50-54 THINKING.indd

Architectural design – the art and science of designing space, building and the built environment – is a creative and complex task. It involves considerations of form (shapes, structure and configurations) and function (purposes and utilities). Whether form precedes function or vice versa (Janson, 1982; Anderson, 1987), the training and education of architects posits that successful design should combine form and function. Tasks include spatial arrangement (massing, volume, space) for programmatic requirement (capacity, cost, lighting, acoustic) and tectonics (details, material, construction and technology) at various scales from urban design to details. In architecture, drawings are the primary form of representation, carrying a design from conception to construction. The drawings the architect makes to explore and evaluate alternatives are more abstract and less precise than the working drawing handed to the builder specifying what to make. The earliest representations in this process are diagrams. The use of drawings to design buildings is a fairly recent phenomenon in the history of architecture. Although full-scale templates of columns are carved in stone at the Temple of Apollo (Haselberger, 1985), it appears that drawing (and hence diagrams) as a vehicle for making decisions about what to build emerged during the Renaissance. See Herbert (1993) for a general discussion; Ackermann (1997) and Branner (1960) for medieval design methods and the development of drawing-based design. Designers think with diagrams. All design is done with drawings and drawings are done in every design. There are many forms of design drawing. We distinguish between diagrams and other forms of drawing – the sketch, the more formal schematic drawing – and study the relations between drawing forms and various design activities. Designers start by making diagrams and sketches to explore ideas and solutions. Trained to use paper and pencil to develop conceptual designs, they draw to develop ideas and communicate their thinking. Design drawing is an iterative and interactive act involving recording ideas, recognising functions and meaning in the drawings, and finding new forms and adapting them into the design. Drawing educator Betty Figure 1-diagrams showing spatial layout bubbles with labels and annotations.