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...