Small Projects, Part One...

　

Small Projects, Part One...

I love small projects, pretty much of any type, but especially small residential projects of a classical or historicist orientation. Elevation and sectional design drawings are especially fun to draw and can often be done at the same time as, and assisted by, CAD drawings. From a design drawing standpoint, the limited scope of small projects (depending on your definition of small) allows you to combine schematic design and design development into a single phase, letting detail observations and refinements made with hand drawings credibly inform and influence the broader compositional design elements at an early stage of the project.

There are lots of reasons for this, at least from a drawing standpont. In broad terms, the small size of the project immediately allows you to conceptualize and render at a scale larger and more dimensionally and profile driven than "schematic" scale. You start out at something like 1/4", 3/8" or even 1/2" scale which, especially on traditional and classically themed projects, require a detail-oriented approach to conceptual design. They also, like large scale projects with a similar parti', require a high level of attention to craft, usually worked out with large scale, profile intense drawings. This used to be slow and mostly enjoyable process in pencil, but impossible to justify with the availibility of quick, simple AutoCAD underlays to trace over. These first drawings I show here did a little of both. It took less than a day to draw and render all three of them as a small part of a presentation for a much larger project. They're drawn at 1/4" and 3/4" scale on white tracing paper (any 12" roll is fine) over basic CAD underlays that established running floor and framing datums, wall, roof and center lines and brick coursing to trace over. As a rule of thumb CAD is also great used as a tool for use making underlays with drawing borders, north arrows and other graphic information to freehand over.

After these first digital steps, it is an all pencil, ink and marker exercise. Design elements like window fenestration, dormers and eave, wall and stone profiles were resolved and layed out in 3H pencil and inked over in free hand with Prismacolor Premier Fine Line Markers, .02 & .005 (www.pismacolor.com) and Pilot Razor Point II fine line pens (www.pilotpens.us) Drawing pens are always a matter of personal preference and style. I like these pens for their excellent sketch and hardline qualities. I also really like their ability to take Chartpak marker and colored pencil washes without smearing or blurring linework. You will find this very useful when you render later in color. Landscape and entourage elements are all quick, free-hand and fairly loose. Later posts will provide more discussion on color rendering on translucent white or yellow tracing paper. The fun in rendering on trace, because of its transparency, is the ability to work both sides of the paper with color and line work.

Elevations, as drawings, lend themselves to much livelier presentation by hand than their digital counterparts. Much of this depends on the quality of linework and how shadow and color are used and rendered. Shadows are, like linework, a huge part of depicting foreground / background elements and changes in plane in rendered elevations. By using simple plan projection methods to create consistent shadows, they really are an essential element in using elevations as an effective presentation tool. 3D sketches  present more varied and complex opportunities for the use, or non-use, of the selective rendering of shadow. Again, the transparency of trace allows many opportunities for subtle layering in drawings like this.

These are quick black and white sketches (all around 8-1/2"x11") on white trace, all drawn in a single day for a very small house on Martha's Vineyard. I rendered a series of quick sketches by hand over photographs of the steeply sloping site. They were drawn freehand in ink over a hardline pencil base study. Drawing over photographs is a theme we will definitely return to here. But for now, these drawings illustrate a larger point. These are "charrette" drawings, all done in a relatively short period of time in a drafting room context. They have digital or photographic assistance at points, in the interests of speed, but are purely hand made. Drawings like this not only afford a greater level of intimacy in communication, they are inexpensive and faster to do with higher rate of return in their effectiveness as architectural drawings than digital images produced in the same amount of time.

The idea that hand drawing is less efficient as a design or presentation tool than purely digital drawing doesn't bear out here.  If it sounds like I'm making an economic argument in favor of hand drawing, well, perhaps a little. At the same time, hand drawing rewards in different ways. The graphic vibrancy of well made hand drawings on small projects still trump purely digital images everytime, especially with small, historically themed residential projects. And they're still more fun to do.

Tape Dots and Other Drafting Room Disasters.......
Anyone who has ever spent a lot of time in a drafting room bent over a drawing board is probably all too aware of the amazing number of opportunites for disaster, both self-inflicted and as part of a larger group effort. In today's drafting rooms, disaster is usually digital in nature. Not saving a copy of your drawing before revising it, refusing to comply with the IT department's neanderthal pen maps and "is this a virus?" or "my computer just crashed" are among the more popular and frequently used excuses. But, courtesy of back-up files and flash drives, these wounds are rarely fatal. Annoying, yes, and sometimes funny, but rarely fatal.

