered
higher in the frame of the painting. Although without mathematical accuracy, these artists
located the onlooker’s position and used architectural elements such as niches to create an
illusion of three-dimensional space (White, 1972).
Many inventions and developments in drawing and painting surfaced during the fifteenth
century. Filippo Brunelleschi has been credited with the rediscovery of rules for ‘constructed’
perspective rendering in 1420 (White, 1972; Péréz-Gomez and Pelletier, 1997). These architects
(primarily Brunelleschi and Leon Battista Alberti) became attracted to this study because
they believed that in using architectural themes they were able to beguile the somewhat magical
aspects of geometry and proportion into perspective depth in painting (Péréz-Gomez and
Pelletier, 1997). Perspective aids such as simple frames divided into squares were employed in
the early 1400s (Hambly, 1988). Alberti used a show or perspective box and invented an
apparatus for constructing perspectives using strings. The camera obscura, possibly in common use,
reflected an object through a lens onto a slanted mirror. Projected onto a drawing surface,
and reduced in size, the image could then be traced (Hutter, 1968; Dalley, 1980; Hammond,
1981). Artists and painters used such tools and instruments to represent the world around
them, but they were also able to use similar techniques to envision the future. For various
reasons a history of architectural sketches really begins with the artists and architects of the
Renaissance.
RENAISSANCE BEGINNINGS
There are several explanations as to why very few architectural sketches, and drawings in
general, have been found that date from before the fifteenth century. There is not a simple
answer to this question, but rather numerous factors that affected the proliferation and subsequent
retention of sketches beginning with the Renaissance.
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