The Line, the Drawing, and the Model

The Roman author, naturalist, and natural philosopher Pliny the Elder tells an anecdote about the origins of line drawings in Ancient Greece in his Natural History of ad 79. The story characterizes the rivalry between two master painters, Apelles and Protogenes. Line drawings have a long history in architecture; they also appear early in the histories of philosophy, painting, sculpture, engineering, physics, and even the medical sciences. Line drawings maintain a significant presence in contemporary visual culture. As modernism started to operate in the liminal zone of the virtual and real, the line drawing served as a catalyst in the binary between the illusionistic and the actual. Architectural drawings can be factual or high-level abstractions; they can be material or ambiguously virtual. Sub-genres of the architectural drawing include the plan, section, elevation, renderings, diagrams, digital drawings, and computational drawings.