Fugitive thought: Sam Jacob on the sketchbook

My sketchbooks are pretty private – not in the sense that they have anything particularly confidential or revealing, but in the sense that the drawings I make in them are pretty much for myself only. The sketchbook is more like a space for the notation of ideas: they might be sketches of potential drawings, trying to figure out the possibility of a design, or a way to get something out of my head so I can look at it and work out what it might be. I make other kinds of sketch, which often graduate from the book to tracing paper, and are far more likely to be seen by other people – ways to communicate with the office, or to show an idea to a client.

Sketching is important to how I work, but then so too are all kinds of drawing. And there is at least as much what you might call sketching that happens in Illustrator and Photoshop as there is with a pen.

Drawing is important because that’s basically what we do as architects. It is others that interpret those drawings and make them physical and spatial. A lot of my teaching is about the significance of the drawing, and I often argue that the history of architecture is as much a history of drawings as it is buildings. I even go so far as to claim that all architecture is a form of representation: that drawings, models and buildings are simply different expressions of architectural ideas. We could think of buildings as forms of representation just as much as we can think of drawings as architecture.

This also suggests that architectural drawings should never be thought of as illustrations. They are things with much more significance. Not simply tools that visualise ideas that happen elsewhere, but the site where architectural ideas emerge. 

That means that drawings and sketches are key sites where architectural ideas are made and communicated. It’s also why it might be good to see the rise of the drawing again, over the slick render. Interrogating how an architect draws reveals a lot about their own position – and if you are the one making the drawing, the demand is that you take a position.

The pages of the sketchbook are varied but connected thoughts, more like a kind of shorthand. Maybe they make little sense to anyone else – and that certainly seems to be the case sometimes if I show this kind of thing to the office. The sketches here are thoughts at different scales, different parts of a project – here, graphic patterns, massing, form. At this stage its a set of ideas in orbit, not yet formed into a single coherence. The sketch / notebook allows this kind of fast, fluid almost automatic process. Other media sometimes feel like you need to know more before you can start. On these pages, fragmentation, fugitive thoughts can start to be glimpsed.

This was part of a drawing I was asked to make of my home – which also happens to be above the office. It has a loose idea of space – both in its planometric projection, but also in the unfolding or fragmentation of the space that it shows. Not quite cubist, it is a sketch that learns mostly from architectural conventions yet at the same time gives a more experiential sensation. Are ideas of space predetermined by the drawings we do? I often think so, and so am interested in the ways different approaches to the representation of space can be combined, sometimes undermining the authority of each.