Why do Architects Write in All Caps?

If you have ever seen a set of construction documents, or seen an architect writing, you may have seen a lot of upper-case. I was asking myself, why is this the norm? Why do architects write in all caps?

Architects write in all caps for the legibility and standardization. Largely, this is from the days of all documents being produced by hand, where achieving regularity from person to person was very important. Upper-case also helps to keep construction documents neat and tidy.

For Legibility

Perhaps the biggest reason is simply for legibility. If you look at these sentences that I am currently writing, any p’s, g’s, and y’s are dropping below their neighboring letters. And any h’s, b’s, t’s, and a few others, are rising above their neighbors. In these sentences there is a lower and an upper line that letters rise to and sit on respectively – except a lot of these letters don’t. This can actually be tremendously useful (something that I discuss below), however, it also leads to a great deal of variation. These letters don’t sit in a nice ordered way, but instead have lots of letters rising and dropping as they see please. HOWEVER, THESE LETTERS ALL RISE AND DROP TO THE EXACT SAME SPOT. For obvious reasons, this helps enormously with legibility.

Perhaps the biggest reason is simply for legibility

For Standardization

The next reason is standardization. This architects have in common with engineers – they both love to standardize absolutely anything they can. And it’s very difficult to standardize lower case writing. It looks messy when written on the same sheet as a construction document. In addition to this, lower case, especially when written by hand, has a great deal of variation from person to person. And so, a part of the reason why architects write in all caps is from the days of hand drafting and hand-writing – where standardization was harder and more crucial to achieve from person to person. The best way of achieving this was, you guessed it, to move to everybody who was working on the drawings to using all capitals. This helped to remove the idiosyncrasies we develop from years of writing in lowercase.

The Benefits of Lower-case vs Upper-case

Lower-case was actually an invention. This is weird to think about, something as mundane as lower-case being invented, but at one point somebody, or a group of people, did invent it. Before lower-case, only upper-case and capital letters were used. In fact, it was the Holy Roman Emperor Charlemagne who sponsored monks from the north of England to research lower-case writing, at some point around the late 8th, early 9th century.

Lower-case was actually an invention … imagine a world where every book, every pamphlet, every Bible is written completely by hand, in upper-case … It isn’t hard to see the demand for a faster method of writing.

So why did Charlemange want to develop a break-through in writing?

There are two main reasons. The first is the time it takes to write in all upper-case.

If you’re reading this, you stand a good chance of having gone through architecture school. At many architecture schools the first assignment is to write out something, could be anything, in ‘architecture handwriting’. No doubt you are very aware, if you have completed that assignment, just how long upper-case takes to write with, especially for long sentences.

Now imagine a world where every book, every pamphlet, every Bible is written completely by hand, in upper-case. I’m not sure if you’ve seen a Bible recently. They’re thick.

It isn’t hard to see the demand for a faster method of writing.

On top of this, long sentences and paragraphs that are all in upper-case are harder to read. A paragraph of solely upper-case characters has a tendency to blend together. A part of the legibility benefit, that there is regularity among letters, comes back to bite. This regularity has a tendency to blur words together when looking at a page of upper-case.

Last Thoughts

It is clear then, that upper-case and lower-case both have their benefits.

The legibility and standardization achieved with writing in all caps means that they are very attractive to keeping construction documents looking neat.

These same qualities, of course, can detract when writing large swathes of writing by hand. For this reason, architecture firms will tend to use upper-case in any drawing, or on construction documents, but don’t tend to when writing narratives, or emails, or related documents.