The Persistence of Hand Drawing: Interior Rendering Today

Today, when computer imagery is ubiquitous, there remain a number of contemporary architects and designers who persist in drawing interiors by hand. Their drawings enhance the designers’ powers of observation. They promote the understanding of scale and proportion.

This exhibition focuses on hand drawings by 12 established and emerging New York-based architects and interior designers; Mita Corsini Bland, Marshall Brown, John and Christine Gachot, Elizabeth Graziolo, William Georgis of Georgis & Mirgorodsky, Nina Cooke John, Wendy Evans Joseph, Leyden Lewis, Hilary Sample and Michael Meredith/MOS, Gil Schafer with David Netto, Peter Pennoyer, and Douglas Wright. Drawings and design portfolios from the New York School of Interior Design Archives provide context for this contemporary work.

Design historians and curators Donald Albrecht and Thomas Mellins draw on their own experience witnessing the rise of CAD and the demise of hand rendering, to highlight this ongoing practice that reminds us of both the artisanry and ideation that the nearly wholesale adoption of CAD by the design industry has marginalized.

Hand renderings exert an impact on the client or viewer. Distinct from other types of interior design drawings—plans, sections, and linear elevations—renderings emphasize the depiction of three-dimensional form and space, often using color and emphasizing the effects of light.  

More romantic than computer-generated images, hand renderings offer an opportunity to imagine oneself within the depicted interior by, in a sense, filling in the blanks. Renderings thus become powerful tools of persuasion used to promote designers’ ideas to clients, patrons, and the press. As such, renderings often serve as an indispensable step in the journey from concept to reality. At their best, renderings accomplish a magical sleight of hand, far surpassing mere visual documentation. Renderings, at once accurate and expressive, allow the viewer to convincingly imagine a world that does not yet exist.

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