My father was a journalist and when I was young, our home was full of newspapers. As a kid I could fill weeks and weeks lying around and sketching on newspapers with a biro- we used to call it a ballpoint pen. I have a fond memory of getting a four-colour Bic biro from the local shop, it was a real highlight. This one had four tabs, with black, blue, green and red. It was easy to twist apart, so you could see the relationship between the spring and the four different biro nibs and tabs. The shop that sold these biros also had a bakery in the basement, which had a particularly distinctive smell which could fill the entire street. We lived in a modest neighbourhood in Islamabad in the nineties, with crisp white Corbusien tower blocks which had not aged gracefully. The communal stairwells had perforated brickwork painted white letting the sun dapple through and the balconies and terraces were enclosed by in-situ concrete painted white. Before the balcony balustrade hit the floor, there was a 50mm gap where the rebar was exposed and also painted white. These were beautiful details, now that I think back to them.
A lot of people go to architecture because they were the kid who was good at drawing in school. I was no different, but with time and experience I realised that being able to create nice sketches has zero impact on your abilities as an architect. It is easy to get lost in a drawing, a model, or a visualisation even, which never translates into a built result. Given such a realisation, I spent the previous eight years doing extraordinarily little sketching, despite finding it enjoyable. I still do not really need to sketch unless it is therapeutic or meditative. If I get the thinking right, I should be able to create an elegant scheme on the first draft.
When lockdown happened, among the unending blur of zoom meetings, I began to realise that communicating architectural ideas verbally was near impossible. The sketches started as a means to communicate what I meant, but then I rediscovered how much quicker it was. The computer forces you to commit to dimensions with a tolerance of millimetres, which one can escape from with hand sketches, even when they are to scale. But most importantly, rediscovering sketching connected me to those earlier memories, of doodling with the four-colour ballpoint pens on my father’s old newspapers.
Bic four-colour ballpoint