Le Corbusier on Plans

Robby--you seem to be grappling with some of the same issues I am facing in trying to inhabit Barcelona’s richness and I agree completely with the urge toward un-convention. However, I disagree on the inadequacy of architectural drawings to capture what you are referring to as soul. I think Le Corbusier captures the sentiment in Towards a New Architecture when he talks about plans:

Without plan there can be neither grandeur of aim and expression, nor rhythm, nor mass, nor coherence. Without plan we have the sensation, so insupportable to man, of shapelessness, of poverty, of disorder, of willfulness. A plan calls for the most active imagination. It calls for the most severe discipline also. The plan is what determines everything; it is the decisive moment. A plan is not a pretty thing to be drawn, like a Madonna face; it is an austere abstraction; it is nothing more than an algebrization and a dry-looking thing. The work of the mathematician remains none the less one of the highest activities of the human spirit.