By 450 BC, builders used parallel lines to imply depth, a precursor to modern perspective.
The graphics of Mies van der Rohe were studies in reduction. His famous collage drawings of glass skyscrapers were ghostly and ethereal, using charcoal to explore the reflection and transparency of the modern material palette. The modernist graphic history is one of black and white, sans-serif fonts, and the reduction of architecture to its essential geometric solids. graphic history of architecture
No single work has shaped the modern graphic history of architecture more profoundly than the 1975 exhibition and subsequent book, The Architecture of the City , by Aldo Rossi. But perhaps the ultimate graphic landmark is Rossi’s own Scientific Autobiography and the drawings he produced with the Venice School . Rossi, along with contemporaries like the Superstudio collective, liberated architectural drawing from the obligation of buildability. Their graphics—often composed in spare, haunting perspectives using flat, almost childlike colors—were critiques of modernism’s sterility and meditations on memory and urban typology. A Rossi drawing of a colonnade against a void sky or a Superstudio “Continuous Monument” grid superimposed over a pristine landscape is an argument, a philosophical proposition. This movement taught that the graphic history of architecture is also a history of unbuilt ideas—the dreams, warnings, and visions that are too radical, too beautiful, or too impossible to ever be realized in concrete, but which nonetheless change the way we see the real city. By 450 BC, builders used parallel lines to