Thinking on Paper

It might startle you the first time you hear it, but the term 'sexy' is part of everyday banter in the architectural world. We apply it to buildings, graphics, design concepts and attitudes.

The most striking thing about the Boston City Hall Competition Drawing exhibit at the BSA this month isn't necessarily the quality of the final drawings - although they are certainly are the sexiest, and they might be the ones you want to take home with you.

The most striking thing about the exhibit is not necessarily the content, but the curation: the inclusion of process drawings on trace (framed, hanging on the wall alongside their finalized counterparts) that would normally end up in the studio wastebasket. You'd have no trouble finding such drawings crumpled on the floor of an architecture student's bedroom, left behind on the 5th floor of Newbury St., filling the dumpsters in the alleys of firms.

These process drawings range from conceptual chicken scratch to visual math to sketchy perspectives, sometimes all on one piece of onionskin. You can trace the designers' thoughts and see the process unfolding. A plan becomes a space and then a plan again, reworked and revised and revisualized in the paperspace of 8 square inches - this one was done in someone's sketchbook. Nearby, a staircase scribbled as a crude U shape morphs into a meticulously orthogonal elevation, and then is abandoned - but not forgotten, for you see it appear in a final drawing just down the hall.

This is not an exhibit about sexy drawings, but it might be about how they come to exist. Sexy isn't born, but built - it isn't a goal, but a result. The lesson is that there's no magic here, but it's a happy lesson - that there's promise for every architect who can think on paper, that those late night hours spent on trashed trace are never for nothing.