From Hand Drawing to AutoCAD....

This post is one of a few I am trying to do right now that start to combine drawings produced by hand in the early design phases of a project with their final iterations as AutoCAD design and working drawings and, hopefully, show that they share a common and mutually supportive vocabulary. Perhaps I should start by saying that, blog title notwithstanding, I do almost no working drawings by hand. That would be insane. If you have to share files or submit digitally (and you always do), your using AutoCAD as a bare minimum. Which is what I work with in the digital drawings you will see here. But as I've hinted at less directly in previous posts is that how you work in hand at the beginning becomes the template for the graphic vocabulary you use your in AutoCAD.  There are so many decorative elements like alphabets, entourage and shading, that allow a level of indulgence 

The Project...

This is a set of drawings for a proposed residential project in Denver, Colorado. The program is a complete remodeling and full second floor addition to an existing single story duplex residence in the largely historic Bannock Street neighborhood. The duplex arrangement will remain but be expressed as two urban townhouses with a brick common wall and shared common exterior stair to a roof deck with exceptionally nice mountain views to the west that the main elevation . The first studies shown here explored a more contemporary expression in massing, fenestration and use of materials. The existing common brick building is being treated as a shell with reconfigured exterior openings and a new shared covered porch. Each unit i

Scheme One...

The first few design studies of the front elevation where we were definitely pursuing a less restrained, more contemporary and urban level of expression with all of the major second floor spaces treated as volume spaces capturing dramatic views of the Rocky Mountains to the West. Both of the early schemes have the feature of common rear yard stair access to individual roof decks. With tightly abutting neighbors to the north and south and, as we went along, an increasingly restrictive zoning plane that severely restricted our building height options at the side yard elevations, the flat roof schemes were abandoned fairly early on.  Here, the existing one story building is treated as a neutral base for with the fenestration and new porch organized around the new 2nd floor spaces. 

Scheme Two...
This scheme was the last scheme using flat roofs we looked at before transitioning to the gable roof scheme you will see below. The project is in a neighborhood where the American "Four Square" single family house is the predominant building type typically with either hipped or Arts & Crafts-era gabled roofs. The setback from the sidewalk to the face of the building is about 15 feet so you really don't have a front yard to work with, which I think this scheme responded well to. The building height is only about 28' to the uppermost parapet on the front elevation. The common entrance area kind of changed the project syllabus from a development and sale standpoint (creating condominiums), so the we decided to stay with the expression of side by side "autonomous" townhouses.
The Drawings at this Stage...
All the hand drawings shown in this post are shown literally "on the boards", capturing them as they were still taped down and being worked on. Most of them are developed as hard line pencil & ink drawings on white tracing paper and rendered on both sides of the media with the usually assortment of Prismacolor pencils and lighter ChartPak AD base marker washes.