For Christian Coop, drawing a building is a way of understanding the decisions, ambitions and ideas behind it. Through his Freehandlines project, the architect and watercolour artist has painted more than 1,000 London landmarks, creating an extensive visual record of the capital. Precise pen work gives each building its structure, while washes of colour capture the materials, light and atmosphere that shape its presence in the city.
Coop’s architectural practice and painting inform one another, bringing together an interest in how cities might develop with a close observation of the places that already define them. In this interview, he discusses the relationship between drawing and understanding, the freedom that comes from working in watercolour, and the continuing appeal of recording London one building at a time.
All images © Christian Coop
You have worked for many years as both an architect and an artist. Do those two identities feel separate to you, or have they gradually become part of the same way of looking at the world?
I think all our experiences shape us, and for me they form a continuous narrative. I often wonder where one identity begins and another ends.
Drawing came first. We all draw as children, and I have even written about the physiology of drawing for an online publication. Drawing led me towards architecture and to a modernist education. Once you have learned that approach, you begin to recognise what may be missing from your training: qualities such as proportion, human scale and the way an entrance is made.
That realisation led me back to drawing as a way of learning. By tracing the lines of a building with pen and paint, I can begin to understand why it is the way it is. Many architects and historians write perceptively about architecture, but unless you draw every edge and understand its relationship to the whole, you may never fully grasp the ideas, hopes and intentions of the architect who first designed it.
So perhaps art and architecture complete each other for me. Together, they also bring me closer to the generations of architects who came before me.
Your Freehandlines project has developed into an extensive visual record of London. What first made you want to document the city in this way?
You usually begin by painting what you know, and for me that meant London. The project grew from there.
I soon realised that a collection of paintings becomes especially meaningful when it is understood in context. Together, the buildings reveal something about a place and the way its architecture creates the character of the city. The more I paint, the more I understand, and that process becomes addictive.
The collection has now grown into one of the most extensive artistic surveys of a single city. I created a map on my website to visualise it, and it shows how densely the paintings are distributed across central London. In some areas, walking only a short distance, between 75 and 150 steps in almost any direction, brings you to a building I have painted.
You have now painted more than 1,000 London landmarks. Has working at that scale changed the way you understand the city and its architecture?
Absolutely, and often without my realising it.
I recently began painting other cities, including Paris, and immediately felt the difference. The buildings may share a broadly Neoclassical language, but subtle variations change the way their architecture is read culturally.
Parisian architecture often feels more romantic and expressive, particularly at roof level. London’s architecture, by contrast, seems more handsome, upright and correct. Sometimes you have to look at a familiar place from the outside in order to understand its value.
Your watercolours are highly observational, but they also have a strong sense of atmosphere. How do you balance architectural accuracy with your own emotional response to a place?
It may be muscle memory, instinct or simply a reaction to a particular view, but sometimes a building seems to grab you. In that sense, the subject chooses the view, and I simply try to capture it.
It is important to listen to those instincts. A city is a kind of stage set, with certain views and vistas arranged or revealed to create drama, calm or a backdrop to everyday life. My work tries to capture not only the details of a building’s form, but also the way it speaks to the city around it.
Light, movement, material and atmosphere are recurring interests across both your architectural and artistic work. Which of these tends to be the starting point when you begin a new painting?
It is difficult to separate one quality from another. My starting point is usually the architecture itself, but I approach it through the particular qualities of watercolour.
Technically, my work is pen and wash. The line creates the form, while the watercolour suggests the material. The atmosphere emerges from the overlap between these two media, which support and depend on each other.
Watercolour can be an unpredictable medium. What is it about its transparency and immediacy that continues to appeal to you?
Watercolour is one of the most difficult media because you have to live with your mistakes, rather like architecture, perhaps.
It is quick and immediate, and yet the finished image is not really a physical object. It is simply an act of staining the paper. That quality gives watercolour its lightness.
I have always felt that the lightest art can speak to us most powerfully. Music can change our mood more quickly than sculpture, for example. Watercolour feels close to music in that respect. It is also satisfying to use such a transient medium to capture something as permanent as architecture.
You often work with line and wash. How important is the initial drawing beneath the colour, and how much freedom do you allow yourself once the painting begins?
