© 2015 by Rockport Publishers

Text © 2015 Julia McMorrough

Images © 2015 Julia McMorrough except as otherwise noted
Foreword © 2015 R.E. Somol

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10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

ISBN: 978-1-59253-897-3

Digital edition published in 2015

eISBN: 978-1-62788-252-1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

McMorrough, Julia.
Drawing for architects : how to explore concepts, dewne elements, and create effective built design through
illustration / Julia McMorrough.
pages cm
ISBN 978-1-59253-897-3 (pbk.)
1. Architectural drawing. I. Title.
NA2700.M43 2014
720.28’4--dc23
2014035921

Design: Julia McMorrough

Cover Image: Julia McMorrough

Printed in China
 Julia McMorrough

How
to exp
lore
con
cep
ts,
def
ine
ele
me
nts
, an
d cr
eat
e ef
fect
ive
bui
lt d
esig
n th
rou
gh
illu
stra
tion
dedication
For my parents, Grace and Frederick Holmes.
 contents
6 Foreword
The Architecture of the Drawing by R.E. Somol

8 Introduction
Drawing Attention

10 01
Projection Types
12 Drawing from History
18 Guide
20 Plan
30 Section
36 Elevation
46 Axonometric
58 Oblique
68 Perspective

94 02
Format Standards
96 The Languages of an Architect
98 Making and Reading Drawings
124 Drawing and Digital Production

130 03
Graphic Specimens
132 Drawing to Design
182 Contributors
183 Image Credits

184 Resources
186 About the Author
187 Acknowledgments
188 Index
 f o rew o rd

What makes [architects] architects … is usually

easiest to demonstrate anecdotally, beginning
with that oft-repeated story of the architect
who, when asked for a pencil that could be
used to tighten the tourniquet on the limb of a
person bleeding to death in the street, carefully
enquired, “Will a 2B do?”...[B]eing unable to
think without drawing … [is] the true mark
of one fully socialized into the profession of
architecture.

Reyner Banham

R.E. Somol is Director of the School of Architecture

at the University of Illinois at Chicago

The Architecture of the Drawing
R.E. Somol
At a moment when the architectural profession and academy
appear exhaustively preoccupied by their relevance to the
social, economic, and environmental “realities” of the world,
drawing is one of the last unnatural acts an architect may
commit. Under suspicion of frivolity or nostalgia, excess or
convention, drawing is, at best, tolerated as a means to an
end, or, at worst, dismissed as gross irresponsibility. But while
some architects may occasionally have the opportunity to
build, all draw. More than nature (Laugier), the machine (Le
Corbusier), or even the city (Rossi), architecture witnesses
its primal scene through the graphic act of drawing. Every
drawing, every projection, constitutes a swerve, a perversion.
And a good thing, too, for there would be no architecture
without such disciplined deviations. All architecture is paper
architecture.
This graphic nature of architecture has been celebrated in
the discipline as an opportunity for the production of new
architecture, perhaps most famously by the generation of
architects who came of age in the 1960s. In John Hejduk’s
Diamond House series, for example, the tipped or rotated
square emerges as the fundamental architectural primitive.
For Hejduk, underlying and preceding the generic cube is
the two-dimensional diamond, which itself must be rotated
and projected before entering the world as the cube.
Similarly, Peter Eisenman’s axonometric model for House X
retains, in its oblique physical construction, the project’s first
instantiation as an act of projective geometry. In these and
other works of the period, drawing is the generator.
7
As the identities of plan and section themselves began to take
on the generic status of “cuts” for this generation, the radical
implications of this reorientation for the spatial, material, and
rhetorical unfolding of architecture nonetheless required that
the conventions and disciplines of drawing remain intact.
Today, however, the conceptual “relativity” of plan and section
has itself become practically subsumed by the new primal
entity of architecture, “the model.” Whether offered by Rhino or
Revit, the model has come to assume the foundational status of
being the thing itself, an unauthored (whether in collaboration
with the software or others) form of nature. The implicit form of
argument that held within orthographic relationships has been
displaced within the real-time negotiation and accommodation
of the model. What risks being lost in this new order is the
understanding of architecture as an artifice, a culturally intended
form, an ideological projection susceptible to agency (or
signature), manipulation, and disagreement. By highlighting
the tug-of-war among genres of drawing and generations of
architects, the present book imagines a potential future for such
unnatural acts as architecture.
To paraphrase Dave Hickey on the relationship of America to Las
Vegas, the world is not a particularly good lens through which
to view (or evaluate) architecture, but architecture is a powerful
lens through which to view (and remake) the world. Architectural
drawings, along with all the artificial conventions they assume,
are a key accomplice in this anticipatory role. Drawing for
Architects exposes some of the pleasures and possibilities that
such voluntary subjugation to these constraints entails.
 i n t ro ductio n

I prefer drawing to talking.

