Why Blueprints Made Buildings Worse

I have here original blueprints from a building from O'Hare airport. Well, sort of. These drawings aren't really original drawings. They're just copies. That's because all blueprints are copies. Before blueprinting, copying a drawing meant tracing it by hand. But a blueprint or a cyanoype photographic negative can copy it with chemistry. This process became so ingrained in building that you'll hardly ever see an architect on TV or in the movies without a set of blueprints in tow. Sorry to be late. I stopped by the room and pick up the plans before the meeting. Which is why we take it for granted just how drastically these change the way that buildings are made and even what they look like. So, let's take a look. This set, which was drawn by the architecture firm S Soom, it shows the organization of the building overall, where things should go and how big they should be. And of course, they're blue, you know, like most blueprints. What might be surprising, though, is that the original drawing of this wasn't blue. It wasn't even made on paper. It was drawn on cloth, a cloth called drafting linen. Here's an original example of that. If you look really closely, you'll notice that it is indeed fabric. You can see the little fibers in there. This fabric was starched and then pressed through some heavy rollers in a process called calendaring. that gives it this glossy smooth surface that's suitable for accepting precise line work and ink. Then oils and dyes make it translucent so that architects and draftsmen can trace lines through it, transferring the information from one sheet through to another sheet. And it's that translucent quality that allows the blueprinting process to work. It's essentially photographic, but it doesn't use a camera. Instead, it starts with chemically treated paper, which is coated with iron salts. These compounds oxidize and change color when exposed to bright light. Rather than turning red like rust, they turn a bright Prussian blue. To make a blueprint, you take the translucent linen drawing covered with dark ink lines. And then you sandwich it tightly against the treated paper. Then you blast the pair with intense light like maybe sunlight or for me these UV lights. Anywhere lines block the light, white shadows are left while the background turns blue. After just a few minutes, you rinse the paper in water to stop the reaction. And when it's done drying, you get a beautiful Prussian blueprint with white lines. All this might seem cumbersome, but it was about 10 times faster and cheaper than hand copying. It compressed days of labor into just minutes, making drawings replicable, portable, and sharable for the first time ever. And this quietly transformed how buildings were imagined, designed, and constructed ever since. Let's start with the most obvious impact. Blueprinting literally inverts the architect's original drawing. If you've ever looked at like a inverted photograph or a negative, you know that it just feels strange. The shadows, which are normally the darkest parts of the image, are turned bright, which disorients your understanding of the overall forms that you're looking at. That's exactly what happens with blueprinting. Before this, architects would meticulously shade illustrations and show depth and materiality in their drawings. They added color washes to convey textures and finishes and atmospheres to the elevations and their sections. But none of that can be included when the drawing is destined to become a blueprint. Just compare these two elevation drawings. On the left, an original hand rendered drawing brings everything to life. It's more like a portrait of the building, showing how you would engage it or what it would look like. On the right, the blueprint equivalent strips all of that away, reducing the architecture to a pattern of white lines on blue paper. It's a technical diagram only. To cope, architects had to develop an entirely new visual language made just of symbols and labels and patterns of line hatches. These patterns didn't resemble realworld materials. Instead, they were arbitrary codes explained through lengthy keys. Around the early 1900s, you might even notice how buildings themselves became visually simpler and flatter. And it's not an accident. Architects struggled to explore the complex interactions of light and shadow and materials when they were no longer visually representing those ideas in their drawings. Buildings gradually became straightforward arrangements of standardized, repetitive forms, architectural expressions constrained by their simplified, copied blueprints. This also transformed the relationship that architects had with their work overall. There's a story about the Italian architect Carlos Scarpa who once had his assistant accidentally drop a lit cigarette onto an original drawing and burned a hole right through it. Instead of redrawing the entire sheet, Scarpa casually declared that the burnt spot could be where a tree should go. On the blueprint copies, no one would be able to tell or distinguish Scarpa's intentional design from the accidental cigarette burn. both appeared simply as an intentional white mark against a blue background. Ultimately, blueprinting disconnected the actual artwork, the architect's original drawing, from everyone else within the construction process. The builders and the craftsmen who

