Ein Tag im Archiv: on reading drawings we did not make, and what the pencilled margins told us about the builders who quietly ignored them

The original drawings were ink on linen, beautifully lettered, and wrong. Not wrong in the architect’s intentions, but wrong about the building that was actually built.

The evidence was in the margins. Someone, almost certainly the site foreman, had annotated the linen in soft pencil: Fenster 12 cm schmaler, Treppe gedreht, hier Eisen statt Holz. Windows 12 cm narrower. Stair turned. Iron here instead of timber. None of these changes appear on the later “as built” set, which was simply a clean copy of the original.

We now ask archives for every sheet of a set, including the damaged and “superseded” ones. The superseded sheets are often the only honest record of what went into the ground.