A club house in a castle in the West End of London, complete with battlements and turrets, from 1882. A design for the post-war reconstruction of the City of London in 1945. A fantasy landscape featuring Le Corbusier’s Capriccio of Notre-Dame du Haut in ruins. A section of a 19th-century townhouse, showing a slice of the staircase wallpaper winding from deep navy on the ground floor to pale sky blue at the top. This is a treasury of architectural drawing from the 16th century to the present day. Exploring both how and why architects draw, it offers a rich visual history from Palladio, Inigo Jones and Augustus Pugin to contemporaries such as Richard Rogers, Foster Associates and Zaha Hadid, via Sir Christopher Wren, George Gilbert Scott and Erno Goldfinger, and everything else in between. From back-of-envelope concept sketches to painstaking pen and ink perspectives, exploded axonometrics and born-digital drawings, this book celebrates the full gamut of architectural representation. With over 200 lush, full-colour reproductions, this is a window into soul of architectural drawing over the past five hundred years.

• Includes newly digitised, never-seen-before material from the RIBA Collections, one of the largest architectural archives in the world.


• Explores rare drawings and designs from John Nash, Sir Edwin Lutyens, Frank Lloyd Wright and many more.


• Insightful commentary alongside each drawing ensures that they are as accessible and engaging as possible.


• Wide-ranging in scope, this book will both inspire and inform.