Old Nice

This architectural sketch by Arnold William Brunner depicts a bird's-eye view of Nice's old quarter, rendered in the rapid pen-and-ink style characteristic of late nineteenth-century design studies. Brunner, an American architect and urban planner, used such drawings to analyze street patterns, building masses, and spatial relationships before proposing modern interventions. The sketch demonstrates how architects of this period employed comics-like sequential visual thinking—breaking complex urban form into legible compositional elements—laying groundwork for the visual syntax soon adopted by newspaper comic strips and early cartoonists developing panel-based narrative language.