Recently, as the undergraduate intern at the bottom of the workplace totem pole, I was handed a USB with almost 1400 PDFs of scanned drawings. I was tasked with labeling them by city, address, and building name. A few weeks later I was also given a box with several hundred original printed drawings (see me below holding one of many folders) that needed to be scanned and digitally organized. What seemed daunting at first was actually quite rewarding. Now, you might ask, why? First, take a look and scroll through some of these drawings below. They range from being done in the 80s to just a few years ago. A lot of them were done by OU's own Professor Ron Frantz. Many of them were done by OU students in the 90s and early 2000s under the guidance of Professor Arn Henderson. Almost all of them were drawn or rendered by hand. Nowadays, architects, engineers, graphic designers--almost any form of creative media--is done digitally. Even if your profession does not involve Photoshop, AutoCAD or similar software, you probably still recognize them. However, before computers were widespread, architects designed and documented strictly with paper and pen. After viewing thousands of these, I have realized that hand drawings will always remain a vital part of the architectural profession because: 1. You have the ability to quickly illustrate ideas on paper, anywhere, any time.With digital designing, you must be near a computer to even begin. A pencil and a sheet of paper allows immediate exploration of your ideas. You aren't limited or slowed down by computer commands or where you can work. You can even do quick sketches on cocktail napkins while you're out and about. 2. Sketches can quickly go through multiple iterations.Think, draw, repeat. Repeat, repeat, repeat. The most important part to design work is thinking over and over about your design and constantly drawing new versions of your idea. Using computer programs can quickly get messy if you try to draw over or alter previous drawings, and creating a new one simply takes too much time. With hand sketching it is much quicker and easier to try out new ideas, you can even layer changes on top of an original drawing. This initial sketch of the new facade for the repurposed Texaco station served as the basis for experimentation with different color finishes, awning placements, windows, and trim. This was easily drawn by hand, whereas a computer rendering of all these options would have taken far longer. 3. They are easier for clients to understand than technical drawings.Often in design software, architects are designing in plan, section, and elevation. They can be filled with dimensions, annotations, and other technical terms that clients may struggle to understand. It can be difficult to envision what a building will look like strictly from a floor plan and this sort of drawing will likely not be interesting to someone who does not work in the architectural field. A view of what the finished building will look like--from either the front facade or a perspective drawing--is more useful for clients to make design decisions with the architect. Check out these drawings of two different buildings. The first two pictures above are a floor plan and a section. While they tell the client the layout of the building, they don't give them a good idea of what the exterior would look like. The elevation in the third picture above gives a better picture of what the facade will look like. Below, the floor plan offers no clue to the exterior appearance. The second picture shows more of what the shape is and the finish materials, but the perspective drawing is the clearest vision of the building's design. 4. Hand drawings have more authenticity and a more meaningful connection.There's something so much more satisfying about a tangible hand drawing--it's almost a piece of art. Computer drawings feel impersonal, robotic, harsh. Holding a piece of paper in your hand, seeing the pencil or pen marks, the imperfections, the direction that someone drew the pen stroke, it adds so much more character to the picture. Unfortunately some of this is lost in the scanned drawings here, but there were a few copies of drawings that were actually originals that I enjoyed seeing so much. Back to the big question, why bother making this digital database of these scanned drawings? Hand drawings have some drawbacks, lacking certain abilities that come with the digital age. It is useful to integrate these physical drawings into digital form because: 1. It is easier to search for a specific drawing.Having a huge stack of papers, or a copious amount of filing cabinets filled to the brim with folders of drawings, it can be difficult to locate a drawing if you are looking for a specific one. With this set of files, each drawing is labelled with the city, address, and building name, allowing anyone to look up keywords and quickly find what they are looking for. 2. The files can be backed up.With physical drawings, there is only one copy of each, unless they are scanned and duplicated, which leaves them susceptible to being lost forever in the event of a fire, water damage, or being misplaced. Now that these have been scanned and saved on a flash drive, they can be backed up and saved in multiple locations. This digital storage insures that the information and beauty contained in these original drawings will be preserved for future reference and appreciation. 3. The drawings are more easily shareable.With hard copies, the extent to which you can easily share them is limited. Typically, paper drawings are only shared in person, with a client or two, and perhaps in a presentation if the drawing is large enough in original size. Having been scanned and converted to PDFs, these drawings can now be sent to other people via email, scaled to larger sizes and incorporated into public presentations, or even posted online such as in this blog post. Essentially, they are now accessible to many more people. Overall I've also learned quite a bit about the skills necessary to make successful hand drawings. Seeing the different hatches and lines that the architects used to convey materials and depth has been useful for developing my own sketching skills. The way these architects convey textures is something that I've not been taught in school. The attention to detail is quite impressive too. As for the documentation and organization that I have done, it will be made available to all of the cities involved in the Oklahoma Main Street Program. Previously, these hand drawings were all just laying in a box in the corner of someone's office, unnoticed and unseen. Even if they were pulled out of seclusion, it was near impossible to find what you were looking for among all of them. Now, future historic preservationists and owners of these buildings will be able to quickly look up these original drawings as needed. Note: I take no credit for these drawings. They were all done by other architects, including Ronald Frantz, Todd Scott, Barrett Williamson, and many architecture students under the guidance of Arn Henderson.
Note: This blog post is also going to be featured on the website of my current employer, OU Institute for Quality Communities. Check it out, along with their other work, at iqc.ou.edu.
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Amy HostetterCurrent student. Archives
January 2019
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