(Summary: Digital design has brought us full circle: hand rendering is back as a cost effective way to expedite schematic design and as an important tool for art-directing 3rd party digital renderers.)

Against all odds, drawing by hand is back. Why against all odds? Because hand drawing was supposed to die. Hand sketching and rendering were supposed to be replaced by computers, and to some extent that did happen. But what has evolved is a bit of a surprise.

First, a quick overview of the state of digital architectural rendering...

The digital rendering revolution is now in its 3rd phase.

Phase One brought us a) new digital schools of design ("Blob", "Boolean", Columbia Graduate School or Architecture, etc) and b) computation-intensive enterprise work for 1980s corporate architects who could afford to pay for “fly-overs” generated by Silicon Graphics work stations (e.g. SOM, KPF, etc. I know, because my friend Sean Daly and I provided one such fly-over for KPF’s 1980s design of Samsung HQ.)