Where does architectural design begin? In an age obsessed with all things digital, it's tempting to envision a computerscreen in a paperless studio. While the practical value of computer-aided drafting and photorealistic modeling areindisputable, but you won't find the soul of architecture in the machine. Look instead at an architect's drawing hand. Ideas flow onto the paper through the uniquely human creative collaboration between mind and eye. Architects Draw, the inaugural volume of our new Architectural Briefs series, highlights this most fundamental level of speculative designfreehand drawing.

Architects Draw offers a practical and invaluable way to help students and would-be sketchers translate what they see onto the page, not as an imitation of reality, but as a comprehensive union of voids and solids, light and shadows, lines and shapes. For nearly forty years, revered Cooper Union professor and artist Sue Gussow has taught aspiring architects of varying abilities how to fully observe and perceive the spaces that make up our physical environment. Gussow skillfully applies architectural language to twenty-one drawing exercises that tackle a variety of formsfrom peas in a pod to monkeys, skeletons, dinosaur bones, and the art of Giacometti and Mondrian. She shows, for example, how cut fruit and paper bags reveal that the physical world is made up of planes, dimensions, and enclosed space.

Architects Draw features examples from postgraduate architectural practice that explicitly connect drawing to the world of architecture. This unique course provides a solid foundation for anyone interested in using drawing as a visual language to describe architecture.