In horror films it’s when you think the thing is dead that it’s most likely to return seeking vengeance. As it is for zombie flicks, so it is, it seems, for architectural representation. After decades of absence, drawing has returned to mark a generational sea change in architectural culture.

From the mid-’90s onward, when computers seriously began to replace drawing boards, the act of drawing became increasingly anachronistic. Grow- ing computational power was harnessed to produce rendered images—glossy visions of soon-to-be-built projects, usually blue-skyed, lush-leafed, and populated by groups of groomed and grinning clip-art figures, where buildings appeared with a polished sheen and lens flares proliferated. Postcards from the near future.

At the same time, digital tools have pushed another kind of architectural drawing in a completely different direction. Technical information communicating construction detail has become “building information,” drawings obsessed with a different kind of “realism”—this time, not visual but in the way they plug into systems and protocols of the construction industry.

Digital culture, up to now at least, has categorized drawings as either technical or illustrative, as building information or money shot. But in doing so, the drawing’s role as an exploratory, inquiring design tool has diminished.

The irony of the vast processing power we now possess on even the most basic desktops is that drawing itself has been subsumed by the tools we’ve chosen to use. These tools—drawing packages and supersophisticated renderware—have narrowed the scope of architectural drawing even as they have exponentially increased its precision. Just think of how these kinds of applications frame not just the drawing but how we draw. They position us within a predetermined idea of space, an array of pre- programmed presets rather than an ambiguous possibility that can be constructed. In these types of space the act of drawing is a Cartesian given.

Renderings assume the language of photography—so much so that in more advanced rendering packages you even design a digital simulation of the camera—and in doing so present us with an apparently “real” image of the world. Yet it’s exactly this fait accompli idea of reality that the return of the drawing seems to challenge.

Contrast this with the grand tradition of archi- tectural drawing in which the space of the page was one that had to be invented by drawing itself. We see this in the work of the so-called paper architects of the 1970s and ’80s: pre-commercial Libeskind, phase one OMA, and most of all, pre- digital Zaha Hadid (and many, many more).

At that time drawings were indivisible from the disciplinary conception of architecture. These were drawings not of architecture but as architecture. They understood graphic space as significant in and of itself. Drawings also tapped into a long lineage—not just groups of the previous generation (Archigram, Superstudio, and Archizoom, et al.) but also through Ledoux, Gandy, Piranesi, and so on into the heart of architecture itself.