CONVENTIONS OF ARCHITECTURAL DRAWING: REPRESENTATIONS AND MISREPRESENTATIONS.

Edited by James S. Ackerman and Wolfgang Jung. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University GSD. 2001. $10

The essential and privileged role of drawing in the realization of architecture has been a presumption of architectural discourse. This collection of articles on the conventions, meanings and uses of drawing from Palladio to Asymptote, is a welcome addition to this discourse. It reminds us that as central as drawing is to architecture, its conventions and its meanings are neither obvious nor always shared by the architectural community. Drawing may be employed in quite different ways, and may be understood differently by different architects, Indeed drawing in general and the particular drawings of any architect may be understood differently by different critics and historians. The essays in this collection provide interesting and at times important insights into the way drawing conventions have been stretched, refined, and reinvigorated in attempts to rethink, regenerate and recreate architecture since the Renaissance. As such, the work is a useful addition to our understanding of architectural drawing.

What the work also reveals is the extent to which the two-dimensional image has replaced, for some architects and critics, the making of building as the ultimate act of architecture. This raises the question: when more essay space is directed at images that have never been realized as built forms than those that have what does architectural drawing and two-dimensional images have to do with architecture as an act of making in a three dimensional world. Are the everyday uses of drawing in architecture, where image is a guide to making, becoming less important, and the image itself more critical as a kind of text to be interpreted rather than realized?

Whatever answer one comes to, the volume under review while proffering no answers certainly provides fodder for one or another position and offers an avenue into the current debates about the meanings and ways of understanding architectural images. One minor criticism, it would have helped in a book about drawing if the images presented were clearer and more easily read.