Years ago, for a second-semester project in architecture school, I drew the interior perspective of a cafe space with saucers and cups on each table.  My critic was so shocked when she saw it that she started laughing.  An architectural drawing is supposed to be the facts of the building, a description of what it is, and nothing more.  It’s up to the architectural rendering, which has crasser, more commercial, connotations, to present the image of the building, a projection of what the life inside it is like.  The drawings of the late modern American architect Ralph Rapson, who lived and worked in Minneapolis, dance in the gap between the two.  While they’re accurate dimensionally and proportionally, like proper drawings, they also capture all-at-once the mythology of the building.

Repson’s drawings are cartoon-like but held in check by the conventions of architectural drawing – standard hatch patterns to indicate materials like wood and stone, and carefully constructed perspective lines – that describe the structures with a designer’s clarity and certainty.  His drawings have more life, more joy, than conventional architectural renderings, especially contemporary, computer-generated renderings, with their elegant, hyper-real chill.  Rapson has a heavier, more sensual hand than an architect.  Every line carries substance and shadow.  Unlike Le Corbusier’s renderings, for example, which are only populated by abstract, big-limbed scale figures, like Le Modulor, Rapson’s are populated with ladies and gentleman, children, animals and vehicles, all going about their business.  They’re brimming with activity.  It could reflect a distinctly American, suburban, postwar joy.  And it could be the pleasure of drawing.