May 26, 2026
Shawcroft Competition Honors 31 Years of Hand Drawing
In an era when design tools have gone almost entirely digital, one annual competition at NC State's College of Design insists on a different discipline — the kind that begins with a pencil, a pen, or a brush held in a human hand. The Brian Shawcroft Drawing Competition, now in its 31st year, remains a rare and deliberate celebration of hand drawing as a core architectural skill. This year, four students received prizes for submissions evaluated across three categories: the design process, documentation and analysis, and presentation. The breadth of those categories reflects the competition's central belief that hand drawing is not a single technique but a spectrum of thinking made visible.
