The Architecture Drawing Prize

Currently in its sixth year, the Architecture Drawing Prize continues to celebrate the art of drawing in three categories: hand-drawn, hybrid and digital. Sir John Soane’s Museum will be exhibiting the prize winners and shortlisted entries for the 2022 Prize, which attracted 138 entries, and a strong majority of hand-drawn entries. As ever, the submissions are from around the world, attesting to the truly international nature of the Prize and the great skill and originality of entrants. The Architecture Drawing Prize is sponsored by Iris Ceramica and is co-curated by Make Architects, Sir John Soane’s Museum and World Architecture Festival (WAF).

Drawing was pivotal to Sir John Soane’s architecture, both in his practice and his teaching. The Museum’s extensive collection is testament to Soane’s use of drawing to explore, challenge and teach. The Architecture Drawing Prize continues this tradition, showcasing new work that celebrates draughtsmanship, skill, and innovation. The Architecture Drawing Prize will this year be accompanied by a display of drawings and implements that belonged to Soane and his pupils. Highlighting the restoration of The Drawing Office, the earliest surviving example of a working architectural office, the display will link the vitality and importance of drawing in Soane’s day to the ambition and craft that continues to underpin architectural drawing practice today.

There will also be a reading table in the gallery with books selected by the Museum’s curators. Visitors will be encouraged to take time to sit and read about architecture, drawing and history – making the exhibition a site for ideas and learning, reiterating Soane’s description of his house-museum as an ‘academy of architecture’.  The 2022 category winners’ drawings will be a key element of the exhibition. The three winning  works are exceptionally good at demonstrating the range of approaches from the representational and sublime in the hand-drawn category, to the highly abstract and conceptual in the digital category, to an approach to drawing that wittily and deftly plays with the very idea of more traditional architectural renderings in the hybrid category. Overall, the drawings by the 2022 entrants to the Prize that have been selected for the exhibition demonstrate an increased interest in social and environmental topics, as well as a belief in using architectural drawing to freely explore ideas and speculate imaginatively.