Check this guy out...

Check out this guy's work. Very Chicago, very beautiful, needs a monograph. www.timothylevaughn.com  or www.levaughn.com

Very high end for the most part so the level of detail is exceptional across a beautiful range of very "Chicago" project types. I used to work quite a bit with Tim, we share a lot of the same DNA as designers and renderers but still go in different directions. And Tim, in terms of beautifully built projects, is way more prolific. Enjoy...

A little chicken coop...

That's right, a chicken coop. A really small chicken coop, the kind that would easily fit in your backyard. This was actually designed for a friend's farm and has a very diminutive scale, being only 8' wide x 5' deep x 8' high. To get an idea of it's companion barn building, see the color drawings in the post titled "Small Farm, Small Barn..."  The client for this project is a good friend and really gets the whole idea of graphic communication in architecture (we met at an architecture firm in Memphis about 30 years ago). Like the barn that preceded this project she is planning on building this herself, so once again Home Depot is our friend here as well. You can build this project with one pick-up truck full of nominal lumber in 8 and 10 foot lengths, some plywood and some fiberglass panels for the roof. And quite a few miscellaneous things like a whole lot of nails.

The drawings (these are the first three of several to be posted) are a combined presentation / working drawing set. They are all 11 x 17 images drawn on white and yellow trace in ink and then rendered with ChartPak AD markers and Prismacolor colored pencils. Everything is drawn at 3/4" scale with lots of "farm" entourage. Because this coop is just so simple and so little, the 3/4" scale means I don't have to draw any large scale details, so instead I get to work a little narrative theme with my drawings.

My friend is all over this. About the only thing we can't agree on is whether we should stain all this wood or just paint everything white. It's a farm, so all white is going to get dirty fast. But I think staining the wood is going to bleach out fast and give it a sharecropper look. So, who knows? Maybe somewhere in between...



Right now, it's all about a sketchbook...

I mean, seriously...the last 4 posts have all had drawings from the same sketchbook. What's up with that? I think it's the sketchbook as monograph concept. Anyone want to buy it before I put it on eBay? Just kidding.....part of the problem here is that I'm being a lazy bastard with these scans because, well, they aren't scans but rather the best pictures you can get from an LG smartphone and it's 5.0 megapixel camera. Welcome to the wonderful world of blogging and Facebook, right? The upside of this is that it's a good way to preserve the sanctity of a sketchbook by not pulling the pages away from the binding ring or however else your sketchbook is bound. That's very anti-monograph. With a better quality digital camera and the right lighting (i.e.; not fluorescent), a digital photograph of a drawing can surpass a scan in it's visual  quality and atmosphere but does sacrifice absolute scale where that matters. For some reason, or lots of them, photographs aren't quite as "brittle" as scanned images which can be a good thing with certain types of drawings.

As far as the sketch book as monograph thing goes? Hmmm.....well, for me, the absolute Holy Grail of architectural monographs has always been the Wasmuth Portfolios that Frank Lloyd Wright and Ernst Wasmuth published in 1910 / 1911. Note that I mentioned that Wright published the portfolios because he actually did very few of the drawings. Many of the best drawings were done by Marion Mahony Griffin, a draftswoman of extraordinary skill and virtuosity. If you don't know who she is, Google her. I would love to have seen some of her sketchbooks while she was working on the Wasmuth folios. Under Wright's obvious influence and a tutelage probably neither enjoyed or would have admitted to, her drawings "set the narrative tone" for the portfolio itself with the marvelous graphic consistency that all of the drawings share. Part of this is merely the technical means of the drawing.....ink on linen, black and white offset printing, and so forth. But an equal part of it is also in the drawing hand, i.e.; "who drew it".....ink washes, entourage, drawing composition, line work and on and on. It was Mahony's ability to manipulate all of factors simultaneously that, even today, give the Wasmuth Portfolio monographs their beautiful and consistent narrative quality.

It's this basic idea of narrative threads in a monograph that brings me back to the whole sketchbook thing.  The last three or four projects I have posted are all from a sketchbook that shares several narrative threads. With this sketchbook, like a single presentation, graphic consistency is one way to give it a monograph quality. It takes a certain degree of discipline to pull this off while at the same time not restricting yourself in how you explore ideas and use your sketchbook as a sketchbook. Not every page has to be a masterpiece. Or even a finished drawing. Or limited to black, white and grey tones. Or, for that matter, a completely legible or logical drawing. The thing I love about sketchbooks is that they are wonderful for exploring entourage and drawing atmosphere. But when I know where I'm going with something and it works for the project, I have one or two sketchbooks on hand that I use for the "monograph" quality or theme I want those sketchbooks to have. It takes a long time to complete them but that, I think, is part of their charm. And with cell phones and Photoshop, you can work small miracles with your presentations.

Oh, and by the way, these are sketchbook design studies of a residence in New Hampshire. They are done in a multi-media watercolor paper sketchbook in ink and rendered in 2H and 3H pencil. And drawn at the very sketchbook friendly scale of 3/16" equals one foot.  

A Captive Audience...Sketchbook, Part Three

Some more sketchbook bumf...the captive audience aspect of hospitals and doctors having been previous alluded to, these are a series of sketchbook design studies for one of my doctors. She wanted to rework the entrance to her weirdly modern house in Marblehead, Massachusetts. So, voila', instant solution. Well, not so instant but fun to do. Drawn in the same media as described in the previous post, this is all about pen, pencil and watercolor paper. This project was constructed in about three weeks and turned out really well, thanks to an exceptionally talented contractor. It looks really cool at night when the Kal-Wall canopy is illuminated and the decorative lighting is turned on. I'll post some pictures when I get the chance but trust me, it turned out just like the drawings. I love it when that happens...

 

 



All of these drawings are done in a multi-media watercolor paper sketchbook. They were drawn from photographs as hardline studies in 3H pencil and then inked freehand with Micron and Pilot Razor Point pens. The pencil washes were slowly built up with 2H and 3H pencils. The landscape entourage is pretty accurate. And that guy on the right is me. The woman sitting on the bench in the drawing in the middle is the client. Well, mostly...

I like the scheme shown directly above. The client liked the scheme shown in the middle which is the one we ended up doing. Matching the existing stone veneer ended being too big of a pain in the ass and anyway, the new stone matching the existing didn't turn corners very well. So, instead, we built the big wood pier / lantern shown in the middle. Which again proves the maxim that you should never show a client the scheme you don't like because inevitably that is the scheme that they will pick. Even still, it turned out well. Wait for the pictures..... 

Design Study.....Sketchbook, Part Two

 

These are a series of sketchbook design studies for a vacation cottage on Cape Cod in Truro, Massachusetts. I developed these this summer while I was in the hospital and had a lot of time to kill designing houses for all the doctors. These elevations were drawn at 1/4" scale in a cold press water color paper sketchbook. The drawings are constructed as hardline studies in 3H pencil and are then drawn freehand with Micron, Pilot Razor Point and Sharpie ink pens. They are rendered with H and 2H pencil washes. The scanner I used washed out a lot of subtleties and contrast in the pencil washes and shading which is kind of a bummer but there are ways around this if you have more patience with your scanner. Which obviously I don't...