Architect's Toolbox: The Sketches That Spark a Home

With everything that goes into building a house today, it’s tough to imagine where everything starts. How exactly do you communicate your ideas to another person, and how does an architect interpret things like “indoor-outdoor flow, lots of natural light and a connection to the landscape”?

While architects use a variety of high-tech approaches to communicating conceptual designs to clients, including iPad mock-ups, computer-aided drawings (CAD) and 3-D models, the first versions of a design tend to begin with one of the most low-tech art forms around: the pen-and-paper sketch. 

"That big idea, the whole project, has to be distilled into one little drawing. We call [them] ideagrams," says Vancouver architect Sean Pearson. "It’s an absolutely simplistic representation of the idea.”

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