ABSTRACT
Drawing is a pivotal skillset paramount to landscape architects, as it is not only a form of visual expression or making but also a form of critical thinking. In the courses at the University of Nevada Las Vegas, students are tasked to think about why and how we draw. A typical response usually evolves into a convoluted account of “To communicate our ideas.” When pushed to consider the deeper meaning of what each line represents, a seemingly chaotic dialectic begins to reveal that the critical challenge of drawing is not only to communicate but also to analyze, respond to, and envision, past, present, and future tenses of complex, natural, technical, spatial, phenomenological, and cultural conditions via graphical facsimiles of those circumstances. This challenge proves to be anything but simple. While drawings serve as a practical means for communicating these scenarios, they also uncover “poetic potential through their ability to create new associations, to excavate affinities, to become vehicles for discovery.”1
