Architectural Drawings

Residential Construction Unit 1 Mr. Todzia

Architectural Drawing

• An architectural drawing or is a technical drawing of a building project that falls within the definition of architecture.

– Technical Drawing- is a plan that visually communicates how something functions or is to be constructed.

– Architecture- The art and science of design and the erecting of buildings and other physical structures.

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Architectural drawings are used by architects and others for a number of purposes: – to develop a design idea into a coherent proposal – to communicate ideas and concepts – to convince clients of the merits of a design – to enable a building contractor to construct it – as a record of the completed work – to make a record of a building that already exists

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• • Architectural drawings are drawn according to a set of conventions, which include particular views (floor plan, elevations, section etc.), sheet sizes, units of measurement and scales, annotations and cross referencing.

convention is a set of agreed, or generally accepted standards, often taking the form of a custom.

History of Arch Drawings

• • Historically, drawings were made in ink on paper or a similar material, and any copies had to be laboriously made by hand. The twentieth century saw a shift to drawing on tracing paper, so that mechanical copies could be run off efficiently.

Evolution of Arch. Drawings

• • The development of the computer had a major impact on the methods used to design and create technical drawings making manual drafting almost obsolete, and opening up new possibilities of form using organic shapes and complex geometry. Today the vast majority of drawings are created using CAD software

C.A.D.

• Computer-aided design (CAD), is the use of computer technology for the process of design and design-documentation.

Designing in CAD allows for two things to take place easier than the older methods? Making copies and changes

Standard Views used in architectural drawing

• A floor plan is the most fundamental architectural diagram, a view from above showing the arrangement of spaces in a building in the same way as a map, but showing the arrangement at a particular level of a building.

Elevation View

• • • An elevation is a view of a building seen from one side, a flat representation of one façade. This is the most common view used to describe the external appearance of a building. Each elevation is labeled in relation to the compass direction it faces, e.g. the north elevation of a building is the side that most closely faces north

Cross Section View

• • • A cross section represents a vertical plane cut through the object, in the same way as a floor plan is a horizontal section viewed from the top. In the section view, everything cut by the section plane is shown as a bold line, often with a solid fill to show objects that are cut through, and anything seen beyond generally shown in a thinner line. Sections are used to describe the relationship between different levels of a building.

Site Plan

• • A site plan is a specific type of plan, showing the whole context of a building or group of buildings. A site plan shows property boundaries and means of access to the site, and nearby structures if they are relevant to the design.

Scaled Drawings

• • • Architectural drawings are drawn to scale, so that relative sizes are correctly represented. The scale is chosen both to ensure the whole building will fit on the chosen sheet size, and to show the required amount of detail.

For example a drawing could be done in ¼ inch scale. This means that if you measured ¼ inch on the drawing, it would represent 1 ft in real life.

Architectural Symbols

• All drawings use a common set of symbols, similar to a language. See Architectural Symbols hand out.

Annotations

• • Working drawings include dimensions. They specify: – room size – wall lengths – door and window locations

Detail Views

• • • Detail drawings show a small part of the construction at a larger scale, to show how the component parts fit together. They are also used to show small surface details, for example decorative elements.

See handout of house plans

Schedules

• • Window, door or trim schedule is a detailed list of: – window types – Window sizes – installation details – finishing instructions (painted, stained, vynal, prefinished) See house plans for examples