Early Concept Sketches by 5 of the World’s Most Famous Architects

5 of the world’s most famous architects’ sketchbooks and napkin sketches, from Frank Gehry to Zaha Hadid

The first time most people see an architect’s work, it’s in glass and steel, brick and mortar, or digitally rendered.

There is nothing quite like seeing the hand-drawn rough sketches that capture the raw imagination and inspiration of great minds before the arrival of practical adjustments and new opinions.

Different architects will use their sketches differently: to define the details of their designs; situate themselves in the location; identify key elements; and capture their moods and inspirations; and logging cultural and emotional references. These drawings and notes can take many forms too, spanning from specific structural designs and elemental analyses to abstract illustration and more conventional visual art.

Here is a collection of the raw concept drawings, from wild sketches that capture the energy and shape of the artist’s thoughts to annotated scribbles that mark the different considerations they had in mind.

Renzo Piano

Napkin sketches are notorious in the world of architecture, one architecture school even funded scholarships through the sale of those of famous architects.

Perhaps one of the most legendary pieces is that of Renzo Piano, the designer of London’s tallest building, the Shard, who apparently came up with the original sketch of the building on the back of a napkin while eating out with the property developer Irvine Sellar.

"He saw the beauty of the river and the railways and the way their energy blended and began to sketch in green felt pen on a napkin what he saw as a giant sail or an iceberg," recalls Sellar who keeps the drawing in his offices.

Le Corbusier

On July 17 2016, 17 projects by Le Corbusier were classified as UNESCO World Heritage Sites, cementing his place in the architectural hall of fame.

As much an artist as an architect, it is no surprise that Le Corbusier’s sketchbooks are so creative: they reveal how his mind connected images, shapes, and symbols to the designs of his buildings.

Le Corbusier was devoted to making life more pleasant for citizens living in crowded cities and his influence on urban planning is among his greatest contributions to design.

His most ambitious project was the design of the capital city of the Punjab and Haryana States of India, Chandigarh, established after India gained independence in 1947.

These sketches of bulls and peasant houses would inform the buildings he would go on to build in the region.

Zaha Hadid

In these sketches, Zaha Hadid is not concerned with concrete ideas of how the project will turn out. They are instead abstract artworks that map spatial conceptualization, composition, contextual relationships, and inter-relational systems. She is clearly liberated by the act of drawing in the initial stages of her design process.

Norman Foster

The TV Tower, perched on the top of Mt Tibidabo in Barcelona, can be seen from almost anywhere in the city. These early sketches of Foster’s ideas and inspirations show how his simple ideas, simply synthesized created the foundations of one of the Catalan capital’s most iconic landmarks.

Frank Gehry

You can tell a Frank Gehry building from a mile off and it turns out his napkin sketches are no different. It would be easy to mix up his scrawling illustration of the Disney Concert Hall with his initial sketches of the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao. Then again, you could be forgiven for confusing the real buildings too.

If you liked this tour of the sketches and minds of some of history’s greatest architects, learn to combine loose ink sketching with watercolor to create beautiful buildings that leap off the page with storyboard artist Alex Hillkurtz on his course Architectural Sketching with Watercolor and Ink.

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