From Pixels to Pencils: The Renaissance of hand-drawn Architecture

What fascinating times to follow the tech and architecture world. Just when you thought that your drawing skills were no longer useful in this digital world, that very same world proves you wrong. For years, we have witnessed a cultural war between older and new generations about the importance of sketching and carefully crafted beaux-arts depictions of neoclassical buildings. Teachers insisted on the importance of training the eye, paying attention to details, and being willing to spend some time alone with your thoughts immersed in the process of translating the world around you onto an expensive sheet of paper. Students, on the other hand, complained that their teachers lacked vision for the future, that they hadn't prepared them for the job market where the bucolic scenes of impressionist painters capturing a landscape were not very useful to them. Moreover, we have seen the most conservative spectrum of the architectural world criticize how empty the architectural process had become in the age of computer rendering. They were actually right in their criticism. Like everything in this fast-paced, consumer-oriented world, the goal was always the result, and very rarely the process. The final product, in architecture as in many other disciplines, from news to books, from fashion to city sightseeing, had all become an end in itself. The means were rarely considered as something to be proud of, as something we did because we enjoyed the process. Instead, we were always taken on the shortest path, with results that rarely satisfied our anxiety to please the world.

In high school, I was taught how to draw by hand. I was not a genius at it, as some of my colleagues were, but I enjoyed it. I enjoyed the fact that for once in my life, I was doing something with my bare hands (literally) instead of using my head, as I always was required to do. I didn't really care much about the result; I was just a happy teenager finding refuge from the troubles that characterize those turbulent years. But when I got to architecture school, full of ideas, images, and references taken from the History of Art's classes I had taken the previous years, I became somehow stuck. I was confronting myself with the incapacity to bring my designs to life, either because I was not good enough at drawing and, therefore, presenting them with just a pencil and a sheet of paper, or because I was just not digitally skilled enough to make a 3D model and present it to the class. Models were a solution, but they required time to make and didn't really catch up with the ideas flashing through my mind. So for a while, I wondered if architecture was really my thing.

As you can tell by now, I didn't quit, but I invested heavily in ways of bringing ideas to life. I set hand-drawing aside because I thought no one really cared about it and focused on the digital skills I lacked so much. I learned Revit and became an expert; I gave classes on BIM and got interested in archviz, computers, and teraflops, and little by little, I got better at expressing myself visually. It seemed obvious to me that no one, no matter how good they were at drawing by hand, could surpass someone who had a fully detailed BIM model from which they could generate all the renderings they wanted.

And so it went. I left my notebook aside and picked it up only once in a while to make a quick detail or to go outside to urban sketch and catch some fresh air. But nevertheless, I knew deep inside that my commitment to it was being defrauded. I just had no good use to give to it, and that was it!

But some weeks ago, I was casually scrolling through Instagram, checking the latest Midjourney creations, and found something that caught my attention. It seemed that someone had solved the equation I had worried about so much and transformed a sketch into a truly impressive architectural rendering. I started browsing the web. I asked Bard about tools that transformed sketches into renderings, and it seemed that many of them had flourished under my nose! I tried them: Vizcom was the first one, and PromeAI followed suit.

The results were, as you can imagine, pretty... terrible. I had uploaded a rough sketch I had made that same day with the expectation AI could transform it into a masterpiece. And it just laughed at me, expelling a rougher rendering of a set of slabs more irregular than Gehry's Guggenheim.

I really felt like if I had all the drawing skills I had ignored for so long, I could be there, standing with a great computer rendering of an idea thought earlier that day. And that frustration, it seemed, was some of the greatest news I had had in a while. It meant that the future belongs once again to those who are empowered by technology to bring out the best of their natural capabilities. That you no longer had to choose between a computer or a pencil, at least for the foreseeable future.

Many theorists say that technology is only getting more human. That the days of flat screens and hard keyboards will give way to more user-friendly interfaces that will allow humans to move freely and use their God-given abilities to craft whatever they want without fearing being left behind by progress. That discussion is, obviously, an ongoing process. There's a long road ahead before we can bring digital buildings to life with the exclusive power of our hands and some AI into the mix. But one thing is true. The days of skillfully crafted architectural drawings are back. And I hope architects are prepared for that.

Me? I am picking up my pencil and that expensive sheet of paper once again.