However, when most drawings were done by hand, you really spread around the talent pool for genuinely spectacular and occasionally fatal (to the drawing and your job) screwups. Pinbar drafting and vacuum frame / diazo ammonium printing were a rich minefield for drafting room wags and comics. Leaving layers out, printing layers backwards or, best of all, inserting the wrong layers in a drawing AND printing them backwards were the most common and laughable errors. Anyone who ever had to revise six layers of mylar to move one door on a plan probably remembers pinbar drafting and wonders what the hell they ever did to the partners to warrant such punishment. I certainly know I did. But for me, the comedy of self-inflicted drawing disasters really began with tape dots.

All draftsmen know, and some of us love, tape dots. Sticky little suckers and they don't taste that bad either, especially when used as a substitute for nicotine gum. You can stretch a drawing to your Borco tighter than a snare drum and it will still be that way when you come to work the next day assuming, of course, that your office has air-conditioning. Tape dots hate humidity, among other things. I had already been drawing for awhile before I got my first box of tape dots. My father the architect was, as they say, not a big fan. They were expensive and fussy, compared to plain old drafting tape. I, on the other hand, didn't have to pay for my tape dots, so I was an immediate convert. No more avoiding the edges of a drawing because the drafting tape would curl up and snag on my parallel bar. No more fuzzing my pencil lines or smudging my ink work because the drawing wouldn't stay tight and flat. Drafting heaven, right? Not exactly. Tape dots, like so many commodities, are perishable. They don't age well. The older they get, the less they stick. To my drawing board, anyway. The underside of my parallel bar, my triangles or, for that matter, my coffee cup and clothing were another story altogether.

Tape dots do curl. They lose their bite. They are especially fond of graphite and really, really like sharing it with the rest of your drawing. They don't detach easily from anything but mylar and who the hell draws on that anymore? If you draw frequently on something like, say, yellow tracing paper, this can be a bit of a problem. Once they're on your tracing paper, getting them off can be like trying to pull up a piece of plastic laminate from a kitchen counter-top. With your fingernails. Once a tape dot or two has leeched itself to the underside of a parallel bar, well, to the unsuspecting or just plain tired draftsman, the collateral damage to their drawing could be quite disagreeable and, on more than one occasion, terminal. Ever see a blueprint with the ghostly image of what is obviously a piece of Scotch tape starting from a corner and meandering it's way down to the middle of the drawing over some weird, squiggly line? You guessed it. Tape dot disaster, which never really seemed so bad until it happened to your drawing, one you probably liked very much and had spent a lot of time on. Or, even worse, really hated doing and now had to do all over again. In many drafting rooms, the sound of ripping paper followed by a shriek and a litany of really foul four letter words was usually a reliable indication that a tape dot had struck again.

The first time this happened to me, I realized that printing tape dots with the ubitquitous smiley face on them was a really bad idea. The suicide rate for draftsmen would have gone through the roof. I still, believe it or not, love my tape dots but don't need them smirking at me while they help me trash a drawing I'm fond of. They are also wildly inconsistent. One time, in an office I used to work at, I put a large drawing I had done up on the wall with tape dots. I later left the firm and, after a few years, came back for a visit and that drawing..had...not...moved. I know this because the paint behind the drawing was lighter than the adjacent wall surface. Or, who knows, maybe they couldn't get the tape dots off and just painted around the drawing. It wasn't even that great of a drawing. Either way, tape dots do love their drywall.

Finally, tape dots are hardly evil. Like everything else, including draftsmen, they have their strengths and weaknesses. And the weaknesses are easily overcome with one or two simple steps and a small measure of diligence. The obvious solution is to give yourself a few inches of buffer from the final border of your drawing to the edges of your paper, letting the tape dots do their thing and gobble up your corners. Then, as the final step, take your drawing up and trim to your final image size. Even now, every time I tape down a drawing I am reminded of one particular irony. Once, upon being spotted by the head draftsman while I was setting up a drawing with a few extra inches of paper margin to each side to give the tape dots their due, I was upbraided for "wasting money by wasting paper". As if the cost of the paper somehow outweighed the cost of re-doing the drawing when the occasional disaster inevitably struck.

Somewhere, a tape dot is smiling.......

Drafting Room Models.....

　

Drafting Room Model.....

