The first drawing of every Halden & Voss building is made with a soft pencil on a sheet of trace, usually on site and usually in the first hour. It is never beautiful. It is rarely to scale. But it is always a decision.
Software is extraordinary at keeping options open. You can model a wall, move it, copy it, undo it. That is exactly the problem in the first weeks of a project, when the most important thing is to commit to an idea firmly enough to test it.
“A line in pencil costs nothing to draw and a great deal to defend. That is what makes it useful.”
The hand knows about scale
When you draw a room by hand you feel its size in your wrist. A corridor that takes too long to draw is too long to walk. A window that is tedious to hatch is probably too small. Those instincts disappear when a mouse can draw a hundred metres as fast as one.
None of this makes us suspicious of computers. Every building we complete is modelled, analysed and coordinated digitally, down to the last fixing. We simply insist that the computer comes second, once the idea has survived a pencil.
New architects in the studio are often surprised. Six months later, most of them carry a sketchbook everywhere.
