Building from the drawing board

Architecture and freehand drawing are inextricably
linked. Even in the Gothic period, the principle applied: what you
can’t build, you at least draw. The same applies to the sketches of Wolf
dPrix, co-founder and CEO of Coop Himmelb(l)au. Over the 53 years of
their creation, Prix’s sketches formed the first stage of every design -
despite rapid developments in digital architecture. Whereas his
freehand drawings were proxies for completed projects in the 1960s and
1970s, today they serve as strategic guides to the firm’s complex
buildings. From 2,800 archival drawings, 1,300 examples were selected
for publication to represent developmental dynamics in an archive-like
format. As invaluable documents of architectural history, they
illustrate some 320 selected projects.