The name pretty much says it all. This is a design study model, drawn and built by hand in a drafting room in the days of paleo-CAD. By "drafting room model", I mean exactly that: a model used as a working tool to study various compositional, massing and spatial qualities of the proposed building, in this case a banking facility I designed in Chicago's Wicker Park. I built this model in 1997 as a drafting room exercise with a couple of architecture students at the same time as I was developing the design concept drawings. I designed the building at a time when I was influenced by the very informal Ralph Johnson Chicago School of Architecture (like a lot of people), so the model had a very specific graphic vocabulary influenced by his work. The model later morphed into a more refined presentation tool when I realized I didn't have any design fee left to spend on renderings.

Architectural models as a design tool, by their very nature, still enjoy an immediacy and currency which validates their intrinsic purpose. The essential question is the road you take in getting there. Today's model builders, professional and amateur alike, enjoy the benefits of precision and speed available through digital technologies. Affordable, readily available laser cutters and printers significantly increase the accuracy and quality of the model components while also reducing the amount of 'cutting time' (and agony) required to create them. Many architectural models are outsourced to professional model builders, especially models that are to be used as a final presentation or marketing tool. By the time these models are constructed the building design has been decided upon and, much like an expensive rendering, are more about validation of the concept, as opposed to exploration of the concept itself. Laser cutting and laser printing also afford professional model builders the opportunity to provide extremely realistic material and profile representation with almost unbelievable accuracy and dimensional tolerance. Brick joints on an 1/8" scale model are a good example of this. Ever try to do that by hand with an X-Acto knife? Grrrr......... 

Good study models are, as a general rule, abstract and monolithic in nature and use one or two materials for all of the building components. Abstract trees are good, people and cars are bad, even as scale references. Realistic material representation is eschewed in favor of simple, easily cut model materials like museum board, illustration board and, if you're really into it and a glutton for punishment, balsa wood. Combinations of these three materials, along with a very light dusting of matte-finish white spray paint after the model is built (to hide glue and pencil lines, fill in joints, etc.), are especially effective. The scale of your model and its methods of assembly will always play a large part in deciding which materials are most appropriate. Models at 1/4" scale or larger will find the depth and rigidity of foam core board or gator board very useful. In study models at 1/8" scale or smaller, the dimensional thickness of foam core or gator board can actually misrepresent certain aspects of the design, such as depth and scale of exterior wall openings, wall thickness, recessed reveals or changes of profile in wall surfaces. On the other hand, the rigidity of gator board makes it an ideal and commonly used material for larger scale models and for indicating site contours and grading. Museum or illustration board can be cut in thin strips and applied over wall, roof and ground surfaces to create layers of detail that are appropriate to the building design as well as the scale you are working at.

AutoCAD and other design software programs make creating and cutting of your model templates by hand both accurate and easy. As an example, try laser printing a reverse image of a model component on translucent media (i.e; vellum or mylar). Then lightly adhere the printed image with spray mount to the back surface of your model material using a brayer. You know, one of those roller thingys. You can then cut the component out from behind with no hand drawing on the model surface itself. This is both quick and easy and also eliminates the unavoidable accumulative scale errors of repetitive hand drawing, not to mention those pesky graphite smears on your pristine white model. A further refinement of this technique can be used by laser printing templates with scale appropriate line weights on translucent or opaque mylar and then applying them to the front (visible) side of a model component, again with a light coat of the deadly and misunderstood spray mount. This allows the model builder to show details like mullion patterns on traditional windows, things that may be too tediously time consuming and infuriatingly inaccurate to hand construct at the scale you are working with.

There are far too many tips and tricks in the technique of composing and building a "drafting room" study model to cover in a single blog post. Remember that study models, like architectural hand drawings, are an artistic exercise in abstract representation, each with its own distinctive vocabulary and inherent advantages or limitations. They are usually collaborative and are made for the often ad-hoc process of learning, informing and communicating. Certain styles and types of building lend themselves more readily to study in model form than others. Ultimately, the quality and degree of detail in a model resides in the amount of time expended and talent available, always with the purpose of the exercise being held clearly in mind. The subtly expressed, hand-crafted qualities of a study model humanize both the expression of the design and the designer, something that should never be held as a completely abstract concept. Remember that your model is a design tool. Admire it when you can but revise it when you must. Well made models rarely lie. If it doesn't feel right in model form, then it probably isn't going to work on the building, either. And finally, remember the seductive power of photography. Some of your most compelling presentation images can come from a digital camera in thoughtfully composed and artfully lit photographs of your model.

