NEW YORK - Robert Miles Parker - an artist and preservationist whose pen-and-ink drawings of urban landscapes displayed a whimsical delight in storefronts, apartment buildings, houses, and theaters - died April 17 at his New York home on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, a neighborhood where he could often be found working at a makeshift drawing board in a lawn chair on the sidewalk with a pet Norfolk terrier on a leash sitting patiently beside him. He was 72.

His partner, David Van Leer, said the cause was undetermined, adding that Mr. Parker had been treated for numerous ailments since he learned he had AIDS more than two decades ago.

Though Mr. Parker also painted in oils - portraits and floral still lifes, as well as cityscapes - it was his pen-and-ink work of aspects of Manhattan’s architectural profile that garnered the most attention.

Lively and reverently joyful, representational but far from architecturally precise, his drawings were shown frequently in both private galleries and public places, including the Empire State Building, the New York Public Library, and the Museum of the City of New York.

“Upper West Side: New York,’’ a book of Mr. Parker’s drawings of buildings, street scenes, and cityscapes, along with personal commentary, was published by Harry N. Abrams in 1988.

Most recently, Mr. Parker was known for his drawings of Broadway theaters, both their facades and their interior details, portraying the handsome intricacies of their designs with suggestive loops and squiggles, a kind of controlled capriciousness.

They demonstrated the evolution of work that had grown more fanciful over the years. Beginning in the 1980s, making his way through more than 30 Broadway theaters, Parker made well over 200 drawings, like those of the Shubert on West 44th Street, depicting it as the home of “A Chorus Line,’’ and the Majestic down the street, where “The Phantom of the Opera’’ remains a fixture.