The special thing about drawing on site – however banal it may sound – is being present in front of the architecture, its phenomenological appearance, observing the building directly and then transferring this to the drawing. Drawing on site means drawing an existing piece of architecture which our eyes see and which penetrates our brain and which, with our hand, we reproduce on a sheet of paper. This illustrates the difference both to design sketches, which are derived from the imagination, and to photography, which rarely works in a cognitive way.

Through the repeated act of looking closely, drawing on site encourages the development of a building archive in which patterns, geometries, structures, forms and typologies can be stored. The draughts person appropriates a building individually and produces a two-dimensional equivalent of the image that he or she has perceived, at an undefined scale.