Architect's Brat.....

　
Architect's brat.....

So I was an architect's brat. Sort of like being a military brat but with an entirely different set of constituent concerns. While there was no journeyman aspect to this life, as in the military, there were many other daily, tangible aspects to brat-hood that I only slowly became aware of with the passage of time. I did not know at the time that I was being given a gift of graphic communication, a subconscious means of aesthetic realization that bridged the divide between the idea of something and its actual construction. Something that I learned in my father's drafting room in the analog world before desktop computers.

My father, Edward, was an architect. A very talented architect and a draftsman of extraordinary skill. This was already obvious to me by the time I was 12 or 13. By this point in my father's career he was already well down the road of solitary practice in Memphis but was never really alone. He always had a small, loyal handful of draftsmen that he would tap into when time or deadlines were tight. And these guys could DRAW. Really, really draw. This was back in the 1960's and '70's when professional draftsman still existed and were legion in most architectural practices before AutoCAD, Revit and SketchUp. What I was only vaguely aware of at the time was the profound sense of esprit de corps that existed between my father and his draftsmen. It wasn't until much later that I realized that what really motivated Don or Atwood or Red, among others, was not just making a few extra bucks moonlighting but the opportunity to work with my father. He was truly a draftsman's draftsman.

When I was older and began to interview with architectural firms in Memphis, I first became aware of the depth and breadth of my father's professional reputation. At firm after firm that I interviewed with, whether he had worked there or not, every partner not only knew my father, they knew his work. Prior to starting his own practice, Dad had apprenticed and worked at one of the most admired architectural firms in Memphis. And I learned very quickly in these interviews that "Fast Eddie" was their universal gold standard of draftsmanship. Not only for the beauty, elegance and technical virtuosity of his drawings, but the speed with which they were done. I can only guess at the number of times I heard in these interviews "Are you Ed McTyre's son? Big shoes" or "Fast Eddie's boy, right? I can tell by your drawings." His complete sets of working drawings (of some very beautiful, now landmark buildings) still float around the occasional architectural office in Memphis forty years later as the paradigm of what "the good hand" brings to draftsmanship.

Dad was the quintessential autodidactic architect. He never went to architectural school but instead went through the now defunct apprenticeship method of qualifying for professional registration, passing the exam on his first attempt. This was a commonly accepted method at the time, largely because one's skill at a drawing board was the great equalizer in evaluating the talents and abilities of fledgling architects. As a teenager, I spent countless hours in his drafting room, combing through his flat files, looking at hundreds of his drawings for a really wide variety of projects. And they were all beautiful. Not just his working drawings but his many preliminary and conceptual design drawings. And they were either pencil or pen and ink on vellum. Many years later, in looking back on the experience, I eventually realized that what was missing were any elements of self-indulgence or superfluity in his work. I know now that this discipline was a direct result of the often lonely, understaffed life of a sole practitioner. When I was 15, I started really working in his office. There, prior to starting a drawing or a sketch, I quickly learned Dad's favorite (and only) mantra..."what is the purpose of the exercise?" In the lexicon of my father's own values and those of his drafting room, pointless repetition or over-embellishment were the only cardinal sins. Looking at the innumerable drawings I have done since then, I can't say these lessons always took hold but I would certainly bow to the immutable logic of his reasoning.

Which brings us back to being an "architect's brat". I never really saw it as being a brat about anything, at least according to the OED definition. To the contrary, I knew, even at the time, that I was very, very lucky and that I was given a blessing that has only increased immeasurably over the years. I learned at a very early age that architecture is drawing and I was given countless examples of this by my father. He taught me that drawing, like architecture, should be seen as a means of inquiry as opposed to a medium of concealment. And, perhaps most importantly, he taught me that beauty in draftsmanship was a gesture of respect, not only to his clients and colleagues, but to the men and women entrusted with picking up tools and turning to his drawings for guidance. 35 years later, I find very little evidence of brattiness in what he passed on. By learning the art of drawing from him, he taught me to love architecture and to treat it as something that should be democratic and inclusive, as opposed to elitist and unapproachable. All this at a time when Brutalism ruled the architectural landscape with a concrete fist. Dad could go from designing a Georgian church or school to an exquisitely detailed modern bank seamlessly and with considerable enthusiasm. His foundation for this was his belief in the importance of draftsmanship as a means of exploration and evaluation. I believe his lessons today, in the face of such erosion of drawing skills in architecture, are still just as relevant.

