Splendour and Miseries of Architectural Construction Drawings

The architectural profession has created an almost unbridgeable chasm between subjective design drawings and objective production documents. For design drawings, there are no established conventions, because they would interfere with the creativity of architects, but for construction drawings, most of which are objective documents, the logical conclusion is that they should have been easily codified. However, architects have had an incredibly hard time agreeing on construction notations, a predicament which is probably as old as the Biblical turris confusionis and Nimrod’s rave, “Rafel mai amech sabi almi,” meaningless to anyone but himself. As a consequence of this peculiar condition, many architects, and most architectural firms, have their own systems.