Architecture Handwriting
Architecture handwriting is the lettering an architect writes by hand on a drawing, and it is the form of the annotation that made the working drawing of the discipline of architecture legible before the text was typed or drawn by a computer. The term covers the styles of architectural lettering, the uppercase and the lowercase scripts that carry the dimensions and the notes on a sheet, and the techniques for writing them cleanly at a small size. This page covers the term, the lettering styles, and the techniques for clean architectural lettering, and it explains why the skill is still taught in the studio.
What architecture handwriting is and why it was the standard
Architecture handwriting is the annotation of the drawing, the dimensions, the notes and the labels that make the sheet legible, written by hand in a standardized form. The handwriting was the standard for the working drawing for most of the history of the discipline, because the drawing was made by hand and the lettering had to be made by hand to match it, and because a typed letter did not sit on a hand drawn line. The lettering had to be legible at a small size, usually 3 to 5 millimeters high, and it had to be made quickly, because a set of drawings carried hundreds of dimensions and notes. The skill was a core part of the training, and a student of architecture spent a term learning to letter before they were allowed to draw the building. The handwriting is now mostly done by a computer, but the form of the lettering, the shapes of the letters, survived into the digital typeface, and the term still names the skill.
The lettering styles used on a drawing
The lettering styles used on a drawing fall into 2 families, the uppercase style and the lowercase style, and the table gives the style, its name, and where it is used.
| Style | Form | Used for |
|---|---|---|
| Upright uppercase | Vertical strokes, no slant | The dimensions and the room labels |
| Italic uppercase | A slant of 75 degrees | The notes and the general text |
| English lowercase | The common hand, small | The quick notes and the marks |
| Freehand italic | A faster, looser script | The sketch and the early study |
The upright uppercase is the standard for the dimensions, because the vertical strokes are the easiest to keep even at a small size, and the italic is the standard for the notes, because the slant reads faster and takes less effort to write. A drawing that mixes the 2 styles does so by rule, the dimensions in the upright and the notes in the italic, and the reader of the drawing knows the rule and reads the sheet by it. The style of the lettering is a convention of the discipline, as fixed as the symbols of the drawing, and a sheet that breaks the convention is a sheet that has to be read with effort, which is where the errors come in.
The techniques for clean architectural lettering
The techniques for clean architectural lettering are 3, and they are the same whether the letter is written on paper or drawn by a computer. The first is the height, the letter is written to a fixed height, usually 3 to 5 millimeters for a working drawing, and the height is set with a guide or a template. The second is the spacing, the letters are spaced to a fixed rule, the width of a letter between them, so the line of text reads even. The third is the stroke, the letter is made in a single direction, the down stroke first and the up stroke second, so the line is even and the corner is clean. A letter that is written with these 3 rules is legible at the small size, and a set of drawings lettered by them is a set that reads as one hand, which is the point of the standard. The techniques are why the skill is still taught in the studio, because the digital typeface is drawn from the same rules, and the architect who understands the hand understands the letter on the screen.
How the hand lettering moved into the digital drawing
The hand lettering moved into the digital drawing in the 1980s, when the computer took over the production of the working sheet, and the letter on the screen was drawn from the shapes of the hand letter. The architectural typeface on a computer, the upright and the italic, is a digitized form of the hand styles, and the rule of a fixed height and a fixed spacing carries over, because the digital letter is set to a height in points and a tracking that is the digital form of the hand spacing. The shift changed the making of the letter, from the hand to the cursor, but it did not change the form, and the letter on a modern drawing is the same letter as the one written by hand, only sharper and easier to change. A set of drawings today is lettered by a computer, but the standard of the lettering is still the standard of the hand, and the term architecture handwriting still names the skill, because the skill is in the form of the letter and not in the tool that makes it.