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 used by architects and others 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 made 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. Conventionally, drawings were made in ink on paper or a similar material, and any copies required had to be laboriously made by hand. The twentieth century saw a shift to drawing on tracing paper, so that mechanical copies could be run off efficiently.

The development of the computer had a major impact on the methods used to design and create technical drawings, making manual draughting 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.

Read more about Architectural Drawing:  Size and Scale, Standard Views Used in Architectural Drawing, Architectural Perspective, Sketches and Diagrams, Types of Architectural Drawing, Drafting, Architectural Reprographics, See Also

Famous quotes containing the word drawing:

    ... you can have a couple of seconds to rest in. I mean seconds. You have about two seconds to wait while the blanker is on the felt drawing the moisture out. You can stand and relax those two seconds—three seconds at most. You wish you didn’t have to work in a factory. When it’s all you know what to do, that’s what you do.
    Grace Clements, U.S. factory worker. As quoted in Working, book 5, by Studs Terkel (1973)