The Architecture Drawing Prize 2020 announced the shortlisted entries in the Digital, Hand-drawn and Hybrid categories. This year’s contest gathered more admissions than the previous edition, with 165 entries from 30 countries, 35 of which are from students and under-30 architects. In addition, the 2020 competition introduced the ‘Lockdown Prize’, focused on the global pandemic, awarded to a drawing related to the architectural changes brought by the coronavirus.
Why should any 21st Century architect bother to draw by hand? There is, after all, an abundance of readily available digital tools that make pens and pencils seem little more than primeval artefacts. Fondly regarded, perhaps, yet as charmingly irrelevant to contemporary architecture as heavy horses are to today’s farmers or typewriters are to newspaper journalists.
In partnership with Make Architects and Sir John Soane’s Museum, the World Architecture Festival (WAF) has announced the call for entries for the fourth edition of The Architecture Drawing Prize. Launched in 2017, the prize is conceived to celebrate and showcase the art and skill of architectural drawing.
The overall winner of the third annual Architecture Drawing Prize is Anton Markus Pasing with his work entitled ‘City in a box: paradox memories’.
Working in the fields of experimental architecture, prototype design and fine arts, German architect Anton Markus Pasing has been awarded the prize for best digital drawing as well as being crowned the overall winner of The Architecture Drawing Prize. ‘City in a box: paradox memories’ represents an unknown city full of stories, closed in a large box. Until the box is opened, the city is in an ‘intermediate state’, it is both real and non-existent at the same time. The artist added: “I prefer the digital method for creating my work, because it allows me to achieve complex representations as well as being able to illustrate narrative aspects more clearly. I don’t aim to generate answers with my images, but to use them to ask questions or tell simple stories.”
A century on, the compelling idea that Modern architecture emerged like some blindingly white, crystalline and disruptive phoenix from the darkness, death and destruction of the First World War is, perhaps, a familiar one. And, yet, the charcoal sketches and chiaroscuro montages Mies van der Rohe made during and after the epochal competition for the Berlin Friedrichstrasse Skyscraper of 1921-22 retain the power to catch the eye, provoke and disturb in our own era of overwhelming imagery much of it produced by and with computer programs.
What is so very remarkable about these century-old visionary drawings is that they portray a future building type - verging on the ethereal and more or less impossible to realize at the time - in the earthiest of drawing materials. It had been a stroke of genius to use charcoal to evoke an architecture of lightness rising from the embers of the trenches that would revolutionize the way we shaped tall buildings and with them our city streets. Such is the power of drawing by hand.
In the spirit of many great architects of the past, from Palladio and John Soane to Le Corbusier and Cedric Price, The Architecture Drawing Prize is an ideal platform for reflecting on and exploring how drawing continues to advance the art of architecture today. It embraces the creative use of digital tools and digitally produced renderings, while recognizing the enduring importance of hand drawing. The organizers invite entries of all types and forms: from technical or construction drawings to cutaway or perspective views – and anything in between.
.jpg?1574092029 "Denis Andernach, 'Stelzenhaus III (stilt-house)'. Hand-draw commended")