Drawing is faster and leaves
less room for lies.

Le Corbusier

Drawing Attention
We are at an interesting juncture in the history of drawing for
architecture. To take on the topic to any reasonable degree,
one must be ready to ask a delicate question: Do architects
still draw? Architects today work differently than those of
twenty or more years ago. Few have the patience or the
need to learn the laborious fundamentals of constructing a
perspective by hand or the painstaking task of practicing
hand lettering that is precise, consistent, and almost
mechanical in appearance.
So the answer may be a qualified no. Rare is the architect
hunched over a drafting board, pen or pencil in hand, but
plenty may be found guiding a mouse or stylus through
a digitized drawing or modeling process. The question,
then, is more useful once restated: Do architects still make
drawings? The answer to that is a far more resounding,
though nuanced, yes.
Drawings are still the currency of the architect. It’s difficult
to convince the world of the intrinsic value of design if it
is not represented in a manner adequate to its worth. The
logic of drawing is, has been, and continues to be a
core aspect of how architecture is both envisioned and
represented. Architects use drawings to tell the story of their
ideas. These drawings, whether technical or provocative,
precise or fantastic, still largely conform to agreed-upon
conventions within the profession and the associated
trades. An architect’s command of drawing enables control
of a message, and failure to engage the power of the drawing
may result in loss of that control.
9
Though it’s easy to lament the end of a handmade era, it’s also
pointless to deny the power of the modern tools that enable
facile design investigation and an almost instantaneous ability
to produce the documentation necessary to broadcast all
aspects of a design’s development. But whether handwrought
or digitally crafted, a design communicates its intentions by
way of drawings. More and more often, these may be as
crafted projections of a digital model, but they are drawings.
Drawing for Architects provides insights into a progression of
drawing types, projections, and techniques by amplifying the
conversations among plan, section, elevation, axonometric,
oblique, and perspective, each with a specific relation
to the kind of design information that it expresses. This
book will explain both the technical and disciplinary
importance of these conventions of drawing and the ways
they continue to underwrite and enable the efforts of
architectural design. Within is a catalog of drawing types
used in architecture, as well as an assessment of applications,
techniques for production, and key terminology mostly
explored through a unique case study that takes a purpose-
made building design through each type and technique. To
complement this information, drawing examples from a broad
spectrum of currently practicing architects are featured as
specimens of what drawing for architecture means today.
As compared to talking, drawing may “leave less room for
lies,” but no drawing is without agency, and control of what it
omits is of equal importance to what it includes. The power
of the drawing is its ultimate authority by what it chooses to
privilege, leaving considerable room for an expanded world
of possibilities.
 01
PROJECTION
TYPES
12 Drawing for Architects

Drawing from History
Architectural drawings take on many guises and perform
many tasks, but their primary jobs involve the generation or
representation of design ideas, and, frequently, they involve
both. Significantly, as most architectural production today is
digital, the distinction between drawing and modeling is an
important one: the drawing is a projection of the object, not
the object (model) itself. So, while we may increasingly be
able to exist within efficient digital creations of seemingly
inhabitable virtual spaces, it is the manifestation of these
spaces as multiple possible projections onto the two-
dimensional picture plane that is of interest in consideration of
the drawing and its volition.
Drawings in architectural production imply reduced-scale
depictions of much larger buildings, parts of buildings, and
even parts of cities. The history of reduced-scale drawings in
the creation of architecture is beset by spotty evidence and
conflicting viewpoints. Unlike many of the buildings they have
yielded, the drawings responsible for much of the ancient
built world, if there were drawings, have simply not survived.
The buildings of ancient Greece were the result not of
prepared reduced-scale plans, sections, and elevations,
but of an arrangement of discrete and highly standardized
elements organized by way of written directions
(syngraphai) and full-scale templates carved into
stone. Such drawings were discovered on walls of the
Temple of Apollo at Didyma and thought to be from the
third century BCE. They depict not only full-scale working
drawings for the temple’s details, but also examples of
drawings explaining, in single-axis protraction (where the
column plan was depicted at full scale, while its much longer
height was proportionally reduced due to lack of space), the
methods for constructing the temple’s enormous columns.
Later, reduced-scale architectural drawings may have been
created on papyrus, parchment, and even wood slabs, but
such materials were incapable of surviving several millennia.
The Invention of Drawing, Karl Friedrich Schinkel (1830)
01 Projection Types 13
Since the Renaissance, however, with its commitment to
the dissemination of ideas and knowledge, and a parallel
dedication to the careful preservation of its drawn artifacts,
the innovations, discoveries, and ideologies surrounding the
projection of three-dimensional space onto a two-dimensional
picture plane continue to preoccupy the imaginations of
architects and historians alike.
For artists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,
depicting the origin of drawing was familiar terrain, frequently
explored through the classical legend of Diboutades and
her departing love. In these paintings, the woman traces
the outline of her beloved’s shadow, which has been cast
onto a wall by the light of a nearby candle or lamp. Robin
Evans, in his essay “Translations from Drawing to Building,”
compares these portrayals to the interpretation by painter
and architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel, whose 1830 painting
The Invention of Drawing, places this same scene outdoors,
with the shadow cast by the Sun, and the man’s silhouette
drawn by a shepherd, while the woman holds the head of
the subject steady. The distinctions may seem minor, but
as described by Evans, an architect and historian, they put
forward two important issues. By moving the action outdoors,
a nonconstructed environment, Schinkel suggests that building
could not have existed in advance of this moment of the first
drawing. Schinkel’s painting also establishes a case for the
orthographic projection made possible by the effectively
parallel lines of the Sun’s radiation, as compared to the local
light source of the more typical painting, resulting, in that case,
in a perspectival rendition of the shadow.
This comparison provides a telling context for understanding
drawing’s position relative to architecture and the cultures
that have produced it, and though our access to the exact
origins of the first drawings used to create buildings may be
uneven, Schinkel makes a compelling case for the necessity of
drawings to precede buildings.
14 Drawing for Architects

