Here is my fourth homework assignment for my Design Communication I course. The assignment was to draft a “maquette” of our own bathrooms at a 1′-0″ = 1/2″ scale. This required a lot of measuring and drafting. Here, I will highlight the progress of my assignment over the course of a week. This sketch on drafting paper organizes the floor plan and elevations in a pattern identical to my assignment last week:
In the following draft, I added line weights, tiles to the walls, and a few more small details:
My next step was to cut each of these perspectives out and trace them onto a single sheet of paper (what I use to document my assignments). Rather than keeping them in the “maquette” format, each perspective is rearranged in their designated order:
I also added a legend to identify the different objects and materials in the room, along with a designated letter for each perspective. It was interesting to see my bathroom walls and floor in this order rather than the maquette order I was used to.
Finally, my job will be to add the title block on the right side along with measurements on the sides of my walls. This will help me when it becomes time to translate my bathroom into SketchUp.
This assignment is much more difficult than I anticipated or what I am used to. Every assignment so far has required me to follow precise steps, all leading towards a draft identical to what is provided as an example. In this case, I am required to work entirely on my own, by using my own measurements. No two assignments of my classmates’ look the same. Despite its difficulty, I have found this assignment to also be the most useful and rewarding. It has taught me about how to translate real-life objects and spaces into a 2D draft. Up to now, I have been doing the exact opposite: translating 2D drafts into 3D spaces. I look forward to translating my existing bathroom into a 3D SketchUp model. Perhaps comparing the two three-dimensional spaces will allow me to see the mistakes in my drafting–specifically, perhaps, in my measuring. I believe drafting my bathroom has been a perfect starting point for the countless other spaces in my apartment I will have to draft in the future!
Isabella, the attention to detail is impressive. I wonder if you are feeling moments where the drafting that seems like a very technical activity invites in moments of creativity (i.e., that the specific constraints of the task allow us to see things in new ways)? There is also the specific attention to how the tools (in this case the pencil) can be used to reveal varying degrees of complexity and information.