I was trained as an architect and worked in the field for over a decade. Drawing had and still has an important role to play in all of my creative processes. Ho

I was trained as an architect and worked in the field for over a decade. Drawing had and still has an important role to play in all of my creative processes. However... It's all to easy to put drawing on too high a pedestal, and Michael Graves is possibly the best example of the dangers of doing so. His drawings are pleasing: humourous lines, stimulating juxtapositions of shape and colour. But they are not architecture, and Graves' focus on the art of drawing has made him a terrible architect. Architecture is not experienced in two dimensions: it is experienced in four. It is only ever seen in perspective and in time. What it looks like as a two dimensional projection is irrelevant to the actual embodied experience of architecture. People who spend too much time immersed in drawings tend to lose sight of this. Moreover, architecture is not just a visual. It also creates a tactile, acoustic, and olfactory environment. It conveys ambient and radient temperatures, and channels the movement of air. It exists within diurnal and seasonal and social cycles, continually changing. Drawing can represent NONE of this, and the architect who approaches their art purely through drawing will lose sight of these facts. Graves certainly has. His buildings -- rendered in three dimensions, out of actual materials on actual sites -- are tacky-feeling, hollow-sounding monstrosities: dank where they should be airy, glaring where they should be shady, completely disconnected from their environments, and not remotely conducive to work or socialisation or rest or any other purpose that humans might want to put a building towards. But hell, they look great on paper, and that's what counts, right? The truth is that architecture is a difficult art, because it cannot be iteratively developed and refined in the same way as other arts. If you're a painter, you paint; if you're a musician, you play music until your fingers bleed. But if you're an architect, you develop your art through indirect representation. Through virtual reality, as it were. And drawing is just another form of virtual reality -- better at representing some aspects of architecture (emotional characteristics of a design, for example) -- and almost incapable of representing others (four-dimensionality, acoustics, tactility, air). It should be quite an important form of representation within the architect's toolkit, but if it's too highly prioritised, then you'll end up as bad an architect as Michael Graves. A well-balanced architect should develop all forms of representation available to them -- both visual and non-visual -- if they are going to fully grasp all aspects of their art.