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How architectural drawings work — and what that implies for the role of representation in architecture

A distinction between imaginative and notational use of architectural drawings is introduced. The case of Mies's Brick Country House is used to suggest that drawings in the imaginative mode are often architectural works in their own right, and that they can function as works by invoking a special mode of visual attention. Such an attention is essentially an act of visual representation or depiction, in that it involves sustained perceptual parsing of the drawing in terms of objects or figures that are not literally present but are still responsive to propositional thought. It is further shown, with the help of some recent work in philosophy, cognitive science and art criticism, how such a representational mode of viewing drawings leads to an imaginative engagement that is the hallmark of an aesthetic experience. It is finally suggested that such a potency of depictive representation has been exploited through history, not just in making presentational drawings, but in the visual design of buildings as well. The purpose of representation, thus, is not so much to use an artefact — say a building — to state a proposition, but rather to help to give it a perceptual structure that can sustain imaginative engagement.