I don’t know whether drawing is important or not. In the last twenty years it has lost its former importance - in my case. In the beginning I worked with enormous impetus and did a great deal of sketching, but the technocrat side of our profession has gradually broken this fervour. I’m no longer sure if the first sketches an architect makes have or had anything to do with drawing per se. And a computer offers a far more complex framework for construction than a drawing.
Teaching at university I find that drawing skills have less and less to do with the architectural ambitions and talent of students. Sometimes good drawing skills can even impede architectural development.
Examples of contemporary architecture that we see now are at an abstract level, and they cannot be traced back to the level of sketches, but I have to admit I’m not even curious what kind of sketches such houses were based on.