Drawing before modelling
Ten years of charcoal portraits turned out to be training for architecture, not a distraction from it.
I get asked why an architect keeps a folder of charcoal portraits on his portfolio. The honest answer is that the drawing came first and never stopped, but the more useful answer is that it does something modelling cannot.
What the hand knows
A face does not let you cheat. If the distance between the eye and the brow is wrong by two millimetres, the whole drawing reads as a stranger — and no amount of rendering it more beautifully will fix it. You learn to look for the relationship first and the detail last.
That is the same discipline a section drawing asks for. Get the floor-to-floor and the relationship to the street right, and the project survives a hundred later decisions. Get them wrong and the most careful facade detailing in the world will not save it.
Software is fast at the wrong moment
BIM is superb once you know what you are building. Revit and ArchiCAD will hold a hundred consistent decisions in place, and I would not want to deliver a set of construction drawings without them.
But they are quick to make something that looks resolved. A model snaps to a grid, applies a material, and produces a convincing image of a building nobody has actually thought about yet. Paper is slower, and the slowness is the point — it keeps you in the stage where the idea is still cheap to change.
In practice
My habit now is simple: nothing goes into a model until it exists as a section and a plan by hand. Usually a dozen of them, most of them wrong. The wrong ones are the fastest part of the process.
The drawings on this site are not a hobby I keep beside the architecture. They are where I learned to look at anything at all.
The drawings themselves are in charcoal portraits. The rebuild that finally gave each of them its own page is a new home for the work.