How to Think and Draw like an Architect
This veteran architect gives a very clear presentation of how an architect thinks and formulates a design once he has an understanding of the client’s requirements and the characteristics of the site. Doctors think in a particular way as do lawyers and business people and engineers.
In this video we get an inside look at how an architect thinks and sees his project from beginning to completion. He shows us how he see and thinks in pictures and how he develops his ideas with a marker and sketch paper at hand starting with simple bubble diagrams then connecting parts together. It is a process which means it doesn’t happen all at once. His ideas about the different spaces develops in layers as his simple bubbles take more defined shape as rectilinear forms with connecting lines.
Even though the designer is from the US, the thinking process and the issues that he must consider to develop an elegant solution is cross-cultural and demonstrate how excellence in architecture occurs.
There is also the aspect of drawing and presentation which this video doesn’t talk about, but there are plenty of other videos which focus on the details of sketching and technical drawing. Visualization connects the thinking process with the drawing and presentation process. The architect may not see everything at the beginning: their vision may only begin to appear later once he starts to draw and sees things on paper. Take a look at this next video. The illustrator confesses that he doesn’t have a clear picture of the building in mind when he started the sketch - again, the structure emerges once he applies pen to paper.
This video may blow your mind away. The illustrator did this freehand perspective sketch in 15 minutes!. Speed comes with practice so the illustrator had to draw thousands of hours of sketches and many, many drawings to reach his skill level. This is a professional architectural illustrator at work, and this is what he does for a living. So don’t feel too bad if you are not anywhere close to his level. Most students and not many architects even can draw this well as quickly. It is impressive though, don’t you think? And it gives us an idea of what is possible.