ABSTRACT

Drawing, says architect and writer Witold Rybczynski, stands squarely at the center of architecture. He learned to draw as a student at McGill University in Montreal in the mid-1960s. His first two-and-a-half years there were concerned with engineering mostly concrete, steel, and foundations but in his third year, the curriculum shifted to the use of exploratory tools like photography and drawing. Drawing freehand and to scale, he explored the idea of a parallelogram, and then returned to the dogleg concept. Writing, too, offers its opportunities and rewards, as Rybczynski's learned over time. At work a few years back on a book about Vizcaya, the early 20th-century Baroque Revival mansion in Miami, Rybczynski and landscape architect Laurie Olin were reviewing the project's original garden drawings. In addition to 18 books, covering subjects such as Palladio, Vizcaya, and Frederick Law Olmsted, the 71-year-old has also written regularly about architecture for The Atlantic, the New Yorker, and Slate.