100 Contemporary Architects

Drawings & Sketches

How does an architect envision a building? And how is that idea first explored? Architecture is one of the few remaining professions in which men and women draw on paper, and in which drawing is essential to the very creation of an idea or project. In the non-verbal world of architecture, lines on paper play a central role-these dots, squiggles, and shadings are the architect’s personal calligraphic shorthand and are as much about describing a new space as they are about a way of “seeing.”

Author Bill Lacy, whose own career in architecture spans the professional and the academic worlds, has selected 100 significant practitioners throughout the world in this first- ever survey of drawings by architects. All the drawings are by the hand of the architect, and in them we see every kind of building-from residential to commercial high rise-and every style of architecture-from high modernism to distinctly individual work-among us today. A brief essay by Bill Lacy on each architect and his or her achievements and contributions to contemporary issues in architecture accompanies the body of drawings. The drawings are further complemented by a photograph of the model or built project. A short biography and photograph of each architect complete the book.

100 Contemporary Architects: Drawings & Sketches is a unique insider’s look at architects working all over the world-Frank Gehry, Hans Hollein, Tadao Ando, Emilio Ambasz, James Stirling, Aldo Rossi are among the important and impressive architects showcased. Cultural institutions, hospitals, airports, financial centers, public parks, private residences, and purely conceptual feats of the architect’s mind are all seen here in the first instance of creation, when the drawing of an idea is most free from the constraints of the client, time, and budget.