Ink and Mortar: David Macaulay

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IF YOU'RE AN ARCHITECT, engineer or designer — actual or armchair — under 40, odds are David Macaulay had something to do with it.

Even if you're older, in fact. "I don't write for children. I never have. I wouldn't even know how to do that," Macaulay said. "I write for myself. But I'm published by the children's book department, because the children's book department, traditionally at least, publishes 'picture books.'"

"I make books where the pictures do the majority of the work and the text is somewhat supportive but then integrated with the pictures. I chose to go for the children's-book publishing field because it seemed like those people were having the most fun."

There is serious fun to be had at "The Art of Drawing Architecture," the National Building Museum's new retrospective. Tracing Macaulay's career from 1973's groundbreaking "Cathedral" to 2003's "Mosque," the show encourages the individual viewer to explore, with eye and hand, the great works of entire civilizations.

"That connection between the hand behind the drawing and lots of hands working together to build some vast thing, I think, is very direct," Macaulay observed.

"I also think that understanding the complexity of three-dimensional architecture is something you can begin to do through drawing, by drawing it. You look at things long enough — which is what drawing requires — and you move around it, you change your point of view."

Macaulay undertakes each book not as an expert but as a student, awestruck by the intricacy of what's before him — and the huge amount of research required to gain what he calls "a sense of the bigger picture."

Due next year, Macaulay's latest project, "The Way We Work," examines the "engineering feat" that is the human body and the "notion that we are the creation of our cells." After that, the illustrator's future is up for grabs.

"There probably will be a kind of systemic connection between all of these things," Macaulay said.

"Tackling weather or politics or ecology — this is all fair game. As long as you're curious and as long as you have the ability to organize complex information ... it's all there for the doing."

» National Building Museum, 401 F St. NW; through Jan. 21, free; 202-272-2448. (Judiciary Square)

Written by Express contributor Glenn Dixon
Photo courtesy National Building Museum