Today, the overlap of the tools and software products utilized by filmmakers and architects reinforces the historical bond between the two disciplines more than ever. In one of their design studios, Master of Architecture students at the Melbourne School of Design try to master the techniques and methods of filmmaking and employ them in their architectural films and animations.
Italian architect Gaetano Boccia has been researching drawings and architectural representation for the past two years. The Pdda (piccoli disegni di architettura) project was born with the intention of sharing Boccia's thoughts, which he has always cataloged and kept in notebooks.
Referring to no particular buildings, these drawings are part of an inspirational process that takes place in the architect's daily context and complex surroundings of Naples and Italian culture.
The passion for cinema and TV shows, combined with that for scenography and architecture, led Italian architect Riccardo Masiero to play with the different spaces and dimensions of the elements that make movies in order to create "MAKE IT ISO!", a series of drawings portraying famous movies and TV icons such as Breaking Bad, Twin Peaks, Harry Potter, Star Wars, The Shining and UP in an architectural way.
These illustrations represent iconic scenes of TV and cinema through the isometric illustration method, giving an overall picture of the construction of the scene, as well as providing a different point of view to the observer.
Keep reading to see the full "MAKE IT ISO!" series and the author explaining his work.
With the mission of providing tools and inspiration to architects all around the world, ArchDaily’s curators are constantly searching for new projects, ideas and forms of expression. For the past three years, ArchDaily has showcased the best discoveries of each year, and in keeping with tradition, we would like to share the best architecture drawings published throughout 2018.
What is the role of contemporary drawing in architecture? We approach the definition of drawing as design itself. Drawings are used to explain principles, to deliver ideas, to construct new architecture, and to document creative processes.
Below you will see the selection of drawings arranged under six categories: Context, Architectural Drawings, Sketches & Hand-drawn, Digital Collages, Conceptual Drawings & Diagrams and Animated Gifs. Each chosen drawing strengthens the proposed construction or enhances the built work.
We also invite you to review collections from previous years here or other drawing-related posts selected by our editors in the following link.
An active ArchDaily collaborator, architect and doctor Rogelio Ruiz Fernández, has emerged as a great enthusiast of cinema, architecture, cities and landscapes. He expresses his love for visual arts, architecture, and culture through his drawings. In these moments, he documents trips, his favorite locales, and project ideas that will later become works of architecture.
Below, Ruiz Fernandez explains his creative process and the importance of sketches in his work.
“A drawing should be a key to the understanding of architecture – what is there to like or dislike, where do architects’ ideas come from, how do these ideas make it to paper, and what is important in this process.” - Sergei Tchoban
For the past month the Russian-German architect, artist, and collector Sergei Tchoban has been the focus of the exhibition, Sergei Tchoban: Drawing Buildings/Building Drawings, bringing together fifty of the architect’s large-scale urban fantasy drawings. These drawings, while intriguing for their technical and artistic value, also reflect Tchoban's deeply personal contemplations about the past, present, and future of his favorite cities - Saint Petersburg, Rome, Amsterdam, Venice, Berlin, New York – along with in-depth documentation of five realized projects (two museums, two exhibition pavilions, and a theater stage design.)
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In order to explain projects and design decisions properly, architects must use often rely on creative representation techniques instead of words. It’s part of the job. The quality of drawings - simple, complex, or anything in between - is fundamental for the correct reception of the ideas. Digital media has enabled new ways of representation including animation and adding a new dimension in a single image: processes.
Animated gifs can provide the same amount of information in constructive terms as a section, program distribution as a diagram and main decisions as a master plan, while at the same time showing the progress and chronology of the project.
The following 30 projects use animated gifs as a tool to represent the design process, construction details, use of layers and interior spatial sequences.
Want to get the most of your Apple Pencil in Trace? Today, Rome Prize winner Javier Galindo, is going to show you a few features that will make your Trace drawings sing.
In partnership with Make Architects and Sir John Soane’s Museum, the World Architecture Festival (WAF) has announced the call for entries for the second edition of The Architecture Drawing Prize. Launched in 2017, the prize is conceived to celebrate and showcase the significance of drawing as a tool in capturing and communicating architectural ideas.
The Architecture Drawing Prize embraces the creative use of digital tools and digitally-produced renderings, while recognising the enduring importance of hand drawing. The organisers invite entries of all types and forms: from technical or construction drawings to cutaway or perspective views – and anything in between.
Architectural print studio Desplans in collaboration with Library Illustrazioni have published the results of their architectural drawing competition titled “The Island: Between Utopia and Metaphor for Reality.” The competition asked participants to submit drawings and text interpreting the meaning of islands and utopias, considering “the double value inherent in the utopia” between aspiration and limitation.
The entries were judged by a jury of figures from Library and Desplans, with one winner and 12 honorable mentions selected. The winning entries were chosen with attention given to the relevance of the theme, dialogue between text and image, graphic research, and quality of reflection.
Lorenzo Concas, an architect, photographer and light designer based in Florence, creates tiny sketches which are layered with an incredible amount of detail. The width of these drawings only spans the length of a fineliner, yet Concas manages to fit in detailed recreations of elaborate ornament. His drawings accentuate the play of light and dark on these Gothic cathedrals and other famous monuments.
Using fineliners and Copic sketch markers, Concas captures these works of architecture from unique angles, allowing us to see the beauty and potential of these buildings in new ways. From intimate details of the Basilica di Santa Maria Novella to low angles which bring attention to the awe-inspiring height of the Eiffel Tower, these drawings exhibit the power of the sketch and how architecture can come alive through pen and paper.
