desenhar em projecto: sete percursos

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Drawing in architecture is one of the most important tools we, architects, have to think about transforming what surrounds us. With drawing in design, we travel through the unknown and, often, through what we have already experienced in unforgettable places. The A1 sheets of tracing paper resting on the drawing board, the blank pages of a Moleskine A5 notebook... and the paper napkins covering any restaurant table are, by nature, our repository of memories: those we rescue from travels and books and, most importantly, those we create in each project. This is a "cosa mentale" that our hands make possible. We can contemplate the sketchbooks and notebooks as objects of artistic appreciation, which, even so, in their origin, explicitly carry the search for a solution to a specific problem, even if not a real one. Despite seeing the drawings of some architects as art, most of them have a very prosaic end: to solve a program in a given place. We don't draw to show or exhibit. Instead, we draw continuously until we are 'certain' that nothing escapes us, from the scale of the territory to the detail of a threshold. Thus, a process unfolds that forces us to overlap drawings, endlessly retracing the same floor plan, the same section, the same perspective, and the same detail, by hand and with rigor. Drawing in architecture is not an end in itself. The model, writing, photography, digital drawing, virtual reality, etc., complement this ancient method that we insist on teaching in our school since the 1988-1989 academic year.