Initially, the idea is to design a 1,000 square foot of habitable space guesthouse for this property. The square footage is the maximum allowed for ARUs (Accessory Residential Unit) by Teton County, WY. The owners of the program would like to create 2 bedroom suites and a living area, kitchen and dining, and a laundry room.

In this video, Chris is working on coming up with a concept with a quick diagram and some basic dimensions that will inform him how big this building may be and details such as how it will be heated, where the kitchenette would go, etc. He prefers to do his schematic design work at eighth-inch, which is a fast and manageable scale to work within.

To help him work quickly, Chris uses both regular and electric erasers, as yes, architects make mistakes too and they can easily fix them with this type of drawing. He also uses triangles, scales, pencils, parallel bars, circle template templates and plumbing fixtures templates. He works on top of a light table, which really helps when he’s layering several pages on top of each other to create a drawing.

Doing this work by hand gives him the ability to see the whole project at the same time. The drawing can look grungy in the end, but it is very readable and Chris will use it as an underlayer for his final presentation drawing, which he realizes in more of a freehand fashion.

You can see him adding many details that will complete this floor plan, such as furniture, and small squares around the floor plan. They are the location of the columns that will support the roof. He also adds a potential pathway and parking space, the intention being to eventually have a one-car garage attached with a breezeway. There will be a stone patio that leads off the covered porches.

Eventually, Chris flips the sheet of paper and adds colors in red a number of shapes in order to punch up elements: when making a color copy, red is very noticeable to differentiate those elements from others.

Noteworthy is Chris’ desire to keep a link to the tradition of working with diazo prints, which are no longer used. In the past, architectural plans were created using a diazo chemical process, also known as the blue-line process for its result in blue lines on a white background. Applying red gave a faint blue tint to final prints, which was important for seeing quickly where walls were located.

Chris adds next some basic dimensions to inform the client of the size of the building and rooms.

Finally, he labels all spaces. Not favoring the traditional blocky style often used by architects, he prefers to use a calligraphic style for its rapid free-flowing form. He developed it while a student and likes that it is legible and artistic as well as having a certain relevance to the schematic nature of the drawings.

He concludes by placing a title block, a sticker that goes in the corner of every project and it identifies DMA’s project and date.