The "Contrasting Harmony of the City" exhibition offers a selection of drawings, architectural fantasies, ideas for set design and various compositions depicting the contrasting harmony between contemporary and historical, iconic and background-architecture.
For the past two years, we have found ourselves wanting to highlight what is the foundation of architectural practice: the architectural drawing. We realized that even after almost a decade of publishing the best projects from around the world, we should take on the task of singling out the exceptional cases of representation, taking into account all varieties and species of drawings. Following up on the criteria used in the previous edition, all the architectural drawings we have selected this year have a sensitive expression— whether it be artistic, technical or conceptual—and they all aim to express and explain the respective project using simplicity, detail, textures, 3D and color as main tools.
Below you will see the selection of drawings arranged under eight categories: Architectural Drawings, Axonometrics, Context, Diagrams, Sketches, Animated Gifs, Details and Other Techniques.
We have all seen a floor plan before. They are typically black-and-white, and maybe some room labels, and an occasional furniture piece or two. This has been the norm for just about as long as anyone can remember, perhaps it's time to switch things up.
Filled with color, style, and spunk, Instagram account, floorplan_man isn’t your average architecture account—his feed highlights the architecture world’s most unique and creative approaches to floor plan drawings. Scrolling through his feed is like scrolling through the Pinterest page of the artsy-ist person you knew back in architecture school—it is flooded with inspiration to upgrade your generic, boring black-and-white floor plan.
The World Architecture Festival, with co-curators Make Architects and the Sir John Soane’s Museum, has announced the winner of the their inaugural Architecture Drawing Prize, established to recognize the “continuing importance of hand drawing, whilst also embracing the creative use of digitally produced renderings.”
From 166 entries from architects, designers and students across the globe, 38 of the best drawings were shortlisted within three categories: Digital, Hand-drawn, and Hybrid. From that list, commendations and a category winner were chosen, with the overall grand prize awarded to the year’s best drawing. Submissions were evaluated on technical skill, originality in approach and ability to convey an architectural idea, whether for a conceptual or actual building project.
This year, the overall winner was Momento Mori: a Peckham Hospice Care Home by Jerome Xin Hao Ng, produced as part of Ng’s final diploma project at The Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London.
“[The drawing is] a superbly conceived and executed perspectival view looking down through the building from roof level, praised for its technical skill and the sensitivity with which it depicted the spaces found in such institutions as settings for multi-generation social interaction,” said Jeremy Melvin, Curator of World Architecture Festival (WAF).
The 2017 World Architecture Festival will take place in Berlin from November 15-17. Learn more about the Festival and purchase delegate passes here. Use the discount code ARCHDAILY17 to receive 20% off. An incredible list of speakers including Alison Brooks, Charles Jencks, Pierre de Meuron and Francis Kéré will feature across 3 days from November 15th to 17th at the Arena Berlin, Germany. Conferences, city tours, lectures and critiques of the shortlisted projects from the 2017 WAF awards are among the events scheduled for the festival.
See the winners and shortlisted drawings below.
When it comes to forms of architectural representation, there is no method more expressive or foundational than the drawing. The series of decisions—drawing utensil, paper type, line style, hand versus digital—combined with the choices of what an architect includes (or excludes) in their drawings reveal the true intentions behind the design of a project in perhaps the noblest and purest fashion.
In previous years, we've published round-ups of our favorite images from our database of selected projects (which we will do again this winter!), but this year, we wanted to do something a little different to engage with our community: we asked our readers to submit their own best drawings. The response was overwhelming – we received more than 1200 drawings from our network of readers across the globe, ranging from atmospheric perspectives to interpretive sketches to highly-technical sections.
From those submissions, the ArchDaily team has selected 80 of our favorites, organized into 7 categories: Visualizations, Axonometric - Isometric, Sections, Collages, Context, Sketches and Plans.
Check them out, below.
Designing and building a project is a challenge in itself. However, once the project is complete there are also challenges in expressing the project so that it can be understood by a new audience. This is especially true in digital media, where online readers don't necessarily spend the same time reading an article as in print media. Drawings and all new forms of visual representation – such as animated Gifs – play an important role in the project's understanding.
At ArchDaily we push ourselves as editors to look for the best drawings from the architects that work with us. We are constantly looking to get the best out of the projects we receive to share with the world and deliver knowledge and inspiration to millions of people. The drawings we have chosen are not only visually entertaining but they serve as a way of educating and learning fundamental architectural representations.
Regardless if they are digital or hand-drawn, all the architectural drawings we have selected this year have a sensitive expression, whether it be artistic, technical or conceptual, and they all aim to express and explain the project using simplicity, detail, textures, 3D and color as main tools.
This year we want to highlight a selection of 90 drawings arranged under eight categories: Architectural Drawings, Axonometrics, Context, Diagrams, Sketches, Animated Gifs, Details and Other Techniques.
The computer does things correctly, and I think it's very important in architecture to also have the incorrect. – Peter Cook
In connection with the exhibition "Peter Cook. Retrospective" currently on view at the Museum for Architectural Drawing in Berlin, the Tchoban Foundation has released a video of the architect discussing the importance of drawing in the architectural world. Cook compares drawing to new computer-based techniques, arguing that while software can do amazing things (including being instrumental in realizing his own Kunsthaus Gratz), drawing allows the architect to learn, communicate and experiment in a way that is irreplaceable. Watch the teaser to the Tchoban Foundation's video above, or read on for the full discussion.
