Notes on the architectural sketchbook: Body, memory and life

This article examines the architectural sketchbook as a site of action and embodied experience. Hand drawing is framed not as a passive repository of preliminary ideas but as an active cognitive and curatorial medium operating throughout the design process. Sketching is explored through three interrelated frameworks – observational, memory-based and imaginative/speculative – which define modes of engagement with space, material and experience. Interdisciplinary perspectives from sociology, anthropology and architectural theory provide a conceptual lens for understanding sketches as cultural, material and cognitive processes. These approaches make the frameworks tangible, revealing latent creative processes and linking historical reflection with contemporary practice. While sketches by established architects offer conceptual reference, the focus is on contemporary student work, showing how these frameworks are enacted today. The student drawings operate as permeable spaces where theoretical concepts resonate and expand through experiential hand drawing. This interplay allows for the analysis and integration of multiple perspectives, amplifying the relationship between theory and practice and revealing the complexity of embodied creative processes. In a context increasingly dominated by digital tools, the sketchbook re-emerges as a space of creative freedom, sustaining an ethics of attention and grounding intuitive, gestural and process-based architectural thought in embodied, atemporal modes of knowledge production.