BEFORE THE ARCHITECT – HOUSE DESIGN CONSULTING
GRAPHICS GULCH IN HOUSE DESIGN
They say that the devil's in the details. Hell's bells, that's all there is to a good house plan set well done. I think folks find that devil in there by peering through their fog of ignorance and seeing their own vacuous, vapid stare looking right back at 'em - like the train light at the end of some dark tunnels. AG
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The following is an excerpt from a 24-page house design consulting commentary on 24 ARCH E (48"x36") Front Of House alternatives we'd designed for our clients' review. The house design rub herewith involved a very large house next to a small breezeway next to a almost very large garage. The house was a stock plan that needed a lot of help to make it safe, durable, convenient, and functional. The 3-car, extra deep garage with largish workshop arose as a house design issue subsequently. House and garage were 2 stories; overall width of the three sections was about 140'. The garage threatened to compete with the house, and it was our house design job to avoid such competition. During our work, it became clear to us that a substantial part of our problem in illustrative presentation was that the elevations didn't account at all for the different pieces relative to each other, that is, their depth in perspective - the house being considerably forward of the breezeway and garage. That launched the old boy on a crusade into house design's graphics gulch.
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Introduction
Off the clock, the AG has gnawed through several days and day parts to understand that which has in the end eluded him; namely, in the elevations of our house and breezeway and garage, within AutoCAD how can one more responsibly represent the elements of different sizes and at different, known offsets of depth to each other than by applying the conventional, elevations method of graphic presentation?
Background
 | We represent our facades in so-called “elevations”, that is, in 2 dimensions – width and height. |
o But not depth, whereat some of which (depth) is ascribed in acculturated imagination, intellectual arabesques. Superimposition and the learned expectation of the depth or arrangement of things front to back give up senses or surrogates of depth perception.
o But what to do, what to do, what to do when you’re faced with that with which we’re faced – three architectural elements – house, breezeway, and garage – that are next to each other and not overlapping?
| 3-dimensional drawing offers perceptional relief in a fuller representation of depth than 2-dimensional drawing. |
o We use 3-dimensional drawing frequently – in almost all of our own roof design and to check some 2-dimensional work.
o With our project, particularly with the house itself –
| the elaboration and articulation of exterior elements would torture this old boy up a tall wall to get all the twists and turns where they ought to be to do 3-D. |
| and that means beaucoup time and beaucoup bucks . . . . mucho beaucoups (that’s Spanfranglish, you know, for the multiculturally inclined). |
The Literature
| There’s a heap o’ text and diagrams on the web to guide the artist and the astrophysicist to glorious presentations of depth of painted cows in a painted meadow and for the positions of planets in the vastness of space. |
| Having recently survived immersions in both realms – the artist’s and the astrophysicist’s – the AG returns to his perspective puzzle weary but not wiser. The AG did learn that among experiences of higher-order pain, one can count with confidence – |
o artists exposing their mathematical wherewithnot and
o astrophysicists’ simplifying quantum mechanics and the time continuum so that we all can get it.
The Nerds
The AG polled three well-respected, very popular, internationally attended Autocad forums, plying our question of appropriate methodology to perform a depth (pseudo-)perceptive, 2-dimensional drawing. He got –
| No reply at all from one forum. So punitive. |
| A puerile reply from another that the AG had better suck it up, get real, pay attention to 1:1 elevations, because that’s what they’re there for (you old ninny, AG), and not look up from his daily grind lest he find naught but a lump of oily coal in his Christmas stocking. So expulsive. |
| A pedantic reply from a third that the AG’s interests are obviously and thoroughly as an anathema to the cause and course of authentic architectural presentation, that good-old traditional presentation in elevations should satisfy all responsible inquiry. So anal. |
Penance
Shame on AG. Bad boy. Bad boy.
The Dregs
So here’s what we’ve got for arm’s length viewing –
· We have a 32’ high ridge on a house (not counting two towering chimney caps) next to a 16’ high breezeway standing 33” back at its front face from the house front face next to a garage which, if fully two stories and, on the same grade level as the house and breezeway, stands 25’ back from the house, is 9’ narrower than the house as measured along the house long-axis, 29’ tall at its ridge. (Data are approximate.) All this is on a 2-dimensional, same-plane basis; it is as though we made cardboard cutouts of house, Breezeway, and Garage, and pasted them up on a warehouse wall.
· We can be sure would that any one of us looks at our three structures, that the farther back from the house front of face we go then (no matter the physical mass) the smaller the farther-back elements appear relative to the house itself; however, given the sorry state of Autocad and graphic technologies, we’ll have to pretend it’s so when we’re judging the depth relationships of and between the pieces.
· In our elevations, our viewpoint is not quite a hundred feet in front of the house at round-about 15’ or so over grade, looking out from one flat-screen eyeball not greater than 7 millimeters high and nigh unto 150’ wide. In other words, our three Front Of House elements could be rightly arranged in-line on the horizontal and vertical next to each other cheek by jowl or in different counties and there’d be no telling. The AG bets that even George Eastman couldn’t have envisioned our Kodak moment.
That’s as good as it’s going to get. Hoo-rah.
Well, that’s almost as good as it’s going to get. There are residential artists. Yes, there are artists who (artfully) draw only (or mostly) residences. If you’re moved to hook up with one, let’s first narrow-down the field of possible draws.
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