Architectural Drawings: Teaching and Understanding a Visual Discipline

Editorial Summary Professional drawing has always played an important role in the training of architects. Plan-drawings have already been sufficiently considered in established architectural research. The research of Peter Schmid presented in this text focuses on so far only scarcely examined architectural sketchbooks as well as various records used for architectural education, such as manuscripts for lectures or notes on perspective theory which belong to the »Munich School« - a tradition of teaching hand-drawing that developed over a period of 150 years through an on-going teacher-student relationship at the Technical University of Munich. He finds that the aim of »Munich School« was not only learning how to illustrate, but also to comprehend architecture through graphic analysis - thereby combining teaching and practice. Against the background that the interest in hand-drawings has significantly increased in recent years, the research helps to refine the role of hand-drawings today as a tool that sets »processes of cognition in motion«. [Ferdinand Ludwig]