Why Architects Are Ditching AI Renderings for Hand‑Drawn Sketches Again

Here’s why the analog tool is making a comeback—and how a simple pencil stroke is reshaping the future of design.

[Photo: courtesy Pratt School of Architecture]

In 1994, Bernard Tschumi, then Dean of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture in New York, launched an experiment that banned paper and hand drawings, requiring architecture students to use computers instead. Together with the rise of computer-aided programs, Tschumi’s “Paperless Studio” accelerated the profession’s embrace of digital tools and reshaped how architects conceived ideas.

Now that AI has entered the picture, you’d be forgiven for thinking the architectural sketch as we know it is dead. Quite the opposite. “We are in a world that is now completely dominated by digital tools, but something strange is happening: The hand sketch is back,” says Andrew Holder.

Holder, a practicing architect and chair of graduate architecture, landscape, and urban design at the Pratt School of Architecture in Brooklyn, recently curated an exhibition that examines the role of the sketch in contemporary architecture. The exhibition, titled Levers Long Enough, includes more than 200 sketches from over 60 architecture practices that sent in watercolors, pencil sketches, and even embroidered scribbles. It is both a rebuke to AI, and an ode to the physical experience in an increasingly digital world.

How the architectural sketch (temporarily) died…

Definitionally, at least according to Holder, a sketch is quick, economical, and physical. Sometimes, he says, the sketch can be performed on a touch screen like an iPad, but only if “we can feel the contact between the hand and the image.”

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As it happens, this physical contact has been disappearing for decades. “Beginning the ’90s and through the early aughts, the sketch was obliterated from the classroom,” says Holder.

With the dawn of computer-aided design, the sketch took a step back in the architecture practice, and though it never disappeared, it has yet to reclaim its place in architectural pedagogy. While life drawing was once a cornerstone in architecture schools—architecture students at the Paris École des Beaux-Arts studied and sketched the fragments and plaster casts—few universities today have a class dedicated to sketching. London’s Bartlett School, as well as the AA School, are both famous for their emphasis on freehand drawing, but most architecture schools around the world, Pratt included, focus on more technical practices like drafting and perspective drawing.

…And why it’s making a comeback

Slowly, however, the sketch is returning to the spotlight. Holder first noticed its re-emergence in 2025, in the work of Hilary Sample and Michael Meredith of MOS Architects. “A whole section of their website popped up where they showed hand sketches for every project,” he recalls.

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