On one of the hottest days in July, three Boston-area perspectivists sat at lunch around a small table in the Hammersmith Café and asked each other why people who draw architecture never seem to talk to each other. Steve Rich, Frank Costantino and Steve Oles could find no satisfactory answer, except the lack of structured means to encourage such a dialog. So, they decided to organize an exhibition of architectural drawing which would, they hoped, provide a point of contact for some of the architects and artist who had drawn quietly and along for years.

That was 1984, and the ambitious-sounding but actually very modest “First Annual Architectural Delineators Exhibition” was brough into being for a total of four hours on the 20^th of September in the lounge of the Boston Architectural Center. In spite of the practically instantaneous nature of the show—which consisted of small photographs of the work of local perspectivists—it generated an amazing amount of positive response among the participants and viewers. It was unanimously decided that there would be a Second Annual Exhibition.

The following year, 1985, was a big and busy one for the cause. The autumn exhibition lasted not four hours but four weeks and was held in the main gallery of the Boston Architectural Center instead of upstairs in the lounge. There were 68 works by 33 artists from Maine to Pennsylvania, with eight Australian pieces thrown in for good measure. Robert Campbell, architecture critic for the Boston Globe praised the show in a review titled, “Revival of Fine Drawing Gains Momentum.”

With the momentum of this success, the Hammersmith Three looked at each other and asked, “What next?” The answer seemed obvious, and that was to “go national.” So in 1986 with a name, logotype and letterhead, a home address at the BAC, 467 submissions from 28 states, a blue-ribbon jury, a printed catalogue of exhibited work, a few grant proposals in the works and one 125 members (not to mention some heft debts and a bank loan), the American Society of Architectural Perspectivists was born.

England had it’s Society of Architectural and Industrial Illustrators (SAI: 12 years old at the time), and Japan had its six-year-old Japanese Architectural Renderers Association (JARA). We believed, quite correctly, that ASAP was an idea whose time had arrived.

Since that time, our Society has expanded to include illustrators from around the world, we have held annual conferences in Europe, Asia and Australia, and although we got a new name in 2001—The American Society of Architectural Illustrators (ASAI)—we have never strayed from our original idea of maintaining a tight bond among architectural illustrators, promoting their work, and playing our own small part in insuring that the work gets better and better every year.