1984

Cool.  What does the ink, or dark pen, b&w represent? School project, no? Or schematic in an office? I was intending this to be a-school type work. 

I think this is sort of interesting, because personalities show through via design work and drawing more so than they do in posts. 

Sometimes.

my thesis

my thesis

The roof looks kind of rusted.

lmao rusty

Here's a few random things I've been working on in recent memory. I still do most of my design thinking with pen and paper, going to computer and then back to paper, lather, rinse, repeat.

^

Nice! Really like the modern office building with the blue fenestration.  I also like the sketch of those round-headed windows with the reddish/pink tones. I forgot where it was you went to school.  Markers were great, if you picked the right color and kept them from bleeding.  Watercolor ... forget that.  Love it, but never learned it.

here are a few: http://archinect.com/stevenward/project/hand-drawings-various

some pencil, some ink, some freehand, some drafted.

nice, gwharton! 

And then compare that to some of my old school work...

Steven - axon of cable stayed (hangar?) - tight!

observant: I went to Washington State.

Steven: nice stuff. the barge thing with the blue pencil background is esp. nice.

gwharton:  that makes sense ... good program.  It's also amazing that some schools teach graphics within studio, which is half-assed, and some teach presentation separately, as it should be done. 

Of your school work, I like the 4th item down ... 5th one, too.

very pretty sketches gwharton!

Unfortunately, most of my school work does not survive. I had it in storage in the back room of my house when the roof sprung a leak. Lost about 12 years of work. Very sad.

For instance, my fourth year tall building project was a rocket assembly and launch facility. I did the drawings by hand with tech pens directly on a single sheet of 4'x8' white foamcore, and then painted in all the backgrounds with translucent acrylics with an iridescent medium. I had to make a special moveable jig to hold the mayline for drafting that thing, so I could draw continuous seven-foot-long straight lines without interruption and not dent the foamcore. Also had to keep the paint thick so the foamcore wouldn't warp. Tedious process. End result was great, though. The painted sky sparkled and shone like an aurora borealis on a clear night. Prof called it a "fucking work of art."

Lost that to the leak, among many other things. Only one blurry photo survives. Does not do it justice by a long shot.

Document your work, kids. You don't want to lose that stuff.

All models (foam core and museum board) discarded.  Graphics survive in rolled up form and in reduced portfolio form.  In those 3 years, my work did not morph much (modernist, somewhat classical and safe proportions, complete via program, constructable) and presentation style was pretty much what everyone else was doing - tight ink graphics.  We could all pick out each others' projects.  I'd say mine were kind of uptight (?)  But then, maybe not.  Some people turned in boxes ... the whole way through.  That was scary.

I did a lot of models too. Still have a few of them, 20+ years later...

That style of graphics (flooring et. al.) must have "persisted" for over a decade, seeing it in the 90s.  Wow.

Nice work all.

^

Check! The difference in project types and presentation styles is what's interesting.  It speaks about the person, the school, the time, the personality ...

My parents were in middle school in 70s.

More please!

Foam core model, you can see a spiral stair through the entry.

@Quondam

That's beautiful, and that style is still HOT! 

Let's try that again.

Foam core model, you can see a spiral stair through the entry.

eh... forget it. Does anyone else use Chrome on archinect?

I love those worm's-eye axons, Quondam.  They really take me back...

By the way, how was that issue of PA you recently bought?

night rendering of a pavilion

'corridor' in a small office building

the role of the architect

love the night rendering jman!

thanks!

Quondam, isometrics do look much better than axons. It's a shame most computer software can't project them correctly from a model. Here's an isometric trim detail I did for a house (in AutoCAD v10) many, many years ago. This was drawn 2D using AutoCAD's isomode snap settings.

nice, gwharton!

The other thing you may notice about that old CAD iso detail, even in this crappy old scan, is that it has real lineweights, just like we were taught to draw by hand (including profile lines). I literally used the computer just like a pen/pencil for that detail.

Nowdays, it seems like people are so hung up on the speed and symbolic nature of CAD drawings that they've forgotten they're still drawings and need to communicate graphically.

tl;dr....most CAD drawings look like crap. I can't decide if this is because most architects are too lazy to do it right, don't understand what they're doing, can't really draw in the first place, or don't understand how to use their own tools. Probably all four.

Maybe that should be my new band name.

TONIGHT AT THE PARAMOUNT! ISOMODE-ODE-ODE SNAP-AP-AP-AP!!!!

Incidentally, this is what that semi-recessed trim/reveal detail looked like when it got built.

Question:  if making the first post, one has the option to "add images."  Once the thread has started, it's either a link or an image, per the icon above.  How does one do this at this point, so that it shows just the image and not a link?  Thanks.

plan for the night rendering

and a large scale elevation

Manual drafting at a community college, in the evenings, along with arch. graphics, drawing, and a refresher calculus course in the year prior to a-school.  Never did any manual drafting, but enjoyed learning it.  Upon entering the workforce, we used AutoCAD. (Faint because they are scans of scans of the originals).

Okay, I give up.  Can anyone help a codger figure out how to post an image file?  (The blank field next to "URL" seems a bit... vague, shall we say.  I put in a file path, and nothing.)

citizen, have you uploaded the images online somewhere else, like flickr or picasa? 

if so, go to the image where you store it online, right-click on the image, and choose, "copy image location." 

then when you go to post the image here, paste the copied image address into the popup field. 

Thanks for responding, Quondam.  It's a file in my folders, so it doesn't have a URL from the web.  (Obviously I'm just missing something dumb and basic.)

Most of the new "kids" Ive worked with have no sense of lineweight, because they directly jumped into CAD. Everything looks the same.

Thanks, jmanganelli.  Nope, just some files in my folders... not uploaded anywhere.  I was wondering if that's the big secret.  Mystery solved!

sameold, you sound old!  like one of the guys who refuses le corbusier because he didn't use the right ink for UN project... ;-)

Sejima and many mod japanese architects make beautiful drawings with no heavy lightweights.  It ain't about technical standards, its communication.  both in dwg and in built work, no?

which is maybe better point, lets see the  buildings yall did before cad and after.  for myself i feel the dwgs may be less craftmanlike but the buildings are made better than before.  much more professional with BIM too...

Will's point is a good one, but doesn't necessarily address Same Old Doc's: my strong hunch is that the Japanese drawings sans heavy line weights constitute a choice, made by architects fully versed in the craft.  SOD argues that the "kids today" aren't even aware of that choice, because they haven't learned it.

Big difference.