On drawing by hand

Every project at Blueprint begins the same way. After the first conversation with the client, after the first site visit, after we've read whatever brief or notes we've been given, the principal leading the project sits down at a desk with a roll of trace paper and a soft pencil and begins to draw.

The drawings are quick. They are not for the client. Most of them are not even for the file. They are a way of thinking, made visible.

Why not start in CAD

We could do the same work in CAD. We're entirely fluent in it — every project moves into BIM by the second month at the latest. But the early thinking, we've found, has to happen by hand.

CAD is too precise too early. It asks you to commit to dimensions before you know what you're trying to do.

The reason has nothing to do with craft or tradition. It has to do with speed and friction. The software wants to know exactly how wide the wall is. The pencil doesn't care. It will give you a wall of any width, and another one beside it, and another one beside that, and you can throw the whole sheet away ten minutes later if none of them are right.

Finding the underlying idea

This matters most in the first weeks of a project. The first weeks are when the building's underlying idea has to be found. Once it's found, CAD is excellent at developing it. But if you start in CAD, you tend to find ideas that CAD likes — orthogonal, dimensional, finishable. The pencil finds different ones.

A habit kept up

We've worked this way for the entire history of the studio. Every principal does it. Every project gets at least a hundred pages of hand sketches before the first CAD drawing is made. We keep them in a flat file in the studio. Occasionally a client asks to see them. We send a few, usually the ones that didn't work — those are more interesting than the ones that did.

A small habit, kept up consistently, has shaped the studio's work more than any single design decision. The act of drawing by hand turns out not to be about the drawings. It is about giving the hand a chance to think before the head commits.