Alberto Campo Baeza

On scanning my architectural drawings.

We’re very lucky. We are already immersed in a New Millennium, the third, and yet it seems that we are not even aware of it. Information technology has turned our lives upside down with so many positive aspects, which compensate for the few not-so-good things it has to offer.

The possibility of scanning drawings, in our case architectural drawings, is one of the gifts given to us. I have decided to donate my entire archive, everything, to the Library at my School of Architecture in Madrid, the UPM, my alma mater. And prior to that, my colleagues scanned all that documentation, so that not only do I not lose it but, posted on my website, it is made available to everyone, including the Library: all the plans, all the drawings, thousands of them, and all the documents. And the more than five million visitors to my website have all this documentation at their disposal. This would have been unthinkable until very recently, so fast is the pace of change! And I can only express my gratitude.

This whole scanning operation has made me and my staff reorganize all this extensive documentation. And it has made us realize how much we have worked over the years. It’s thrilling to see all those drawings on screen now, with an unrivalled degree of luminosity and the possibility of being able to analyze them down to the last millimeter.

Alberto Campo Baeza

June 2019