Our sketching group arranged a tour of the architecture school.  Sadly, they don’t teach drawing with pointy devices anymore.  Everything is 3D graphical presentations, a shift that James Richards (an architect) says, in his great Freehand Drawing and Discovery, generates a lot of work for him as he’s often hired during planning/pitch sessions because he can do freehand sketches of proposed ideas.

But we live in a “latest must be greatest” world.  Like the trains and warehouses we dismantled when gas was cheap when we ‘knew’ that continuous streams of trucks on the road were ‘best’, I suspect architects will start learning to draw by hand again after there is a generation of ill-equipped architects who can’t.

The tour was fantastic as the architecture department is in one of the old “seminaire” buildings, with vaulted ceilings, Hogwarts-like staircases, and small doorways with, in some cases, the old steel doors you only see in medieval movies.

I got downtown about 15 minutes before we were supposed to meet so I sat down and drew this sketch.  There’s a large statue in the square and it’s surrounded by a granite fence on three sides and at each corner one of these smaller monuments.

cheap brown sketchbook, TWSBI Mini, Platinum Carbon Black