When the architect Charles Gwathmey said in a speech at Princeton last month that young architects no longer know how to draw, he obviously wasn't thinking of Matteo Pericoli. Pericoli, a thirty-one-year-old Italian-born architect who works for Richard Meier, draws obsessively. He draws buildings, he draws maps, he draws birds. And last year he drew all of Manhattan.

Well, almost all. He drew the entire West Side of Manhattan, from Spuyten Duyvil to the Battery. Pericoli made a line drawing in black ink of the way the city looks from the Hudson River, and he did it on a single, thirty-seven-foot- long roll of white paper. He started the drawing in May of 1998, working nights and weekends. Until he finished, a year later, he kept the paper rolled up on a table in his apartment, on the Upper West Side, exposing only a few feet at a time. He would draw six or seven blocks, then roll the paper forward, covering what he had just done. He worked like the scribes who write Torah scrolls by hand: he never erased, he never changed anything once he had done it, and he never looked back at his work after he finished a section. He did not see the entire drawing until it was completed.

Pericoli's drawing, which will be on exhibit at the Casa Italiana at New York University until December 24th (the title is “Manhattan Unfurled”), is at once monumental and gentle. In Pericoli's fine lines every building is benign, and together the buildings seem almost to be swaying softly in a chorus line along the Hudson. He wanted to document a view of the city that New Yorkers almost never have, since it is available only from a boat on the Hudson. And Pericoli, who moved to New York from Milan in 1995, knows enough about his adopted city to know that no one from New York ever takes the Circle Line.

The idea, he says, came to him when he was riding his bicycle to work through Riverside Park. “I saw all of these wonderful buildings on Riverside Drive that have such character, and I wanted to draw them,” he said. “At first, I thought I would only do a drawing of Riverside Drive. Then one day I decided to go on the Circle Line, and it was a revelation to me. It is the most democratic view -- what you see is what you get.” Pericoli realized that he would not be happy unless he drew it all, right down to the Battery. He took two more trips on the Circle Line, standing on the deck and shooting a photograph of the Manhattan riverfront every six or seven blocks. Then, deciding that he needed a broader perspective, he traded in his bicycle for a motorcycle and started going across the river to shoot from up and down the New Jersey waterfront. In all, he took more than four hundred photographs before he was ready to start drawing.

"It is connected to what I do as an architect, the beauty of drawing a line," Pericoli said. "Every building has character; to draw it is like drawing a face, the things that give it soul. If you draw something, it is fixed in your mind forever, it is a miracle."