Do architects still need to draw? (2020)

3/26/2026 at 6:17:05 AM

I've been practicing drawing on my iPad.

Not having to use stuff like whiteout and having undo is quite nice. Getting layers "for free" is nice. I've given myself permission to even do some digital manipulation like resizing on the fly rather than redrawing some eye.

But watching some pros go at it on paper + pen, I do get this feeling that when you don't have the undo button you really do gotta force yourself to get good at the nitty gritty. Really you need to get good at drawing lines nicely the first time when you're inking to paper.

Also, when going through this stuff slowly and annoyingly, or tracing other people's art, you really start internalizing things like how some visual effect is gotten by just a handful of lines. 6 well placed lines gives you a notion of very voluminous hair for example.

it does feel like touching the lower level parts of a craft can help so much with having good fundamentals at a higher level.

Who hasn't, as a kid, thought "Oh I can draw bubble letters" and then realize that it's actually kinda tough, and then after mastering it have some new appreciation for spacing lines out properly and knowing where the pen goes?

Seems like a useful way to get a feel for things. Everyone "knows" how perspective work, yet a lot of people can't commit it to a page. There's clearly some understanding for how things work hidden in being able to do the thing, isn't there?

by rtpg

3/26/2026 at 7:29:36 PM

> But watching some pros go at it on paper + pen, I do get this feeling that when you don't have the undo button you really do gotta force yourself to get good at the nitty gritty. Really you need to get good at drawing lines nicely the first time when you're inking to paper.

Often you envision what the line will look like in your head before placing. And then you have the motor skills/experience to recreate that line well. They're just some of the micro-skills that encompass "drawing".

by armonster

3/26/2026 at 5:29:44 PM

Totally! A lot of artists recommend to young folks that before they dive into Procreate / Illustrator - still get good at pen and paper and ink by hand. The lack of undo button forces you to make choices and commit to them. You also hear a lot of artists talking about how, past a certain point of creating a piece, you are now "solving problems" to finish it.

I highly recommend the Draftsmen podcast as a wonderful resource to learn. Marshall Vandruff is a master teacher and has many thoughtful things to say.

by _doctor_love

3/26/2026 at 6:50:21 AM

I wonder if AI tools are similar to undo here — great for exploration, but easier to skip actually internalizing things.

Curious how people balance that in practice?

by annie511266728

3/26/2026 at 7:36:49 AM

The precision and concentration, also forces you to slow down and think about the part once again. Is it correctly dimensioned and size. Is the material the correct one. Can it be machined and assembled that way. How can it be inspected? Etc.

by 21asdffdsa12

3/26/2026 at 5:25:41 PM

Yes, because drawing is a way of thinking.

There’s a distinction between technical drawing in plan and section, vs perspective. When you draw at scale, the size of your pen and its marks become scaled to the size of human movement. That is, the end effector of your pen(cil) tip becomes a metonymic representation of the person. When you focus at that scale, then it allows one to think ‘into’ a space.

Perhaps what I’m talking about is drawing or sketching with an accurate scale. The benefits of working with scale drawings is that the paper (whether physical or digital) becomes a simulation environment that is able to prove or disprove hypotheses - like “will this space feel cramped” or “will this furniture fit in this room”, or “will this crowd be able to flow this way”. This happens because the drawing space, as a Cartesian space, holds information about dimensions, as a consistent mapping from the physical world into the drawing world.

I’m not sure what the analogue would be for technology. Imagine if UMD diagrams or drawings for microservices were somehow scaled based on the robustness of each server? In the physical world, constraints move pretty slowly - your foundation usually isn’t going to move 5’ to the east in the next 100 years, whereas compute capacity might change a great deal overnight. The need for a consistent mapping space seems less important, because technology changes rapidly.

