This book deals with the critical nature and crucial role of architectural drawings. A manual which is essentially not a manual; it is an elucidation of an elegant manner for practising architecture.
Organized around eleven exercises, the book does not emphasize speed, nor incorporate many timesaving tricks typical of drawing books, but rather proposes a slow, meditative process for construing drawings and for drawing constructing thoughts.
This is an indispensable reference text and an effective textbook for students seeking to advance their appreciation of the nature and exercise of architectural drawings.
Review
"Profound humanism is vividly evident on the pages of this book, humanism in two senses: a body of ancient and modern learning, and a philosophy of human existence. Each of Frascari’s drawings and discussions sparkles with wit, acute insight, and humane wisdom. For architects and other readers who are concerned with our built environment it is a work that should be carefully studied and pleasurably savored."
David Leatherbarrow, University of Pennsylvania
"Woven among the poetic sketches of these eleven lessons is a simple but profound message. Drawing is an embodied act of imagination and a creative way of thinking. It is a metaphoric power that has seduced architects since the first fragment of a design idea was drawn with a stick in the sand. While architecture schools today scurry to add still another software to their visual media, Frascari reminds us that what is being lost is quite possibly the capacity of the architect to think."
Harry Francis Mallgrave, College of Architecture, Illinois Institute of Technology
"Reminding us of the fact that architects (for the most part) make architectural images rather than buildings, Frascari sets about re-establishing the embodied act of drawing as the primary locus of architectural thinking – providing an urgent corrective to the too-often uncritical adoption of ever more disembodied digital design technologies. The culinary master-metaphor offers up a rich diet of historical dishes, resulting in an intellectual banquet of almost Bacchanalian proportions."
Jonathan Hale, Reader in Architectural Theory, University of Nottingham, UK
About the Author
Marco Frascari is Professor of Architecture at Carleton University, Canada. He studied and worked with Carlo Scarpa at IUAV and received his PhD in Architecture from the University of Pennsylvania. He taught for several years at the University of Pennsylvania, and as Visiting Professor at Columbia and Harvard. He then became a G. Truman Ward Professor of Architecture at Virginia Tech and is currently director of the David Azrieli School of Architecture and Urbanism in Ottawa, Canada.
