Drawing Vicenza: Questioning Through Drawing in the Veneto, Italy

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Students in the 2025 Vicenza Summer Program sketching (l–r): outside a greenhouse, and at the Brion Tomb (1968–78) by Venetian architect Carlo Scarpa, near Treviso, Italy.

Drawing Vicenza: Questioning Through Drawing in the Veneto. Italy
Experiences of UVA Summer Program 2025

Exhibition 
Mon, Oct 27 – Wed, Nov 19

Gallery Talk & Reception
Wed, Oct 29, 4:45PM
Campbell Mezzanine, Level 2

This exhibition presents the work produced during the five-week summer program in Vicenza, where architecture students immersed themselves in the act of drawing as a mode of inquiry. Set within the urban and rural landscapes of the Veneto region, the course challenged students to observe, and to record. Through freehand drawings, diagrams, and analytical studies, participants explored the reciprocal relationship between human occupation and the built environment, discovering how thresholds, boundaries, and frames define both space and civic identity.
 
The drawings on display—ranging from precise architectural analyses to evocative experiential sketches—reflect a disciplined practice rooted in observation and reflection. Each drawing begins with a question: Why is it here? What if it were elsewhere? What does it reveal about time, purpose, or craft? Through the repetition of this inquiry, students developed not only technical fluency but also an awareness of the interconnected physical, material, and social dimensions that shape place.
 
The exhibition celebrates drawing as both process and product—an instrument of discovery and a record of thought. These sketchbooks and books, together with a selection of photographs, form a collective portrait of learning through looking. They reveal how attention, patience, and disciplined curiosity can transform the simple act of drawing into an architecture of understanding—one line, one observation, one question at a time.

Faculty Program Directors

—Inés Martín Robles, Associate Professor, Architecture
—Luis Pancorbo, Associate Professor, Architecture