But if anyone has any examples of the equivalent of a scale drawing in technology, let me know!

by brenschluss

3/26/2026 at 7:37:05 AM

I am surprised at the other comments here that state sketching is a skill worth preserving. That's something the author of the article clearly states, hist call to discussion is about technical drawing by hand. And I'm surprised this is still a topic. I studied architecture more than 25 years ago and at that time hand drawing was already phasing out. I have never practiced architecture since then and never thought there would be a debate about drawing by hand again. From what I heard of friends being in the business, doing 2D-drawings isn't a thing in bigger projects anymore, as it is way more economical and less error prone to do the plans with 3D modeling.

by sarnu

3/26/2026 at 4:22:51 PM

Sketches are great for quick ideas. I don't think the drawings replace them for quickly running through prototypes.

by knollimar

3/26/2026 at 4:23:59 PM

I got sketches from architects probably weekly for a ~500 unit hotel (I'm on the electrician end). It worked out okay, but it didn't substitute for the BIM later

by knollimar

3/26/2026 at 7:51:51 AM

Industrial manufacturing still uses 2D. They have to annotate tolerances, materials, and processes just as precisely as the geometry.

by deckar01

3/26/2026 at 8:52:47 AM

I think Pen vs mouse isn't the issue. To me, the question is: did you do it all yourself, to the last line (including choosing the thickness, the color… of it all), or did something do it on your behalf, based on higher level instructions?

When you draw by hand, you are directly responsible for everything that ends up being on the paper. Nothing ends up there that you did not deliberately put there. So you get to know every what every single line, every single line style is for. You wouldn't put them there otherwise.

When you draw with the computer, you ask it for something, and it produces some output. But what makes computers efficient is that they do a lot of the work for you. So you do not digitally draw every single pixel yourself. You ask for a screw, a window, a light fixture, and you get one. It's much faster (and possibly prettier), but you are not necessarily getting familiar with every single piece of the drawing that gets produced when you ask for one.

If architects (or mechanical engineers, for that matter) don't really need to know what a thick or thin line is for, or what the parts in the drawing of a window or of a ventilation system mean, then they don't need to draw my hand. But if they do, I'd argue that learning drawing by hand does matter. (Or in some pixel art program, but ain't anybody got time for that.) Once you do know it all, use whatever too, but start by learning the basics of your craft, thoroughly.

Automation on top of understanding is great. Automation instead of understanding is fast, until it's a source of mistakes and confusion.

by frivoal

3/26/2026 at 1:04:42 PM

It’s kinda funny that author says of course sketching and loose drawings are a required skill, when designers, especially UX and web designers seems to never have put a pencil to paper in their adult life.

by wodenokoto

3/26/2026 at 2:29:48 PM

I learned about hand drawing low fidelity prototypes in 2/2 UX courses I’ve taken at Uni

by DauntingPear7

3/26/2026 at 8:42:38 AM

Yes, architects still very much needs to draw by hand. Imagining working as an architect on a single family house. Being able to listen to the client and make drawings by hand in meetings is the best way to communicate architectural ideas. Drawing on paper before continuing on a computer, also makes it easier for an architect to design something other than square boxes.

by thomasfl

3/26/2026 at 7:34:59 AM

CAD programs were designed to automate hand drafting processes. Most of the autocad commands made no sense until Drafting 101. It was a full semester of hand drafting, which did feel excessive. Hand writing hundreds of words in an engineering font is just a waste of time.

by deckar01

3/26/2026 at 1:52:45 PM

I took pencil and paper mechanical and architectural drafting for 3 years in a high school vocational program (in the US) which also included learning AutoCAD. I enjoyed the pencil and paper work more, and I must have been among the last age groups to learn it. By the time I became a working engineer only 5 years later, there were no vestiges of manual drafting anywhere. Computer desks must have been the main focus of draftsmen for many years already.

I'm not sure if it helped or hurt my CAD drafting skills, but the attention to detail was almost meditative for me during what seemed like hours of silence among a dozen other kids at drafting tables. Not sure I have any real point here, just sharing my experience.

by hydrogen7800

3/22/2026 at 2:51:37 AM

The way of seeing can be taught, requires discipline, and all the ways execution can fail--requiring tape, scissors, inks, or C-z--proves training is in the (deliberate) act.

