Friday, August 21. The shoes I wore to meet the architects.

A set of Copic markers is not cheap. But good tools are valued in the Office Design studio, where we have a large, colorful set; we are, after all, toolmakers.

Adobe Says Drawing Should Be Like Writing—A Skill We Teach Everyone

If only I used them more often.

We met last week with the architects for our first design session, at their studio on Western, mullioned windows dividing Elliott Bay into a choppy grid. I was jealous. Jealous of their sketches and the markers that preceded them. I learned to draw in design school, but not like an architect.

“The sketch, then, despite often being the size of a stamp or a pack of matches, is neither the representation nor the embryo of the idea but rather, as Franco Purini said, “the DNA of ideas”. It is the idea’s genesis because it tends to solve, within the context of the inventive kernel of activity, every complexity of what is still outside that kernel, however temporarily.” – Paolo Belardi, Why Architects Still Draw

and

“Sketchbooks are not about being a good artist, they’re about being a good thinker.

Obviously, some people do bring the practice of sketching to a higher art form, but to me, it’s always been about visual brainstorming and record-keeping in a format with a ridiculously low barrier to entry. My drawings look like shit, but fidelity doesn’t matter as long as I can convey my ideas to others or to my future self.

We should revel in not caring how good or bad we are, and by knowing that we hone our creativity with each stroke of the pencil.” – Jason Santa Maria, Pretty Sketchy

 

How To Think Like An Architect: The Design Process

The sketches produced made us happy, with many of the divergent ideas we’ve been struggling to realize, finally visualized in graphite form. We are close to a finished design. Very close.