Drawing with an open mind: William Mann on sketching buildings

Pencil in hand, the architect makes visible what was previously invisible, or opens a fresh start on a familiar question. On the blank sheet of paper, you can, in the most direct and unencumbered way, explore the contours of the ‘found’ situation, map the grafting of possible new conditions onto this, and piece together knowns and unknowns until you have something plausible.

Like Alice’s bottle and cake, drawing shrinks or grows you - enabling you to insert yourself into paper rooms the size of your thumb, or to observe and turn vast structures around as if they were a matchbox held between your fingers. But these are not properties of the pencil or the paper, they are a product of hand, eye, brain, body. When you draw a schematic, you access the intuitive visual logic that we are probably born with, but also that awareness of how multiple logics interact - this is acquired through the repeated experience of building. The lines may wiggle but the sketch is as precise as the mind behind it. For a detail, and perhaps with the help of a bit of miming, you draw from thin air what your hand knows about the size of a fixing or the strength of a material. And you open up that trove of memories, sensory and bodily, that is inseparable from the imagination. You do this to put yourself in a place that doesn’t yet exist, and to tailor it to occupation by human bodies and souls – since scribbling even a thumbnail perspective unleashes a touch of empathy. Sketching lets you think with the handbrake off, allowing you to find out something you don’t yet know, rather than just reiterating what you think you do.

In this series of drawings for our ‘Brickfields’ small business centre in Hoxton, we were exploring the individual experience of movement and light, the dimensional parameters of staircases and access galleries, the plumbing and cabling that make the building usable and open to change, and the social character of the shared light court. It’s a complex little dance between the technical and the human, looking for a supple rationality and an unforced warmth. Most of these were done during a discussion within the team; on one of them I have scribbled ‘sell this’; I think the one with Henry Moore figures we did show to the client, and after some scrutiny, they trusted the balance of logic and sociability we were ‘selling’. The building was completed last summer, and filled up gradually: just in time for the lockdown, these shared spaces had acquired a beautiful buzz of people quietly working, meeting, eating and relaxing in intimate proximity – an atmosphere rehearsed and anticipated in the space between body and paper.

So, yes, these and other sketches were hugely important for us; what rationality and humanity there is in the building came through drawing with an open mind. But we have about a thousand of these, some just filed, others assembled into a scanned scrapbook. A journalist wouldn’t give them a second’s thought, a historian would diligently comb through, attributing them to different hands (for example, we know that some of the sketches of the Bank of England were by Soane’s mentor George Dance the Younger), and would trace the ebb and flow of the idea. Where does the critic sit in this spectrum? Well, the job description is self-penned.

An architect’s sketch of a building is like a stone chipping on a sculptor’s floor, probably more informative in numbers than on its own. It’s part of the sustained thinking and labour that takes a project through ever-closer approximations until it’s built. If the critic wished to point out that even a half-decent building is the result of such iterative working, then they would be making a useful point to an audience who want to know what a building looks like before they know what it really is.

And if – a big if - the critic were to travel at least some of the way with the historian, to interrogate the multi-authored evolution of an idea, to separate enquiry from performance, and to detect the shackles and strings that restrain and pull at the architect’s hand, then better still. For they would then stand ready to tug at the seamless tapestry of the ‘architect’s’ creation, unpicking the strands of vision and delusion, of mastery and servility, to reveal the contours of our society in the grubby collective drawing we call the city.