Architectural Drawing: Exercise 3 and 4 - The Staircase

Welcome to Architectural Drawing. In this series, I share what I have learned in regards to drawing in my Intro To Architecture class.

During the second week of class, the architecture students were assigned two exercises. The first one, Exercise Three, focused on the ability to use different pencil types and line strokes effectively, while copying what you saw on paper. The picture above features two tree representations. The left tree is the example. The right tree is my hand-drawn copy. Since Exercise Three was very brief, I'll be skipping it and covering Exercise Four for this post.

Exercise Four required us to find a specific staircase on campus, take measurements of any pertinent information, and draw both a plan and section view...all freehand.

The Plan and Section

Both plan and section drawings are essential for communicating information about the structure. Specifically: measurements.

Plan drawings are the top-down aerial view of the structure, except you do not see the roof of the building. The roof is sliced away so that you can see the insides of the structure from above. It allows for a perspective never truly seen by any user of the space. 

Section drawings, on the other hand, are side views of the structure, but there's a caveat similar to the plan drawings. They are not just side views. Section drawings show what the structure would look like when a section of it has been sliced away. This allows for a more in-depth look at the space. Think of section drawings as first looking at the front of a loaf of bread, and then slicing that loaf of bread to reveal what lies behind the facade.

Both plan and section drawings are two-dimensional representations of reality, and when they are done correctly and clearly, they are extremely helpful for those building the structure.

The Staircase

After trying to measure a much more complicated staircase, I decided to choose the one above. This one was very simple. Once I was at the site, I pulled out my tape measure and began to record information. I had to measure almost everything that you see in the picture. After I finished the measurements, which I completed in two separate days, I was able to start the drawings on the grid paper. The result of all my measurements is below.

Section Drawing

In both plan and section drawings, the point at which the structure is sliced has to be shaded. The official term for this is called poche. In the section drawing above, you can see that I shaded both the staircase and the brick underneath. This signifies where the hypothetical "knife" sliced the structure. That's why you don't see the bush or the basement staircase railings as you see in the real picture. 

Furthermore, the type of materials used in the structure must be shown. To do this, one can draw basic symbols. For example, to show that the walls were made out of brick, I drew groups of brick symbols. On the other hand, concrete is shown by groups of dots.

Plan Drawing

When one is using a section view, it is very helpful to have a plan view along with it. Plan views compliment the section view, providing details the section view cannot see. In my plan, I drew what's called a "section cut line" to signify where the structure has been cut in the section view. This can be seen as the long line with two triangles on either end.

Notice what I did wrong in the plan view. You can see it marked on the top left of the plan. The thick brick wall you see is the wall of the building behind the staircase. Since the structure will be sliced through when looking down at it, this brick wall needed to be shaded.

Overall, the end result of these two drawings, put together, provided an accurate depiction of the size, texture, and proportions of the staircase.

References:

>> Architectural Drawing: Exercise 2 - Mindbenders