The Architecture Drawing Prize 2020 announced the shortlisted entries in the Digital, Hand-drawn and Hybrid categories. This year’s contest gathered more admissions than the previous edition, with 165 entries from 30 countries, 35 of which are from students and under-30 architects. In addition, the 2020 competition introduced the ‘Lockdown Prize’, focused on the global pandemic, awarded to a drawing related to the architectural changes brought by the coronavirus.
The Architecture Drawing Prize is an international competition that celebrates the art and skill of architectural drawing. The prize is curated by Make Architects, Sir John Soane’s Museum and the World Architecture Festival.
The work presented in this article is the outcome of drawings done by the students of the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University in their second-semester studio, conducted by Alfredo Thiermann (ThiermannCruz). The work was produced during a 6-week long period of distance-learning after the school was shut down at the beginning of March.
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.
Architecture is a profession deeply dependent on the visual. It’s imagined, sold, critiqued and consumed almost entirely on the strength (or lack thereof) of drawings. We pick and prod at images presented at angles we’ll never be able to see, admiring the architectonic qualities of elements we’ll never actually experience.
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.
Looking for some quick references or ways to spice up your drawings? Fire up Google Translate or brush the dust off your Italian to take advantage of this comprehensive vector/dwg/architecture drawing resource site! archweb provides a number of free CAD blocks, downloadable CAD plans and DWG files, for you to study or use in precedent research. From furniture to north arrows, road detailing to room layouts, the website boasts a vast collection of plans, sections and elevations for you to pick and choose from, across a variety of categories. And what’s more, many drawings come complete with closed polylines and shapes for you to fill and hatch to your heart’s content.
Check out these 20 blocks to add quick and easy details to your drawings:
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.
You may know about Lynda.com, the online education platform that hosts thousands of video courses for learning how to use software. But did you know that Lynda also has some great drawing, animation, and design courses? The best part (if you're a current student or local library card owner)? Lynda can be accessed for free from many universities, colleges, and libraries! If your backpack-toting, library-visiting days are behind you, the platform offers a free 10-day trial.
If you're looking to perfect your ability to capture or project building interiors and exteriors, Amy Wynne's hour-long course "Drawing 2-Point Perspective" is a solid option.
A year after her untimely passing, we take a look back on one of the hallmarks of Zaha Hadid's career as an architect: her sketches. In October we wrote about how her paintings influenced her architecture. Now, we examine her most emblematic sketches and the part they played in the initial formal exploration of her design process.
The following excerpt was originally published in Natascha Meuser's Construction and Design Manual: Architecture Drawings (DOM Publishers). With our industry's technological advances, "the designing architect is not simultaneously the drawing architect." Meuser's manual aims to help architects develop and hone their technical drawing skills as the "practical basis and form of communication for architects, artists, and engineers." Read on for ten freehand drawing exercises that tackle issues ranging from proportion and order to perspective and space.
What is beauty? A few years ago, a group of international researchers sought to unravel the mysteries of human beauty. They used state-of-the-art, totally impartial computer technology and a huge dataset to establish once and for all why particular faces are perceived as beautiful, and whether beauty exists independently of ethnic, social and cultural background; in other words, whether it can be calculated mathematically. The scientists input countless photos of faces from all over the world, each described by survey respondents as particularly beautiful, into a powerful computer. The resulting information, they believed, could be used to generate a face that would be recognized by any human being as possessing absolute beauty. But what the computer eventually spat out was a picture of an ordinary face, neither beautiful nor ugly, devoid of both life and character. It left most viewers cold. The accumulated data had created not superhuman beauty, but a statistically correct average.
