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.”