In 1977, in honor of the bicentennial celebrations of a year previous, Cooper Hewitt mounted an exhibition entitled 200 Years of American Architectural Drawing (see more on the exhibition in a special feature on the Architectural League’s website). Curated by David Gebhard and Deborah Nevins, the show and its accompanying publication featured a range of...

This drawing by Giuseppe Barberi is a design for a church. But almost nothing about the structure is typical of 18th-century European churches. The briskly sketched cross that tops the dome announces the Christian nature of the building, but nearly everything below it is of pre-Christian design. The squat, round dome supported by a colonnade...

Does the artist behind this drawing simply intend to represent a doorway, or rather use this as an elaborate pretext in creating a portrait of a mysterious figure? Such a question will undoubtedly remain unanswered. Through a seemingly simple combination of architectural elements surrounding a male figure, Barberi conveys something distinctly atmospheric. With cloak thrown...

This room portrait is one of two views of the Middleton Park drawing room in Cooper Hewitt’s Thaw Collection.  The interior was designed in the chinoiserie style and shows a room mostly filled with bamboo furniture, a Chinese or Chinese style painted or wallpaper of exotic birds sitting in trees, and a frieze of pseudo-Chinese...

The architect Michael Graves, who died last week at the age of 80, was passionate and insistent about the importance of drawing in architectural practice. Over the course of his career, the use of computer-aided design software became ubiquitous among generations of architects, but Graves remained steadfast in his belief that drawing by hand was...