8.3.2024 Friday - sitting quietly and drawing

The highlight of my day is sitting down drawing out hotel room options, listening to Jackie Cheung while eavesdropping on Sean at the end of the room going through structural framing and levels with the engineers Wong and Edberg. 

I am not the only one solving design problems. 

 

Architectural concept drawings

 

I recently found these sketches from 2015, and was quite pleasantly surprised that the key idea is easy to understand, it made use of the existing space and tied in neatly with the existing structure. These were conveyed with simple architectural sections and plans, accompanied with several perspective views and images from magazines to describe the intended mood. The project did not make shape, we never really found out why - perhaps it was the wife's pregnancy and imminent birth of their first born, perhaps the client's father did not agree with intervention to the family home. 

In any case, I recall enjoying working on this design and conversations with Sam, who was a good intermediary between the client and us. 

Fast forward 6 years - and another set of schematic sketches this time of a larger project and with another design partner sketching over CAD drawings. The process is similar but I noticed that I did not spend the same amount of time/care in the line work of the sketches - probably because I was talking to Fiona as I drew, trying to record, to confirm what we were agreeing about. These are more like #talkingdrawings, but I want to pay more attention on my drawings - there is more to worry about nowadays, and I have less time. But those are feeble excuses which I can overcome by prioritizing what I spend my time on.

Boomerang

When I tell my friends and colleagues that I am not completely at ease with large buildings, and prefer to do smaller buildings that I (with the help of a junior) can design, document and supervise to completion, they don't take me seriously. This is why I often find myself in the midst of a large project looking for smaller components to design and detail, such as this club house for an apartment block. Ideal for an early Saturday morning when even the dogs are asleep.

The building's form is pushed and pulled into an irregular shape by setback requirements, the positioning of the swimming pool and an adjacent driveway - it ended up looking like a boomerang.

rough sketch up model by me

As a counterfoil to the building form, a low concrete canopy sweeps across the front of the club house for the drop off and car parks. The folded walls the first floor allude to the elevation treatment of the apartment building, the gaps in between them allow filtered sunlight into the rooms.

A nicer model by my juniors, with the apartment in the background

This is an opportunity to indulge myself in a bit of time to design and day-dream, and derive another spark of delight from this project.

Next up - a cardboard model.