Architectural drawings do not represent

Abstract

The drawings that Iktinos produced for the Parthenon were not a copy of a copy of Plato’s ideal temple. They were instead a set of architectural ideas in their own right, and demonstrably they were more beautifully fitted for their purpose than the Doric hexastyle ideal. The paper argues that drawings are the original being-in-the-world of architectural ideas. Their non-representational function is what Heidegger calls the “moment of vision”, the historical horizon and the graphical pathway that brings architectural meaning into presence within-time and for the first time. When a discourse about architects, temples and gods is located historically and phenomenologically in the time of the drawings, Heidegger’s phenomenology is shown to be consistent with Vitruvius’s pragmatic view that drawings are architectural ideas.