Communications Workshop 3: Architectural Drawing

Major Project: Rose Seidler House

For the major project we had to produce an A1 presentation of plans, sections, elevations and perspective drawings of the Rose Seidler House in Wahroonga.

We had received some plans etc in class, which were not straightforward to read, as I didn't know much about the house.

I made the trip up to Wahroonga and was struck by the amount of colour used in the house, and how comfortable the house felt, even though it was now 60 years old. A few of my favourite shots can be seen below. I loved the kitchen and fireplace inside, and the use of bold colours on the exterior wall panels and doors.

In the end I was pretty happy with my composition. The layout ended up a bit clustered, and my top perspective too small. But I got to play around with the drawings, I did the rendering freehand in pen, so it was good to try some different techniques than used in the previous rendering assignment.

I found this to be a constructive workshop, where I learned som basic drawing techniques which I can use to develop my drawing ability with practice.

For one of the week 3 in class exercises we had to compose a drawing using different tones of shading (below). Working up from the lightest elements in the composition to the darkest. We had to not use any lines to form the boundaries of objects. I chose a spot in the west stairwell of the red centre. It was relatively easy for me to see the contrast between light and shadows on the same surface, but difficult to tell if the red paint was lighter or darker than the blue surface or raw cement. It was a good exercise to get some appreciation for analysing a scene into some sort of systematic method for building a drawing.

We went on to learn about 1 and 2 point perspectives (vanishing points, horizons etc.) in the second workshop. I had great difficulty doing a perspective of my kitchen over the weekend, as the lines seemed to change direction between when I was looking towards the vanishing point, and when I looked at the roof line for example. I basically ended up tracing photographs for the perspectives, but by doing this it becomes pretty clear that the perspective techniques work.

For Workshop 3 I chose to do Architectural Drawing, hoping that I would get some basic skills in both drafting and freehand drawing.

Our first exercise was doing a plan, section, elevation, and still life of a tea cup. I found the architectural drawings relatively straight forward, but didn't know where to start with the still life.

My tutor suggested starting with a series of elipses and build the drawing up from there. I'm pretty happy with what I managed to draw (below).