an article for Middle East Architect, published in 2013
Fragments of ochre found at Blombos Cave suggest that drawing is almost as old as our species, Homo Sapiens. A thin sprinkling of both two and three dimensional works spans the archaeological record since then. Among the most famous are the lion man carving and the remarkable cave paintings of Altamira and Chauvet. Visual thinking is deeply embedded in the collective subconscious.
Architecture is also very ancient. We could trace it to mammoth bone huts from the depths of the last ice age, but it is more conventional to start with the emergence of urban life in the Middle East some 7000 years ago. We don’t know what drawing techniques the architects of the White Temple of Uruk used, but we can trace the trace the growth of geometry from ancient Iraq and Egypt to Greece and Rome. Vitruvius gives us our first detailed account of the skills and knowledge an architect should have and his work was closely studied by…