Architecture Without CAD?

At Notre Dame’s Architecture Camp my daughter learned how to draw a church.

At 16, my daughter can explain flying buttresses better than most contractors.

That’s not hyperbole. That’s Notre Dame.

Most summer camps for high school kids are fairly shallow. How much can you really teach a 16-year-old in a few days? My son once attended a weeklong design camp where they tried to teach a different design discipline every day — industrial, landscape, graphic, etc. It sounded great on paper. But the reality was wide and shallow.

It reminded me of my college study abroad program, where we crammed Poland, Germany, and England into one semester. Sounded great, but we spent most of our time in transit — train stations, brief hotel stays, and hasty walking tours. We never stayed long enough to absorb the place. In a culture obsessed with distraction, I’ve come to value pedagogical depth over breadth.

And that’s what makes Notre Dame’s Architecture School so different.

onTradition

Notre Dame is widely known — and sometimes mocked — as the flagship for traditional architecture education. While virtually every other architecture school has gone whole hog on modernism, abstraction, and digital design, Notre Dame has doubled down on classical everything. Where the others emphasize concepts and critiques through CAD, Notre Dame teaches proportion and permanence through the pencil.

The school still requires students to master hand drawing. They still study Vitruvius. They still design buildings with ornament. And it turns out — this works.

Notre Dame’s Career Discovery Architecture Camp didn’t just teach my daughter to draw a church. It showed her, in two weeks, what many schools can’t teach in four years — how to think like a builder.

Students, ages 14 to 17, learned to draw complete churches — floor plans, elevations, perspectives, and details for stained glass windows. Most of the churches had flying buttresses. Some had domes. All had substantial ornament, detailed as part of the camp.

My daughter spent five hours drawing bricks. Not photoshopping textures. Not mechanically copying and pasting. Drawing. The precision and intention required in that act left her with a skillset far beyond many college freshmen.

This kind of instruction — intense hand-drawn studio time, led by working practitioners — is rare anywhere, much less in a high school camp. Her instructor, Giuseppe Mazzone, teaches first-year design at Notre Dame and is known for his exceptional sketching ability. This was not a week of “design thinking” and glitter glue. It was full architectural training, compressed into twelve gruelling days.

The Learning Curve

For contrast, I draw buildings for a living. I’m (mostly) self-trained. I work in affordable, incremental development, and draw a lot of 600-square-foot rectangles on rectilinear urban lots. I struggle with curves — not because I can’t learn them, but because affordable housing rarely needs them. I’m fine with that. It works for what I do.

But Notre Dame didn’t impose those constraints on their students. They let them try the ambitious stuff — symmetry, form, articulation, verticality, even at 16. That tells you something about their trust in tradition — and their belief in teenagers (and, ergo, I suppose, humanity).

The broader academy often dismisses traditional design as pastiche. They say it’s not of this time. That it’s artificial. That it limits expression. That it lacks political voice. But I’ve watched modern architecture become a political voice first, with human utility and grace relegated to the unimportant. In too many schools today, students are taught to critique systems rather than build structures. They’re encouraged to think big, but not necessarily how to build anything.

So here’s the question:

• What’s lost when students aren’t trained like this?

• What happens to our buildings? To our cities? To our collective memory of how to build well?

In my work with the Congress for the New Urbanism, Incremental Development Alliance, and National Townbuilders’ Association, I’ve partnered with a lot of Notre Dame grads. One of the best is Thomas Dougherty, author of The American Alley and one of the leading voices in faith-based housing.

Thomas was hired for a Durham Charette to help us explore how churches can build housing. Armed with context and research on these narrow topics, Thomas can turn a utilitarian church parking lot into a world-class village. He came out of this program.

The students coming out of Notre Dame have skills most architecture grads simply don’t:

• They understand history and historical precedent.

• They know how traditional architecture dovetails with traditional city-building.

• They can draw.

And not just in Rhino or Revit. They draw with their hands, guided by a contextual understanding.

Grace Through Basics

I recognize that technology is a tool. But overreliance on digital tools atrophies the basic muscles of design. Nowhere is that more obvious than when you watch a Notre Dame architect design next to a CAD-dependent peer. The difference in approach and deliverables is stark. One is thoughtful and free. The other is automated and stuck, as if they are handcuffed.

Neither is inherently wrong. But one, in my view, is clearly better.

Notre Dame training seems to permit CAD, reluctantly, knowing that in most of the industry, it is a necessary skill. But they don’t let CAD detract from the basics of the profession—conveying vision, and meaning, through hand drawing.

It’s no surprise then that Notre Dame architecture grads have the highest average starting salary in the country — $70,000 to $75,000 a year.

If we want to fix our towns, our cities, and our civic buildings— we’re going to need more architects who can draw, think, and build like this.

I told my daughter before she went: “You may or may not love architecture. You may or may not love Notre Dame. But you’re going to come out of this with an opinion.”

She did. So did I.

And now I have a drawing of a church on my wall — flying buttresses and all — designed by a 16-year-old.

That’s what great teaching can do.

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