Taste is another. It varies among many, but is often refined by the diet.

by turtleyacht

3/26/2026 at 7:20:10 AM

My dad was an old-school architect. When AutoCAD replaced the drafting table—the ink, the ruler, the set square, the protractor—he thought it was crap, because now any total hack at drawing could do it.

For me, on the other hand, AutoCAD was amazing, because with AutoLISP you could draw with words. And now, with the LLM boom, I finally get him.

by azaras

3/26/2026 at 8:26:34 AM

No, of course not. LLMs will replace programmers as CAD did to drafters.

by charlie90

3/26/2026 at 8:29:17 AM

Not really. Drafters went from using pen and paper to using computers, programmers will go from using computers to still using computers :P

by slopinthebag

3/26/2026 at 8:35:52 AM

It's barely adjacent but once I worked with a bankruptcy where I learned that firms that design and sell houses commonly work as a front that basically take input from the customer, sketch it out and then just hand it over to some business in Sri Lanka that actually produced the architectural material then used for construction.

The company that had failed pushed in their marketing that their employees were all architects and construction engineers, but in reality they were more like a sales division that had people elsewhere doing the work. According to them this was common practice.

by cess11

3/26/2026 at 7:15:20 AM

The author is quite right to pose this question, but I would remind everyone that out of all the "drawing professions" one could choose, those with the least drawing skills usually chose to study architecture.

And I would argue also that this scarcity of ability was already a problem for the last 100 years. The whole iterative process of ideation (ie. designing, sketching) gets so much less intuitive, if one has to pull out a ruler first, or boot up his machine.

While I can't say whether Bauhaus and subsequent modern styles are to blame, with their reductionist philosophies, or rather the lack of ability of the professionals driving "style" into that direction, it surely does rhyme with the general population's perception of modern architecture being faceless, and indistinguishable, boxes.

After all, none of our modern building's first designs consist of strokes that came from the rich muscle memory of a human arm. At best they came from arms with almost none.

The state of affairs is so bitter, often the buildings perceived to be the most creative ones of this era are most often results of letting some `Math.random()` on a PC do the drawing.

If I had to count one positive thing about being a graffiti "artist" since youth it's that you constantly practicing shapes and the perceived emotional impacts of even tiniest adjustments all embedded in your muscle memory. Once you gained that skill, no design tool can beat that ideation process. Not with a stylus, not with ai. Even the ms between a stylus's input until it appears on-screen are blocking you, the misalignment of the stylus's tip to where the drawn line appears, let alone the seconds++ an AI takes to turn your prompt into an image.

In dev-speak, removing hand-drawing from the skill set of architects entirely is as if you were deliberately removing HMR from your local web dev-setup.

I would thus argue the opposite: Architects badly need to draw more!

by woodpanel

3/26/2026 at 7:34:49 AM

Your comment seems to miss that the author is speaking about technical drawings, not sketches, in particular this part:

> And I would argue also that this scarcity of ability was already a problem for the last 100 years. The whole iterative process of ideation (ie. designing, sketching) gets so much less intuitive, if one has to pull out a ruler first, or boot up his machine.

You mention sketching explicitly, which is exlcuded by the author. And making technical drawings without a ruler seems insane to me.

> In dev-speak, removing hand-drawing from the skill set of architects entirely is as if you were deliberately removing HMR from your local web dev-setup.

That would be true if you removed sketching, but removing hand-drawn technical drawings is more like replacing hand-crafted optimized assembler code with an optimizing compiler.

by moring

3/26/2026 at 7:58:04 AM

It does not. But afterall he mentions the ideation too. Also the drawings he shows are clearly not just technical ones

by woodpanel

3/26/2026 at 6:46:18 AM

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by annie511266728