Drawing Structures First Year GC

This publication marks the first edition of Drawing Structures, a first-year atelier presenting a selection of thirteen working drawings produced during the Fall 2024 semester at EPFL by 102 first-year civil engineering students. In this foundational course, we introduce drawing by hand as a conceptual and creative tool central to the formation of the civil engineers as creatives, designers and project makers.
Each student develops a set of drawings over the course of the semester, based on one of nine selected bridges by Swiss engineer Robert Maillart (1872–1940). Using archival documentation and selecting an appropriate scale, students begin to draw projective plans, sections, and axonometric fragments, gradually exploring the spatial and structural logic embedded in Maillart’s bridges.
These hand-drawings often include notes on dimensions and details that reflect each student’s level of engagement and understanding. The drawings reveal not only the geometry of the structure, but also the thinking behind its conception and its construction, a creative act that involves imagination, intuition and deliberate choice. The atmosphere of the drawings, and the emotional quality of inscribing a line directly onto paper, immediately set the tone for the care and attentiveness with which we intend to conduct the semester.
The methodology is very specific and strict, yet it allows of fosters through the act of drawing a kind of thinking that is not linear, nor limited to calculation. To draw is to observe, analyze, and construct. Drawing helps civil engineering students to develop critical thinking, visualization skills, and the ability to navigate the multiple layers of design: constructional, technical, conceptual, historical, and cultural.
The focus of the course is to construct a plan and sections of a bridge that includes the landscape and selecting a scale to understand its materiality and detailing. Orthographic projection, with its unique ability to preserve scale, offers a precise open space for analytical investigation. Yet beyond its technical precision, drawing serves as an external memory, a cognitive extension that supports creativity and transformation. Ambiguities become opportunities for discovery.
Descriptive geometry, as developed by Gaspard Monge (1746 -1818), remains a fundamental method for translating three-dimensional forms into two-dimensional representations, and vice versa. Through rigorous training in projection techniques, students learn to visualize, analyze, and manipulate spatial relationships and structural systems. These foundational skills cultivate the intuitive spatial reasoning essential for civil engineers able to engage with projects as both designers and builders of complex structures.
Axonometric projection introduced in the second part of the semester, becomes a space for immersive exploration. It allows the unfolding of spatial depth and transparency, revealing a constructive logic through the slow layering of lines. These drawings are accumulations of thought, time, and precision.
Imagination does not reside only in the mind. It is also embedded in the act of drawing, in the simple and personal language of lines, points, and planes. The paper becomes a space of projection, memory, and imagination. Drawing becomes a cycle of doing, analyzing, correcting, and redoing, a process that mirrors the iterative nature of both design and construction, enabling a reflected engagement with form and matter.
Drawing is always a creative transformation.