Keynote Speaker architect Sir Peter Cook, Royal Academy of Arts, London, signing his book.© Yale School of Architecture, photo by Susan Surface.
In 1632 Rembrant van Rijn painted The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicholaes Tulp, in which a doctor reveals the internal mechanics of the body for a rapt audience. A sense of wonderment envelops the scene as the doctor pulls taut the subject’s tendons with a pair of medical shears, while a meditative gaze and raised hand give him the presence of a divine figure. This striking image serves as an unlikely metaphor for the recently held symposium “Is Drawing Dead?” at the Yale School of Architecture from February 9-11. While its title suggests an ideological showdown, we witnessed something more like the anatomy lesson. The analog and digital camps may have given competing testimony of the role and nature (and vitality) of drawing, but what was shared by all was the articulation of the mechanics of the process that creates architecture.