Perhaps it is the architect in me that needs to draw first. The drawing becomes the structure, and the painting becomes the façade.
I often post both the line drawing and the finished watercolour on social media, and it is surprising how often the line work is more popular. Perhaps a line drawing holds the promise of a process still unfolding, and that sense of possibility is exciting.
The line work is precise, which allows the watercolour to become much freer. I use all kinds of things, including water pistols, knives and sanding machines, to create light patches, texture or snow. Once you have established the structure, you can begin to experiment.
Your work explores not only well-known landmarks but also the character and hidden histories of London. Are you especially drawn to buildings because of their architecture, their stories, or the combination of both?
For me, it is a combination of both, and there is an interesting relationship between them.
Every period produces buildings, many of them functional rather than exceptional. Over time, some are replaced, while the best survive. This process helps create the cities we know, and it means that the historic buildings still standing today often have a particular importance.
That importance may come from their architecture, their cultural associations or the events that took place within them. The great buildings usually have something remarkable to say about themselves, whether through their form or through the stories attached to them.
As an architect, drawing is also a tool for analysing and communicating ideas. Has the dominance of digital architectural visualisation made freehand drawing more important to you rather than less?
It is fascinating to see how technology changes the way we represent ideas and understand the world. When a new technology appears, we rush towards it; once it becomes ubiquitous, we often begin to seek something different.
People are curious, but they also look for authenticity. Direct, human communication through drawing has a powerful quality. As an architect, I use rendered images, but as artificial intelligence becomes more prevalent and often produces strange errors, I find myself returning to watercolour more and more.
The act of painting is also an escape from the digital narrative of working life. It offers a slower, more physical and more personal way of looking.
You have created architectural concepts including the No Shadow Tower and Circle Line Travelator, while your paintings often focus on preserving and recording existing places. Do you see a tension between imagining the future of cities and documenting what is already there?
I see all my concepts, including painting, as larger projects. I am fascinated by the way something small can influence something much larger, which often happens in cities.
The Mona Lisa, for example, draws hundreds of thousands of visitors to the Louvre. That concentration of visitors has helped shape the surrounding shops, restaurants and wider area. It is amazing that an individual painting can therefore influence an entire urban district, something Aldo Rossi calls an urban artefact.
My concepts, such as the No Shadow Tower and the Circle Line Travelator, explore how cities might work differently in the future. The travelator concept reimagines the Circle Line as a continuous moving walkway: a new form of circulation beneath the city. These projects are deliberately speculative, but ideas can influence the way people see a city and sometimes lead to real change.
The watercolour project works in a complementary way. It records the meaningful architecture of an entire city through a form of communication that is very human. Imagine being able to see all of London in one gallery, presented as a single work of art.
You have spoken about encouraging freehand sketching as a way of understanding complex urban environments. What can drawing reveal about a place that photography or digital modelling cannot?
A photograph shows everything, but I often feel that it reveals very little about how we actually experience a place.
Vision is never static or uniform. We experience cities in fragments. The eye moves from detail to detail, scanning parts of a wide field of view, while our other senses contribute to an overall impression.
An artist can capture that impression as it is felt. Drawing also allows you to leave out the elements that do not matter, so that the viewer can focus on what is significant and fill in the rest through imagination. In that sense, part of the art exists in the eye of the viewer.
After documenting so much of London, are there particular places, cities or architectural subjects you would now like to explore more deeply through your artwork?
I never really stop painting because there is always more architecture to discover. The project has encouraged me to travel and look at other cities, and the website now includes galleries devoted to places such as Paris, New York, Venice, Oxford and Cambridge.
For each new city, I try to limit myself to around 50 watercolours so that I do not become completely absorbed in painting everything. The limitation also creates a focused selection, allowing visitors to compare the character and architecture of different cities.
I have begun writing articles and guides as well, exploring what is worth seeing, why architecture matters and the stories behind particular buildings. Freehandlines has become a growing archive of architectural paintings and urban stories, and perhaps my most ambitious project so far.
I am also looking to have a book published soon with Lund Humphries and Dr Harry Adams of the Courtauld Institute of Art. It will form part of a series covering every part of London. Taken together, the volumes will likely provide the most comprehensive architectural study of the capital’s individual buildings.
Explore Coop’s paintings and architectural stories at freehandlines.co.uk.
