There is a moment in every project — usually in the first two or three weeks — where the design is still genuinely open. Where nothing has been committed to, nothing has been sent to a client or a planning authority, nothing has been translated into the precision that software requires and, in requiring, enforces.

That moment is the most important one in the entire process. It is when the real decisions are made.

We draw by hand during that period because a hand drawing is honest about its own uncertainty. A line made with a pencil says: this is an idea. A line made in CAD says: this is a wall. The difference is not semantic. It changes what the person looking at the drawing believes is still possible.

We have had the experience, more than once, of presenting an early digital model to a client and watching them respond to it as though it were finished — asking about materials, questioning proportions, treating a sketch as a proposal. The drawing had communicated a false certainty, and the conversation had narrowed accordingly.

A hand drawing keeps the conversation open. It invites the client into the uncertainty rather than presenting them with a resolution. It says: we are thinking. Would you like to think with us?

The digital tools come later, and they are essential — for precision, for coordination, for the thousand technical questions that a building requires answering before it can be built. We do not romanticise the hand drawing or pretend that it produces better buildings on its own.

But it produces better thinking. And better thinking, in our experience, is where every good building begins.