Architects draw - Sue Ferguson Gussow

Architecture Briefs focus on a variety of single topics of interest to architecture students and young professionals. These affordable, beautifully designed volumes feature exciting developments in architectural practice as well as in-depth analysis of key design and construction concepts often overlooked or glossed over by traditional architectural overviews. Field-specific information is presented in a user-friendly manner alongside essential, basic underlying principles. This new series aims is to familiarize readers with the concepts and technical terms necessary to successfully translate ideas into inspiring feats of design and construction.

Where does architectural design begin? In an age obsessed with all things digital, its tempting to envision a computer screen in a paperless studio. While the practical value of computer-aided drafting and photorealistic modeling are indisputable, but you wont find the soul of architecture in the machine. Look instead at an architect's drawing hand. Ideas flows onto the paper through the uniquely human creative collaboration between mind and eye. Architects Draw, the inaugural volume of our new Architectural Briefs series, highlights this most fundamental level of speculative designfreehand drawing.

Architects Draw offers a practical and invaluable way to helps students and would-be sketchers translate what they see onto the page, not as an imitation of reality, but as a comprehensive union of voids and solids, light and shadows, lines and shapes. For over forty years revered Cooper Union professor and artist Sue Gussow has taught aspiring architects of varying abilities how to fully observe and perceive the spaces that make up our physical environment. Gussow skillfully applies architectural language to twenty-five drawing exercises that tackle a variety of formsfrom peas in a pod, to monkeys, skeletons, dinosaur bones, and the art of Giacometti and Mondrian. She shows, for example, how cut fruit and paper bags reveal that the physical world is made up of planes, dimensions, and enclosed space. Architects Draw features examples from postgraduate architectural practice that explicitly connect drawing to the world of architecture. It also includes a guide to artist's materials, a visual checklist of quick drawing exercises, and other invaluable information that can be detached from the book for quick reference. This unique course provides a solid for anyone interested in using drawing as a visual language to describe architecture.