Some lessons, however simple, can resonate lastingly within our personal practice. This is the case with a specific memory from my undergraduate years in the Architecture and Urbanism program at Escola da Cidade, where, during a second-year technical drawing class, the professors suggested we retrace the floor plans of the Butantã House, designed by architect Paulo Mendes da Rocha. My recollection is that, immediately, some of the students found the activity uninspired or even irrelevant—which is understandable—while for others it was certainly enjoyable and fruitful, even if they might not recall this specific episode more than a decade later, as is the case here. The value of being exposed to different activities within a course—from the most to the least conventional, from the simplest to the most elaborate—is that each individual will utilize different tools and knowledge in unique ways. Hence the importance of a wide range of experiences, even within the seemingly rigid instruction of technical drawing. What is trivial for some can be instrumental for others, whether momentarily or over the long term.
The most powerful insights to emerge from this exercise were the following: manual retracing is also a way of traversing an object with one's hands. By drawing every line, curve, and intersection in its true dimensions and proportions, we are not merely copying the design or jumping from point A to point B, but assimilating it attentively and fully, as if walking its entire perimeter. Traversing paths, retracing, and understanding. While a 1:1 scale can sometimes be difficult to grasp, it is at the scale of the drawing—or through the act of drawing—that the body's scale becomes familiar with the proportions of this architecture, blending with other sensory perceptions. Therefore, this is not just manual copying, but an exercise in learning how to see—a tool for assimilation and for building a graphic, spatial, and constructive repertoire. After all, isn't drawing also a way of building by adding layers of physical matter to paper? A construction site in miniature. Furthermore, drawing is a powerful tool for layering and editing; to redraw is also to choose what to highlight and what to suppress within the layers of information and material.
From my undergraduate years to the present day, with the practice of technical drawing and its vast possibilities serving as a guiding thread across architecture, art, and their intersections, that same exercise of redrawing to understand not only remains alive but has also become a crucial tool in the development of "An Archaeology of Drawing," an ongoing master's research project in the Department of History and Fundamentals of Architecture and Urbanism at FAUUSP. The study addresses the importance of conceptualizing, analyzing, and discussing the material aspects that constitute historical documents beyond their visual and informative qualities, focusing particularly on architectural drawings within their archival contexts and the dynamics of translation and circulation of these drawings and their images. By understanding drawings as three-dimensional objects constructed through specific tools and techniques, rather than merely as substrates for images, shifting our gaze to a much closer scale allows us to access layers of information physically embedded within these documents. The drawing's materiality bears the imprint of its creation, and it is in identifying and analyzing these traces of physical gestures inscribed on the medium that the potential for new discoveries lies. From this perspective, grounded primarily in Material Culture studies (with practical and theoretical examples more widely developed in Art History, but also found in Architectural History), this study aims to demonstrate that a deep understanding, preservation, and rigorous reproduction of these materialities within both the internal and external dynamics of an archive and its documents—through an analysis committed to recognizing and dissecting the constitutive and constructive particularities of drawings, from their tools and substrates to their sociocultural contexts—is also what guarantees how to proceed with their careful reproduction.
