Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Marco Frascari, Eleven Exercises in The Art of Architectural Drawing: Slow Food For The Architect's Imagination
Marco Frascari, Eleven Exercises in The Art of Architectural Drawing: Slow Food For The Architect's Imagination
net/publication/257314827
CITATION READS
1 552
1 author:
Sylvie Duvernoy
Politecnico di Milano
28 PUBLICATIONS 43 CITATIONS
SEE PROFILE
Some of the authors of this publication are also working on these related projects:
All content following this page was uploaded by Sylvie Duvernoy on 29 November 2014.
In the process of architectural design, the drawings that are intended to represent the
ideas stemming from the designer’s imagination fall into two main categories: conceptual
sketches, related mainly to the early research phases; and communication drawings,
related to the phase of divulgation of the results of the research. Conceptual sketches
relate emotions, while communication drawings mostly report information. The
communication drawing, in order to be efficient, must adhere to the standard codes of
two- and three-dimensional representation, and therefore takes the familiar forms of
plan, section, elevation, perspective, digital rendering, and so forth. It can be done by
assistants or collaborators. Marco Frascari calls this kind of drawing “trivial drawing”. On
the other hand, the “non-trivial drawing”, which describes the idea rather than the form,
may take any graphic form whatsoever, and may be done with any kind of graphic tool.
The quality of the conceptual sketch, done by no one other than the designers
themselves, depends heavily on their ability to express their feelings on paper with
pencils, markers, colors, and all sorts of graphic techniques.
Marco Frascari, of Italian origin, has been teaching architectural design for many
years in the United States and Canada. This new book is totally dedicated to the “non-
trivial drawing”, inquiring into the relationship between drawing and designing, or
better, between drawing and thinking. Although the title of the volume is Eleven
Exercises in the Art of Architectural Drawing, the book is not meant only for students
but also for colleagues engaged in teaching drawing and/or working in design studios,
and of course, for anyone interested in the meaning of drawing. More than a textbook, it
is an essay. The subtitle gives us the key to understanding the author’s thesis and the
purpose of the eleven exercises: “slow food for the architect’s imagination”.
The arguments that Frascari discusses in his essay are so many and so diverse that it is
impossible to comment on them all. Among them, three main themes that recur in the
various chapters of the book have caught my attention: the question of slow vs. fast, the
opposition between digital and non-digital, and – last but not least – the relationship
between design and drawing tools.