SKETCHES OF WAR
“When I think thoughts,” renowned modernist architect Victor Lundy tells interviewers, “I draw thoughts.” Throughout his iconoclastic career as an architect, Lundy kept visual journals—“brain-boxes,” he called them—in which he captured the evolution of a project from his first ideas through completion. As a young soldier in World War II, Lundy created smaller scale versions of those brain-boxes: nearly two dozen three-by-five-inch spiral-bound notebooks, small enough to fit in a soldier’s breast pocket, filled with quick pencil drawings. The eight notebooks that survived the war are a visual diary of his seven months in the 26th Infantry Division, made up of soldiers he would later describe as “the most intelligent infantry men in the history of warfare.”
Victor Alfred Lundy was born to Russian immigrant parents on Manhattan’s Upper East Side in 1923. With his mother’s encouragement, he began seriously drawing and painting in
