Courses

Over the last four decades, the emergence of digital design technologies has fueled debates about the fate of drawing in architectural practice. These discussions often presume a narrow definition of drawing as something executed by hand, typically with a pen on paper. As an architectural medium, however, drawing has historically encompassed a wide range of graphic acts of mark-making that engage a variety of scales, materials, and surfaces, long preceding the proliferation of paper and the authorial figure of the architect. Employing a longue durée approach that embraces a capacious and porous definition of drawing, this seminar seeks to reevaluate the development of architectural drawing in Europe. Rather than beginning in sixteenth-century Italy, as many standard narratives do, it ends there, offering a fundamentally different view of Renaissance practice. The seminar also seeks to deepen our understanding of architectural drawing through direct, object-based study, making use of the rich collections of Avery Library, New York Public Library, Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Cooper Hewitt, as well as the exhibition Gothic by Design: The Dawn of Architectural Draftsmanship (opening April 16) at the Met.