Why we still draw by hand
A defence of the soft pencil, the long table, and the slow drawing, written on the studio’s first month for whoever joins us next.
By Ida Lindqvist
On the second week of the studio, the joiners arrived with four drawing boards we had ordered before we even had chairs. A friend asked, politely, why we were spending the budget that way. The boards are heavy. They take up floor space. The pencils need sharpening. It is a fair question and the answer is longer than I expected.
The pencil thinks slower than the cursor
A pencil line takes about a second. A line in the model takes a tenth of that. The pencil is slow on purpose. It will not let you commit to a wall before you have looked at it. It will let you change your mind in the middle of a line. The model will not.
The drawing is for the building, not the client
We do not show the hand drawings to clients. They are the first conversation the project has with itself, and they belong to the studio. By the time a client sees a drawing it has usually been through six pencil iterations and three models. The pencil drawings are not deliverables. They are the building thinking out loud.
“If you cannot draw it by hand, you do not yet understand it. If you can, you may begin in the model.”
The friend who asked, in the second week, has now visited the studio twice more. The second time was last week. She stood at one of the boards, with a 4B pencil and a section through a stair we had not yet started, and the question was hypothetical.
