The Disappearing Drawing
A few weeks ago, I picked up a stack of architecture books. One of them was an expensive monograph of John Pawson: John Pawson: Making Life Simpler, published by Phaidon. I flipped through it looking for something specific, and it confirmed what I had realized a long time ago: there wasn’t a single plan. No section. No diagram. No explanatory drawing of any kind. Just photographs, page after page, glossy and mute. Not a single plan!
This isn’t an isolated case, and it isn’t accidental. Look at any architecture webmagazine today, scroll through the feeds of young offices on Instagram, browse the portfolios that circulate online — plans and sections have all but vanished. What’s left are renderings and photographs. Beautiful ones, often. But images of a finished thing, never the drawings that explain how it came to be.
If you are lucky, you’ll find a diagram or two, or an animated cartoon explaining the genesis of the building’s shape — but not the reason. Not the technical challenges, not the drawing solutions. That level of detail still exists, but mostly behind a paywall, in specialist publications rather than the magazines and feeds most people actually see.
I grew up going to a university that had Le Corbusier’s La Main Ouverte sculpture at its entrance. Corbu — and the modernists in general — was the sacred cow of my institute; admiring him was practically obligatory, almost a religion. Despite the movement and despite its principles, what I’ve always admired about Le Corbusier is that he inspired other architects to copy him. He wanted to be copied. I remember Tadao Ando saying he started learning architecture by drawing on top of Le Corbusier’s plans. A contemporary Tadao Ando couldn’t exist today, because there would be no plans left to copy. That’s the point. The commercial nature of design has taken over the ideal, noble mission of changing the world.
Why this happened
The reasons aren’t mysterious. Images are immediately legible. You don’t need to know how to read a plan to understand a photograph — the eye does the work instantly, no training required. A section, on the other hand, asks something of the viewer. It asks for a bit of literacy, a bit of patience. In a media environment built for the scroll and the swipe, that friction is a liability. Photographs travel. Renderings seduce. Plans don’t get likes.
Or to be more precise: plans and sections seduce only industry insiders and experts in the field, not the general public. That’s why magazines and websites, chasing a larger audience, must please a larger public. There are still specialist publications — DETAIL, to name one — but they’re a small drop in a very big ocean.
And so publishers, editors, and architects themselves have optimized for what performs. It’s a rational response to the incentives of Instagram, Pinterest, and the feed-driven economy of attention. I’m not claiming anyone made a conscious decision to suppress technical drawing — it’s simpler than that. It’s what happens when a discipline’s public face gets shaped by a platform that rewards immediacy over understanding.
Two consequences, and the second one worries me more
I see two consequences of this shift, and they’re connected but not equally weighted.
The first is about taste and ambition. When all a young designer sees is the final image — the surface, the style, the mood — that becomes the object of desire. You start wanting to reproduce an effect rather than a way of thinking. The photograph becomes the goal instead of the byproduct. This is understandable, even forgivable. Every generation absorbs architecture partly through image culture, and there’s nothing new about young architects being seduced by a striking photograph before they understand the discipline behind it. I was no different — I was drawn in by a beautiful drawing, not a photograph, but the pull was the same. That’s a story for another post.
The second consequence is more serious, and it’s the one that actually worries me — the one that pushed me to write this: the erosion of the ability to design at all. Architecture is, at its core, the discipline of commanding space. Not describing it, not decorating it — commanding it, understanding it well enough to shape it with intention. Plans, sections, drawings, and physical models are not illustrations of that understanding after the fact. They are the instruments through which understanding is built. You don’t draw a section because you already know the building. You draw the section to find out what the building is. The drawing is the thinking.
A published photograph is the end of a long, deliberate process — the accumulation of decisions, revisions, and cross-checks that happened in plan and section long before a camera or a rendering engine ever got involved. Every image worth looking at is downstream of a drawing. The drawing comes first. The image comes after. That order is not incidental; it’s the entire discipline in miniature.
A message to young designers: remember that having a great idea, or a great vision, is not enough. Even a great idea, if you can’t communicate it effectively, is worth zero.
When we draw a plan or a section, we’re doing several things at once:
That’s why even a simple plan carries so much information. And that’s why it should always accompany the beautiful picture, not disappear behind it.
If we stop showing that process — if the plan disappears from the page and only the finished image survives — we’re not simplifying communication. We’re erasing the evidence that architecture requires thought before it produces form. And if that evidence disappears, how are new designers supposed to learn that the sequence matters? Nobody teaches themselves to think in sections by staring at a photograph. You learn to think in sections by drawing sections, by seeing other people’s sections, by understanding that the beautiful photograph you admire was preceded by dozens of unglamorous, unpublished drawings nobody will ever see.
So — dear architects, dear publishers: I understand you don’t want to reveal the secret magic behind your beautiful pictures. But we need to show the young generation what’s behind the final result. Otherwise, we won’t pass on the testimony, and sooner or later, there will be no one left able to do it.
Why this matters more now than ever
This concern would be real in any era, but it’s sharper today because of AI. We now have tools that can generate a finished-looking architectural image from a few words of prompt — no plan, no section, no spatial reasoning required at any point in the process. The gap between “having an idea” and “producing a convincing image of that idea” has nearly disappeared. Which means the temptation to skip the drawing altogether — to go straight from vague intention to seductive render — has never been stronger.
Do we really want to live in a world where the images are gorgeous, but no one is able to build them — or to judge, critically and objectively, whether they deserve to be built at all?
This makes it more urgent, not less, that we protect the discipline of the drawing. We cannot live on images alone. An architect’s responsibility isn’t to produce a compelling picture; it’s to translate an idea into precise spatial geometry — the kind of information that a contractor, an engineer, or a builder can actually use to construct something in the physical world. A rendering doesn’t tell a mason where a wall goes. A plan does. No AI model, however convincing its output, can replace the discipline of thinking through a building in plan and section, because that discipline isn’t really about producing a drawing — it’s about producing understanding.
What I’d like to see change
I don’t think the fix is complicated, even if it runs against the current. Magazines, blogs, and offices publishing their work could simply start including the drawings again — not as an afterthought buried at the bottom of the page, but as the evidence of process it actually is. Show the plan next to the photograph. Show the section that made the image possible. Let young architects see, explicitly, that the sequence runs from geometry to image and not the other way around.
It costs almost nothing to do. And it might be the only thing standing between the next generation of architects and a discipline that has forgotten how to think in space.