With all the attention given these days to architects, it should be little surprise that there’s a burgeoning market for their work.

No, not that work. Not shining riverfront condominiums or big-budget museums, but far-more-affordable architectural drawings. Everything from a rough idea sketched on a napkin to the meticulously crafted final illustrations used to present concepts to clients are being purchased by people who admire the buildings, appreciate the historical value of the depictions, or simply think they are beautiful in their own right.

“We can’t collect buildings,” says Chrysanthe Broikos, a curator at the National Building Museum in Washington. “So these are the next best thing. They’re works on paper that breathe life into what the architect was trying to say, what he saw as the inherent possibilities of what he wanted built.”

Architecture critics may scoff at the notion of architects selling their early drafts, but such original drawings have long been in and out of favor as collectibles. New York art dealer Max Protetch has been selling original plans and drawings by iconic designers Frank Lloyd Wright and R. Buckminster Fuller for years. And in the late ’80s and early ’90s, Christie’s and Sotheby’s got into the act, auctioning off original plans by Wright and others for tens of thousands of dollars. (Drawings by little-known architects can be found for as little as $1,000.)

Those plans and drawings, of course, weren’t meant to be sold and, for the most part, neither is the work of contemporary architects. However more and more living architects are becoming savvy about the commercial value of their workaday renderings (the material created for actual buildings) and have begun offering particular pieces in partnership with art dealers.

It helps that architects are excellent and distinctive illustrators, and typically their drawing styles nicely echo their design styles. Michael Graves’ renderings, for example, are awash in the signature pastels that define his postmodernism, while Zaha Hadid’s boldly abstract acrylics promise striking additions to an oeuvre that has already won her recognition as the first (and only) woman recipient of the prestigious Pritzker Prize. Daniel Libeskind brings his trademark anxious angles even to the gentle medium of watercolor, and minimalist Tadao Ando’s pencil sketches mark his Japanese paper with delicate lines.

Today, “classics” remain popular, with Wright drawings still available for less than $10,000 but with the potential to skyrocket, according to David Jameson of Chicago’s ArchiTech Gallery. In a fall show, he hopes to include a colored-pencil drawing by Wright of a prairie house from 1907—with supporting documents, such as vintage magazine articles—priced at around $125,000. That’s an extraordinarily large sum, Jameson says, but this is a “presentation drawing” (a carefully finished work made as a gift to an important patron or created as a marketing tool) that depicts the very essence of Wright’s style. Such pieces are found mainly in museums or Wright’s archives. So far, most Wright drawings, even those sold at auction, have been purchased for less than $50,000.

But, adds Jameson, even much smaller pieces by the masters can fetch tidy sums. “I’ve sold a beautiful 4-by-5-inch Louis Sullivan sketch of some foliage for a façade for $50,000,” he says. “And to him, it was originally just a pencil doodle.”

Architect Richard Meier feels that architectural drawings don’t qualify as art. The designer of the Getty Center in Los Angeles, who recently made news when he decided to open his model studio in Long Island City, New York, to the public, says projects of the Getty’s scope often encompass thousands of drawings. “I’m not interested in selling any of them,” he declares, “although I do donate works to charities, and where that ends up is anybody’s guess. People love to feel they have an inside scoop on the process of making buildings, but I don’t think of drawings as art. For me, the end result is what matters.”
 
Historians and curators don’t agree. They see a quiet glory in the stories offered by what is often a few lines and scribblings on fragile tissue paper. Works such as Wright’s and Sullivan’s, and the other architectural drawings on display at the National Building Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago and New York’s Museum of Modern Art, offer insight into the beginnings of modern architecture, they say.

Dealer Max Protetch believes that the best pieces illustrate ideas rather than buildings. “Some architects are terribly influential with what they draw and write,” he says, citing manifesto meisters like Peter Eisenman, Robert Venturi, and Rem Koolhaas, all active today.

With museums always on the lookout for important drawings, competition is tough for private collectors. Once in a while, a rendering does show up online (on eBay, for example), but not often. John Izenour, archivist for architecture firm Venturi Scott Brown in Philadelphia, says he occasionally receives calls from eBay buyers. “There does indeed seem to be an unsanctioned market for such drawings,” he concedes. “We’ve gifted some stuff over the years, and sometimes that can end up changing hands and make it onto eBay, I suppose. But these days we’re not releasing any more original materials. The decision is to leave the archives to educational institutions.”

Other than finding work created for conceptual projects—unrealized stuff drawn as a losing entry in a competition, for example—or, as in Meier’s and Venturi’s cases, donations for fundraisers, collectors usually turn to dealers who represent architects. New York’s Gagosian Gallery has sold Meier collages that have nothing to do with his architecture, and Protetch, taking a cue from architects’ partnerships with everyone from Target (Graves) to Tiffany (Frank Gehry), has offered limited-edition tea and coffee sets designed by architects like Toyo Ito and Dominique Perrault. This year in London, Kenny Schachter’s Rove gallery commissioned a concept car from Hadid. Schachter, who collaborated with the architect to refashion salable versions of her building models, simply said at the time, “Good design blurs distinctions about genre.”

But “architecture nerds,” as David Jameson calls himself and his brethren, get most excited by the material actually connected with the built. “The people like me who drew buildings in the margins of their textbooks when they were kids may never have become architects,” he says, “but we wound up never losing that compulsion.”