Sketches 1990 – 2020

The advent of computers is often blamed for the impoverishment of building culture. Computer-aided design (CAD) seemed to make hand-drawing superfluous for architects and made it fall out of fashion.

A trend reversal seems to be emerging in this question. Even if the artistic exercise with the drawing pen, the felt-tip pen or pencil on napkin or paper, in the notebook or the sketchpad has never really disappeared, interest has recently been increasingly directed back to the care and precision, the sensitivity and creativity of “designing by hand”.

Berlin-based architect Philip Norman Peterson, for all his familiarity with the digital world, has never stopped thinking with a drawing pen. He used this to collaborate with Max Dudler, Daniel Libeskind, and Holzer Kobler Architekturen, among others.
In his book Sketches Methods of Finding Form, he can be seen finding forms step by step. To do this, he has developed various methods of thinking about building, place and city. He not only dreams of airy worlds, but provokes with radical proposals of, for example, an inner-city airport at Berlin’s Alexanderplatz. And he takes philosophical and artistic suggestions from Jacques Derrida, El Lissitzky, or Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and transforms them into urban and architectural structures.

The design methodology is fascinating and easy to follow. The individual style of his drawings, subtle and precise, abstracting and clear, develops an immensely unique aesthetic appeal.