previously interacted directly with the architect's original vision were left handling just faded blue shadow copies of the original. Yet, it was the contractors who actually demanded that blueprinting become the standard practice. Here in Chicago, the architect Daniel Burnham was known to sneak drawings away without telling anyone. He would make changes that surprised contractors with more costly details and materials than were drawn in originally. Blueprints solved that problem by providing proof of exactly what the design looked like at a particular moment. But there was another huge benefit. Blueprint copies allowed contractors and builders to coordinate the complex logistics of materials and labor and schedules far better and earlier in the process than ever before. With multiple copies of the drawings in hand, different trades like plumbers and electricians, steel workers, and masons could all work from the same definitive instructions all at the same time. But because these people weren't working together on the job site yet, they relied purely on these drawings to develop their approaches. So architectural drawings had to become way more detailed and comprehensively describe every inch of the future building beforehand. This made construction document sets gigantic with more pages, more dimensions, more annotations, and more complexity. For instance, if you take a look at the construction set of the Empire State Building, which was completed in 1931, it was guided by around 100 pages of drawings only. A remarkable achievement at the time. Today, the construction documentation for modern skyscrapers could easily exceed thousands of pages, each precisely detailing every nut, every bolt, cable, and fixture. This unprecedented scale of pre-planning would have been unthinkable without blueprinting. This, however, shifts the role of architects, who are now expected to be expert coordinators, managers, and business people. Blueprints turned architecture from being mostly an artistic pursuit into a highly specialized profession, one that was obsessed with detailed instructions and coordination and precise documentation. While this rigorous pre-planning improved construction efficiency, it came with other costs. Because every detail had to be clearly drawn for copying, architects inevitably favored simplicity and standardization and repetition. Complex shapes and shadows and intricate detailing were all difficult and expensive to replicate accurately. So designs defaulted to uniform, predictable, and repeatable versions. Urban landscapes transformed from dynamic experiments of form and material into standardized assemblies of easily replicated rectangles and squares, ones that were optimized for efficient construction. You can't build what you can't draw, and you don't draw what's tedious or what's unproven. Before blueprinting, architecture was practiced primarily by small and local focused firms. Each project carefully was handcrafted from scratch and tailored uniquely to a client's needs. Each building was essentially a one-off experiment with little chance of easily replicating detailed solutions from previous projects. But with blueprinting, larger, older firms found a strategic advantage by preserving their original linen drawings. Small improvements quickly turned into massive advantages when multiplied across thousands of blueprint sets. So blueprints didn't necessarily killed creativity in architecture. They just redirected it toward coordination, efficiency, and business strategy. With blueprinting, they could reuse entire sheets of proven details from one building to another building, dramatically cutting costs, and time. This kind of detailed experience compounded rapidly with every new copy drawing creating powerful market dominance in ways that never happened before. These firms also developed specializations and they became experts in particular building types, skyscrapers and factories, hospitals and airports. For instance, Albert Khan's office in Detroit became renowned for industrial buildings because they could be copied quickly using standard details from one automobile factory to the next. They ended up dominating industrial architecture across the United States. But perhaps the ultimate expression of blueprint copying, it came in 1908 when Sears Robuck and Company, then a mail order giant, realized that blueprinting could sell more building materials. They did that by replicating entire houses, effectively turning architecture into a ready to assemble consumer good. Families across America could flip through a catalog, offering 370 distinct home designs. Once a home was selected, Sears pre-cut all the lumber, bundled every nail, fixture, and shingle, and loaded the package onto a single train car, and then shipped it directly to the customer. A detailed set of blueprints then guided the families or the local builders step by step through the house's construction. This is business model allowed Sears to sell and deliver more than 70,000 homes with each individual design copied roughly 200 times each. Meanwhile, architecture itself was becoming more corporatized. professionalized and hyper specialized. And the stage was set for copying buildings by sending pre-manufactured

parts across the United States. But we do not actually make blueprints anymore for construction. Yet the term blueprint, it's so ingrained in our language that we call every architectural drawing a blueprint, even if it's not blue. It also seems impossible to imagine making buildings without the levels of pre-planning and coordination that they offer. At the same time, they've removed some of the critical aspects of the final building's qualities out of the hands of the people that design it. Modern architectural drawings exist digitally, lacking any physical presence at all, at least until they're literally made concrete. Designs are now abstract collections of data and building information models bound by what software can represent or simulate or visualize. These and blueprints offer a sort of view of the building from nowhere, disembodied from the way that people will experience it eventually. and architects grow increasingly removed from the hands-on realities of construction. So, blueprints created like an architectural spam, scalable and endlessly copyable buildings. But that's happening to us, too. Our identities and our data can be copied and transmitted everywhere. The problem is that process leaks like a Franklidd Wright roof. Every spam email or telemarketer call is evidence that a data broker has collected your data and sold it to a marketer, a credit agency, or a scammer. Go ahead, Google search your name right now. I'm sure that you'll find something that you did not intentionally put out there. Addresses, job histories, shopping habits, or family connections, maybe even your social security number. You can contact the website owner and demand that they take it down. They will be legally required to do it, but that's a lot of work. You might also try what I did and let Incogn do all that work for you. Incogn 230 data brokers on your behalf and requests that they remove your personal information from their databases. They target every single copy of it out there and eradicates it. I've tried it. And my call history is free from telemarketers sense. All you do is create an account, enter just the bare minimum that they need to find your data and then incogn takes it on from there. They handle the inevitable push back from brokers and you get satisfying updates as your information disappears from those sketchy corners of the internet. This is especially important here in the US where people search sites are everywhere, a doctor's paradise. But even after your initial cleanout, Incogn keeps scanning the internet. If anything ever slips through, you can use their custom removal tool to target the offender. So, use my link below or the one that's on the screen and use code Steuart Hicks and you'll get 60% off of your annual plan. Again, that's 60% off the priceless protection from spam, scams, and identity theft just by clicking here or using the code Steuart Hicks. Stay safe and I'll see you next time.