Sure, and doing figure drawing is a lot of work for something that can be done with a camera. But "a picture of a naked person" is as much the goal of figure d

Sure, and doing figure drawing is a lot of work for something that can be done with a camera. But "a picture of a naked person" is as much the goal of figure drawing as I suspect "a model of this street" was of this project; the real goal is the knowledge it puts in your head, both of your tools and of your subject, which you can then use in making stuff up from scratch.