For more than 40 years, architect Pete Bossley has carried a sketchbook with him. Documenting his creative process and observations of the built environment.

For the first time accumulated in one place and presented to the public to see, these 197  sketchbooks provide a remarkable record of a life’s work. Woven within a shifting context of work and life, Pete’s journals capture the influence of buildings and places he has encountered and the quiet minutia of daily life. From one page to the next, a sketchbook might transport us from the cross-section of a building in progress to a far-flung foreign landscape to an idea for an abstract painting. 

Within the sketchbook pages the drawn line appears as a wide-ranging constant. Bossley moves freely from pencil to crayon, technical to gestural, and the hand-drawn to the digital pen. What emerges is a sense of drawing as a radical and unrestrained tool for expressing not just the subject itself but the substance of our feeling and experience.  

Forty Years Drawn expands on the acclaimed book, One Year Drawn, published in 2019 by Point Publishing.

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Pete Bossley has an extensive reputation in architecture and interior design, with particular experience in galleries,  museums and residential. He is known for a number of memorable buildings such as the Museum of NZ Te Papa Tongarewa, the Sir Peter Blake extension to the National Maritime Museum in Auckland, many iconic houses throughout the country, apartment buildings and social housing projects.  

He is involved as a concept designer in all projects in the practice, and his work has received numerous architectural awards. He has exhibited and lectured extensively on his work here and overseas, including Tokyo, Vancouver, Santiago, and Australia. He has also taught architectural design for over 25 years, and was adjunct professor of Architecture at Unitec Architecture and Landscape School. Pete’s work has been published in a wide variety of New Zealand and international publications, and a monograph of the practice was published in 2005. In 2012 Pete was awarded the NZIA Gold Medal, the highest honour in New Zealand Architecture.