Projection Types Architecture is inherently three-dimensional,

though it often relies on the two-dimensional
means of representing spaces and forms through
the use of projection, of which there are three
ORTHOGRAPHIC
primary categories: orthographic, oblique, and
perspective. Each projection type has attributes
that enable it to convey, in two dimensions,
various degrees of information about the three-
dimensionality of the object.

Plan Axonometric
Section
Elevation
Elevation (Side)

Elevation (Back) Section (Transverse)

(top)
plan

Elevation (Front)

Elevation (Side)

MULTIVIEW PARALINE (SINGLE VIEW)

ORTHOGRAPHIC PROJECTION
 01 Projection Types 15

Often, the term “projection” is used even if a drawing has not

been created through the process of projection, but was drawn
instead as a pictorial representation. Projections emerge from
an inherent understanding of the object and the theory of its
construction, whereas pictorial representations are the result of
OBLIQUE PERSPECTIVE following a set of directions. Computers frequently make our
projections for us, working through the deeper fundamentals
necessary to the construction of a projection. While this section
acknowledges the multiple possible origins of a projection,
its focus is on the understanding of the results and uses of
these projections, rather than on the varying methods of their
construction.

HORIZON LINE

Two-point Perspective
Plan Oblique

HORIZON LINE

Elevation Oblique One-point Perspective

PERSPECTIVE (SINGLE VIEW)

OBLIQUE PROJECTION PERSPECTIVE PROJECTION

16 Drawing for Architects

The Picture Plane Projections are well understood by their relationship to the picture
plane. The picture plane itself could be described as a yat window
through which the object is viewed, such as a sheet of paper on which
the projection is drawn, or a computer screen that frames a digital
model in a particular position.

Plans, sections, elevations, and

axonometrics are orthographic,
because their projections are
accomplished through parallel
lines that meet the picture plane
at right angles.
 01 Projection Types 17

All of the projection types have the

same four elements: an object, a
viewer, a picture plane, and
projector lines.

Oblique projections meet In a perspective projection,

the picture plane at oblique the receding lines converge
(slanted) angles, though they to a vanishing point on the
are parallel to each other. horizon.
18 Drawing for Architects
 01 Projection Types 19

Guide Calling on the power of drawing to organize,

illuminate, and engage, the principal projection
types will be explored through the graphic
documentation of a prototype building design. The
featured Local Library is a mid-scale library and
community gathering space. It could be sited
anywhere—on an island, in the mountains, in the
city—and it was designed for and with the drawings
in the pages to come. It will serve as navigator, tour
guide, and testing ground for the drawing types
presented.

Organized by type, these drawings are explorations

as much as they are explanations. Taken together,
they represent ideas about one possible project,
explored through conventions of architectural
production and representation. As a set of
drawings about the building, their primary aim is to
exploit the projection types in question, in service
of investigating possibilities for the building’s
design. As the drawings explore the ways that
different projection types are uniquely suited to
telling different pieces of one building’s many latent
stories, ideally, they may not coordinate with each
other consistently. Such inconsistency is imperative
to understanding a drawing’s strength as a design
tool, and not just as a view of a model. Drawings
have ambitions and are at their strongest when
helping designers discover what questions to ask of
their designs.

Note: Pages that focus on the Local Library will display

the diagram above] with notations that reyect the
featured drawing.
20 Drawing for Architects

E
AN
PL
URE
CT
PI

Plan as Over-
head View

Plan as Section
Cut (Floor Plan)
 01 Projection Types 21
PLAN

Plan
A groundplan is made by
the proper successive use of
compasses and rule, through
which we get outlines for the
plane surfaces of buildings.
Vitruvius
The Ten Books on Architecture