Power of pen

Neave Brown, the renowned architect of modernist housing in the 1960s and 1970s for London Borough of Camden, used only pen, ink and paper to design the complex Alexandra Road estate of 520 dwellings, from first ideas to completion. This meant drafting and re-drafting of thousands of detailed drawings, for example, staircases were redrawn up to 40 times to get it right. It meant, as Brown put it, spending long hours 'nose down' at the drafting table. Only when all drawings were complete did Brown's team produce a scale model for presentation purposes. Now, drafting with pen and paper has largely been replaced by CAD tools although the practice of freehand sketching is still alive in the early stages of the design process.