Visual Narratives of the City: On Architectural Drawing and Sketching

This article examines the image of the city as captured in architectural drawings and sketches, treated as tools for interpreting urban space. The author outlines the role of drawing in the history of art and architecture, highlighting its significance as the fundamental language for recording design ideas and as a method for understanding spatial reality. Particular attention is devoted to an analysis of the drawings of three Polish architects: Konrad Kucza-Kuczyński, Krzysztof Ludwin, and Sławomir Gzell. Their sketches reveal various ways of perceiving and interpreting the city – from reflective contemplation of architectural structure, through a narrative and emotional depiction of urban space, to a synthetic analysis of urban composition. The analysis indicates that the architectural sketch serves cognitive, analytical, and interpretive functions, enabling the capture of both the material characteristics of urban space and its atmosphere and genius loci.