"Son, wherever you work, always try to be 'the good hand' in the office. That way, you get to see and do everything." So I was told a few days before starting my first job outside of my father's office. I was 18 at time and unable to realize that I had just been given the most useful and important professional advice I would ever receive. The idea of "the good hand" began on that day. Dad died way too early in 1995 and most of his drawings have been lost or scattered over the years. But, like DNA, they still filter and influence so much of what I and others do. Such a gift. If you are reading this and are just starting out in architecture or design, I will pass along one other thing Dad instilled in his "architect's brat" which is.....save everything you draw. It all tells a story, a story of you. Even if it is only for an audience of one, it all matters and it is a wonderful narrative of a life. Kind of like my father's....

Welcome to "The Good Hand"...

　
Welcome to "The Good Hand", an inter-active blog dedicated to the promotion of the art of classical architectural drawing, draftsmanship and illustration. Classic in the sense that it embraces the concepts of traditional architectural "hand" drawing in a wide variety of media, from sketch books through plans, elevations and sections all the way through to three-dimensional renderings utilizing both hand constructed as well as digital base drawings.

Architectural draftsmanship has been the principal means of study, design exploration and graphic communication for architects for nearly two millennia. And yet, in just the past twenty years, the very art of draftsmanship has been seriously degraded by the rapidly emerging digital technologies taking over every aspect of architectural education and drawing production. The consequences of this as it relates to both the education of architects and the practice of architecture are broad, subject to many interpretations and will, hopefully, be widely discussed here. But rather than simply leaving drawing behind with a sigh and a shake of the head, "the good hand" will strive to be a forum for those still engaged in the process of "drawing" architecture, knowing that graphic ownership of a building through good draftsmanship is synonomous with the craftsmanship of good building. Rather than being regarded as an unaffordable anachronism of the digital age, good drawing skills, "the good hand" as it were, should be seen as mutually supportive of a draftsman's digital vocabulary. The process of design composition through manual drawing studies constantly informs and refines the decisions a designer makes digitally, taking advantage of the elements of immediacy, composition and atmospherics inherent in hand drawing and instilling in the digital designer a true sense of authorship in the work at hand.

Obviously, the paramount role that drawing used to play in the production of architecture will never be recovered. Today, architecture must be commnunicated digitally. Three dimensional and parametric modelling, SketchUp, BIM / Revit and file sharing with project consultants / bidders all demand a digital foundation in the climate of today's architectural or interior design practice. And yet, every project presents the designer with numerous opportunities for manual graphic exploration that are not only appropriate to the task at hand but provide that designer with an outlet of expression that far exceeds the creepily anonymous but seductive versimilitude of digital rendering and animation.

Throughout the twentieth century, most truly gifted architects and designers were recognized as much for their unique styles of draftsmanship as for their collective bodies of built and unbuilt work. There are a variety of reasons for this, not the least of which was a unique form of democracy that used to exist in most architectural offices, a democracy that was built upon the drawing skills, "the good hands", of its young architects and draftsmen. At its core was the widely accepted belief that the more superior your drawing skills were, the more rapidly you rose through the ranks to become a designer on the projects you were working on. If you were "graphically talented" or could "draw like a bandit" nothing, short of gross character defects or sleeping with a client, could keep you from rising through the ranks of middle-management to the highly coveted position of "project designer". The quality of your drawing skills was the determining factor in which phase you first saw a project and, as a result, the stage at which you actually became a designer.

Oddly enough, this mind-set still exists in many architectural and interior design offices today and can still be capitalized upon. The reason for this is fairly straight forward. The most successful designers and renderers introduce the elements of personal style and abstract representation into their drawings that point to the origins of both the design and the designer. Digital technology not only supports this concept but actually enhances and refines these skills and vice versa. This is also the purpose of "the good hand", namely to present a wide variety of architectural and interior design drawings at different phases and stages of a design project, explain the various media and drawing techniques used to create a particular image and to show how digital technology actually informs, supports and enhances this process. This will hopefully be an on-going dialogue and images describing the drawing process and the media used will be frequently presented. Reader submitted images and comments will always be welcomed. Drawing types will include sketch book studies, traditional plans, sections, elevations and, of course, hand drawn 3D renderings. Design and presentation composition will be frequently discussed as will the application of these skills to digital drawing techniques.

So, sharpen up those 3H pencils, stretch that tracing paper and let's sit down and draw something...