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Architectural Drawing An architectural drawing or architect's drawing is a technical drawing of a building or building project that falls within the definition of architecture. Architectural drawings are 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, and to make a record of a building that already exists. Architectural drawings are drawn according to a set of conventions, which include particular views (floor plan, section etc.), sheet sizes, units of measurement and scales, annotation and cross referencing. 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. 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. At the scale of one eighth of an inch to one foot (1/96th) or the metric equivalent 1 to 100, walls are typically shown as simple outlines corresponding to the overall thickness. At a larger scale, half an inch to one foot (1/24th) or the nearest common metric equivalent 1 to 20, the layers of different materials that make up the wall construction are shown. Construction details are drawn to a larger scale, in some cases full size (1 to 1 scale). There are a number of 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 building in the same way as a map, but showing the arrangement at a particular level of a building. 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. An elevation is a view of a building seen from one side, a flat representation of one faade. This is the most common view used to describe the external appearance of a building. Geometrically, a cross section is a horizontal orthographic projection of a building on to a vertical plane, with the vertical plane cutting through the building. Isometric and axonometric projections are a simple way of representing a three dimensional object, keeping the elements to scale and showing the relationship between several sides of the same object, so that the complexities of a shape can be clearly understood. Detail drawings show a small part of the construction at a larger scale, to show

how the component parts fit together. The normal convention in architectural perspective is to use two-point perspective, with all the verticals drawn as verticals on the page. Architectural drawings are produced for a specific purpose, and can be classified accordingly. Presentation drawings are intended to explain a scheme and to promote its merits. Working drawings may include tones or hatches to emphasize different materials, but they are diagrams, not intended to appear realistic. Basic presentation drawings typically include people, vehicles and trees, taken from a library of such images, and are otherwise very similar in style to working drawings. Rendering is the art of adding surface textures and shadows to show the visual qualities of a building more realistically. An architectural illustrator or graphic designer may be employed to prepare specialist presentation

images, usually perspectives or highly finished site plans, floor plans and elevations etc. Survey drawings are measured drawings of existing land, structures and buildings. Architects need an accurate set of survey drawings as a basis for their working drawings, to establish exact dimensions for the construction work. Surveys are usually measured and drawn up by specialist land surveyors. Historically, architects have made record drawings in order to understand and emulate the great architecture known to them. In the Renaissance, architects from all over Europe studied and recorded the remains of the Roman and Greek civilizations, and used these influences to develop the architecture of the period. Records are made both individually, for local purposes, and on a large scale for publication. Record drawings are also used in construction projects, where "as-built" drawings of the completed building take

account of all the variations made during the course of construction. Working drawings is a comprehensive set of drawings used in a building construction project. These will include not only architect's drawings but structural and services engineer's drawings etc. Working drawings logically subdivide into location, assembly and component drawings. Location drawings, also called general arrangement drawings, include floor plans, sections and elevations. They show where the construction elements are located. Assembly drawings show how the different parts are put together. Component drawings enable selfcontained elements to be fabricated in a workshop, and delivered to site complete and ready for installation. Traditionally, working drawings would typically combine plans, sections, elevations and some details to provide a complete explanation of a building on one

sheet. That was possible because little detail was included; the building techniques involved being common knowledge amongst building professionals. Modern working drawings are much more detailed and it is standard practice to isolate each view on a separate sheet. Notes included on drawings are brief, referring to standardized specification documents for more information. Understanding the layout and construction of a modern building involves studying an oftensizeable set of drawings and documents. Reprographics or reprography covers a variety of technologies, media, and support services used to make multiple copies of original drawings. Prints of architectural drawings are still sometimes called blueprints, after one of the early processes which produced a white line on blue paper. The process was superseded by the dye-line print system which prints black on white coated paper. The standard modern processes are the ink-jet printer, laser printer and photocopier,

of which the ink-jet and laser printers are commonly used for large-format printing. Although color printing is now commonplace, it remains expensive above A3 size, and architect's working drawings still tend to adhere to the black and white or grayscale aesthetic.

Reference: Architectural drawing. (n.d.). In Wikipedia. Retrieved August 7, 2011, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Architectural_drawing