‘Drawing on the Public Good’
Urban-Think Tank & Jack Isles
Design as Scholarship (Journal of Architectural Education 70:1)

As Robin Evans observed in his seminal 1986 essay, ‘Translations from Drawing to Building’, architects don’t make buildings they make drawings. Although much has changed since he made this observation, particularly with respect to disciplinary representational practices, drawings and constructed images remain primary media of architectural design. Discursive images are loaded – they are full of information, replete with spatial articulation, jam-packed with representational conceits and conventions, and overflowing with interpretive possibilities – while simultaneously concise in their delivery, refined in their graphic language, minimal in their aesthetic, and pithy in their communicative potential. Within their fulsome compositions, they retain both clues and tools for their own unpacking.