Drawing Scale

Technical drawings in architecture have a scale to them, which is a standard number that shows how many times is the drawing smaller than real life.

We will got into details, later, but a couple of useful scales are:

1:100 - means 1 centimetre from you drawing equals 100 centimetres in real life
1:50 - means 1 centimetre from your drawing equals 50 centimetres in real life
1:200 - means 1 centimetre from your drawing equals 200 centimetres in real life

This is all very nice, but you need to make these scales actually be useful to your, so you understand how much one meter from real life would be on your page.

We will use this simple formula to achieve just that:

1 cm on drawing .................. 50 cm in real life
x cm on drawing ................... 100 cm (1 meter) in real life
x = (100 x 1)/50 = 2 cm

So this means:

1:100 -> 1m = 1 cm on drawing
1:50 -> 1m = 2 cm on drawing
1:200 -> 1m = 0.5 cm on drawing

We will use a 1:200 planar and frontal view of a cube to construct the perspective.

How To Construct A Two-Point Perspective

These Are The Steps To Drawing A Correct Constructed Two-Point Perspective.

1. Draw the ground line in a suitable position on your sheet.

2. Draw the planar view of a the cube (a simple square) rotated at a non-symmetrical angle (ideally for beginners 30 degrees) with one corner on the ground line.

3. Draw the frontal view of our cube (looks like a rectangle due to the position of our rotated square).

4. Draw the diagonals in planar view, set up the viewing direction (a line perpendicular to the ground line) through the centre of the square (where both diagonals meet).

5. Set the correct viewing distance by using the 45 degrees and 30-degree triangles, mark centre the viewpoint in planar view.

6. Draw the horizon line at the appropriate distance from the ground line. If we are talking about constructing our cube in frontal view at a 1:200 scale, then the horizon line being at 1.65 meters is at 0.825 cm. Draw the central point on the horizon line, mark it with a simple ‘P’ ‘

7. Project in planar view through the three corners of the square which are not on the ground line, stop the projections on the ground line, draw verticals that go above and below the ground line.

8. Project in frontal view starting from the midpoint through both the top of the bottom of each edge in frontal view, stop these projections on the verticals generated by the planar projection.

9. Unite these six points, alongside the minimum and maximum of the corner sitting on the ground line. Due to this fact, this edge remain undeformed in perspective and in 100% of cases is a back line (you can draw it from the get go with dashed lines).

10. Thicken the contour lines of our perspective, draw the back lines with dashed lines.

Enlarging Two Point Perspective

• We now need to enlarge our constructed perspective so to get a decent size drawing worth the time and effort invested in constructing the perspective. Starting from the central point, extend the lines which beam out through the corners of the box perspective.

• Decide the size of perspective you want (mostly in relation to the space you got on your page) Now let us start by drawing a parallel to the vertical lines as these are easiest to construct.

• After that, by using the two triangles technique, you can draw parallels to the horizon line as well. Note: with increasing the perspective size the perspective points themselves become more far apart, but stay on the same horizon line. In 1% of cases due to construction errors, the closest perspective point might not hit the horizon line... that is ‘fine’ as you can trick this via hiding the perspective point with anentourage (trees + shrubs).

Horizontal Divisions

Drawing horizontal divisions is all about geometric construction.

We got two options: divisions which are directly dividedinto two or divisions that do not divide by two.

1.) The divisions that divide by two are easiest because they more or less focus on diagonals and then splitting those diagonals with more and more diagonals... thus they form halves, quarters, eights and so on and so forth.

2.) The divisions that do not divide by two are different - for these, you need to draw a horizontal line starting off from the edge and then divide that by the number of division you need: 3, 5, 7, 13... and then convert those points to the adjacent perspective point. The intersection between the construction lines and edge in perspective will give you all the divisions you need.

Vertical Divisions

Vertical divisions are made by measuring directly on the enlarged perspective edges as two-point perspectives do not deform vertically.

By using the perspective point which is on your page, you can draw these divisions by measuring on just two of the four vertical edges.

The other way of drawing vertical divisions implies your project from the frontal view by measuring directly on its vertical lines and drawing the divisions to scale, then projecting through the ‘P’ ‘ point.

Top-Down Perspective

Bottom-Up Perspective

Drawing And Designing The Cube House

We will not take things one step further (as we always do) and construct a cube house perspective.

This means we need to use all we learned by now and apply it in the context of a ‘building view’ perspective.

The dimensions are again 10 x 10 x 10 meters, the entrance is elevated 1 meter of the ground (5 steps), and the terraced roof has a depth of 60 cm.

That makes for a ground floor and two levels, each with the height of 10 meters - 1 meter - 0.6 meters - 2 x 0.2 meters (for each floor slab) = 2.7 meters.

We won’t be going into too much detailing about what makes a drawing of a house really look like a house, for now just focus on copying the one cube house you like out of the four presented on your design brief.

The cube house concept is going to be fairly basic, and this is because our aim isn’t to create the most original design possible (this will be up for a future lesson) but to just apply the constructed perspective technique we’ve learned in a real-life example.

So how do we design a cube house? We first need to cut out 1 meter out of our 10-meter cube for the base, then cut off 0.6 meters for the roofing.

Subtract 0.4 meters out of the 8.4 meters left and divide by three for the three levels. Obviously, we need to have the
1-meter base, then a floor with a 0.2-meter slab, another floor, with another 0.2-meter slab, the last floor and then the 0.6-meter roof terrace with an incorporated slab.

Designwise there is not too much to add - just copy one of the reference ideas in your PDF lesson.

If You Want To Understand More On The Subject Though, You Need To Know These Three Rules Of Thumb:

• mark the entrance with a canopy.

• use a maximum of three materials - simple material, glass and a textured material (brick, wood, metal cladding).

• make the volume of your building look like an intersection of volumes which are connected by transparent glass.

You can create all these divisions directly in your frontal view when drawing the building and then throw them in the constructed perspective.

This is generally the best option as it takes advantage of the precision of constructed perspective.

Speed Up - Constructed Perspective

This is the 400% speed up workflow of a normal 'building view' constructed perspective... including vertical and horizontal geometric divisions.

Take notes, and watch for all sticking points - you need to absolutely streamline your workflow and understand constructing a perspective 100%.

Speed Up

Here is  the workflow for drawing a constructed 'building view' perspective starting from one of the assignment reference drawings. Again, take notes and watch for inconsistancies in your own workflow.