Sketching: The Latest Architecture and News

This article was originally published on Common Edge as "How the Quick Daily Drawing Puts Humanity Back Into Architecture."

Architect Frank Harmon has a discipline: he tries to do a freehand drawing every day. He doesn’t spend much time on them. About five minutes. These short spurts of depiction have the effect of catching lightning in a bottle or, as Virginia Woolf once said about the importance of writing every day, “to clap the net over the butterfly of moment.” To capture these moments you must be fast. The minute moves. Harmon’s drawings feel loose, fuzzy at the edges. You sense their five-minute duration.

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Sketching is the best way to work through design problems. Since no designer is an island, sometimes sketching collaboratively is the best way of working through design problems together. Other times, you sketch a bit, create a proper drawing, and then present to colleagues, clients or stakeholders.

"Whether you're resolving a challenging condition by yourself, or helping a client to visualize, we all sketch it out first," explained Sophie Amini, Creative Director at Pooky. "With Archisketch, more often than not, even I prefer to put aside my paper and pencil and whip off a sketch on my iPad. At Pooky, we work very closely, both with each other and with the manufacturers. We talk through sketches and ideas at length before deciding which samples to get made up. Sketches are translated into technical drawings, from which the manufacturers can work."

Moleskine, the go-to brand of sketchbook lovers have expanded their luxury notebook line, The Art Collection. The Italian paper-manufacturing brand and architects' favorite (we know we are!) dedicates this new collection to those who value the creative process just as much as the final result and want to translate their stories and ideas onto papers. Whether it’s drawing, doodling, painting, sketching, or composing, the Art Collection meets the diverse needs of its users who "simply need get lost in their colors and visions without fear of losing the spirit of their work."

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Morpholio has released details of Smart Fill, which they describe as “the world’s first area calculator for live design sketching.” Designed for the TracePro app on iPad and iPhone, Smart Fill calculates the area of spaces in active sketches, without the need for further drawing or alterations.

The Smart Fill calculation evolves as space is altered through further sketching. As rooms are sliced in half, the area reduces, while as walls are erased, the area expands. The app also allows for the space to be filled in with color, text labels, or numerical data.

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The Architecture Drawing Prize received 166 entries from 26 different countries, offering a fascinating cross-section of approaches to and uses of architectural drawing today: from highly sophisticated design drawings to lyrical hand-drawn sketches, and everything in between. The exhibition retains a sense of this variety so along with the three category winners, it was decided to showcase the ten entries that received commendations from the judges.

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The Modmin has been a go-to for quality videos and tutorials on architectural drawing and sketching. Their newest video tackles a drawing fundamental: the ability to draw a straight line. For many seasoned architects, this is a skill that they mastered long ago. But if you are just starting out, or if you've been hiding behind your computer's ability to consistently draw straight lines, then this hack is for you.

Referring to the first tip in Matthew Frederick's 101 Things I Learned in Architecture School, Themodmin's Umar shares an exercise he was taught for achieving straight lines. 

On October 15^th four languages, three countries, and three astounding architectural projects will be brought together through a series of events and workshops to celebrate the 20^th anniversary of the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao. The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation seeks to commemorate the event with a full day program of activities entitled Drawing the Guggenheim. Visitors can explore and sketch the museums during a variety of public drawing exercises, architectural tours, films and family events at each of the Guggenheim locations.

With the launch today of Apple's iOS 11—and with it, the release of the company's powerful system for augmented reality apps, ARKit—Morpholio has released a new update to their popular Trace app that allows users to sketch over photographs with perfect accuracy. While it has always been an option to sketch over photographs in Trace, the new "Perspective Finder" tool superimposes a scaled grid over the photograph that helps designers follow the perspective of the image and measure their drawings accurately.

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Moleskine notebooks, sketching, architecture photography, imagination, and Instagram—these are all curiosities that arouse the interest of a stereotypical architecture lover. So it's hard to believe that Pietro Cataudella, author of the CityLiveSketch project, is neither a trained artist or architect, but a student of geophysics.

In the summer of 2014, the Italian began a project to "describe the land in an alternative way by the combined use of photographs and drawings that represent the landmarks of splendid Italian towns (and beyond)." He has traveled from Pisa to Rome, London to Barcelona, and sketched famous buildings that include Stefano Boeri's Bosco Verticale and the Eiffel Tower.

The ability to draw well is one of the most coveted skills in architecture. Unfortunately for those without an innate gift for sketching, it's also one of the most difficult to learn—even if it can, contrary to popular opinion, be learned with commitment and practice. But for those poor souls without such talents, there is now a fix: an app called SketchAR.

Available for iPhone and Android devices that incorporate Google's Tango technology, SketchAR can take photographs or other images, convert them into sketchable line drawings, and then use augmented reality to overlay them onto real-world surfaces.

In an increasingly paperless world, architecture still relies on channeling ideas by hand. Sketching has endured as the method of choice for designers to communicate with clients, the public, and each other. As we have previously reported, the George Architect YouTube channel, managed by Reza Asgaripour and Avdieienko Heorhii, is devoted to bringing sketching techniques and ideas to the wider world, with a series of tutorials on everything from light and shade to three-point perspectives.

Despite the rush of new technologies available to architects to express their designs, the humble art of hand-drawing is still alive and well. And when sketching are drafting are done well enough, they can become their own artifacts for inspiring architectural thought.

The work of architecture student Adelina Gareeva is one such example. Studying at Kazan State University of Architecture and Engineering (KSUAE) in Russia, Gareeva produces incredibly detailed architectural drawings, from carefully constructed perspective drawings of St. Basil’s Cathedral, to travel sketches to more abstract architectural compositions that draw similarities to Zaha Hadid’s Suprematist paintings or the Cubist works of Georges Braques. Check out some of her best sketches below.