Instagrammable Architectural Drawing?

Abstract

Although the first social network dates back to the late 1970s, the real ‘Big Bang’ occurred twenty years ago, when 2003 Mark Zuckerberg led the birth of Facebook, still one of the most popular social networks today. However, even more critical to the discussion, including the interests of our community of image designers and researchers, is the emergence of social networks such as Pinterest and Instagram in 2010. The interest in these platforms lies in their way of sharing different forms of visuality, so much so that the digital images shared on these socials have become sources of inspiration for new generations, a kind of visual library, albeit a questionable one, to draw on for graphic production as well. Even architectural drawing has not been exempt from this practice, making architectural images more accessible to a broader audience. Today, it is common practice for architects to share their designs and drawings on these platforms, allowing people from different parts of the world to see, appreciate and even ‘consume’ their work.
In this regard, through the reconnaissance and comparative analysis of some social pages and profiles of architect-draftsman who share and promote architectural drawings, the essay aims to investigate the plurality and complexity of formal aspects of architectural drawing in the age of social networks in order to identify its limits, expressive potential, and underlying or explicit cultural prodromes. The primary intent of the essay is to bring more attention to a now widespread and established practice that calls us into question as a academic community.