If you’re looking for a good woodworking plan, there are a few things that need to be considered. 1. Is there a cut sheet and or material list? A cut sheet is the parts of the piece individually noted and dimensioned so that they can be properly fabricated. A material list is a shopping list • Read More »
When it’s necessary to design a building for a site that’s not level, the designer needs to know just how high each point is above the lowest part of the site. This information is obtained by the surveyor and delivered in the form of contours on a property boundary, and is called a contour map. • Read More »
A shop detail drawing is a graphic representation in some form of a part or the whole of a structure member like a beam or a column, that gives enough information to fabricate of the parts shown. Detail drawings should include, but aren’t limited to: Sufficient accurate illustrations of the member to be manufactured, giving • Read More »
Chief Architect, bless their hearts, is telling everyone that has license to their older versions that they must update to a later version of their software with the newer operating systems like Windows 7, 8, and 10. Hey, that just makes good business sense if you are a big software developer. You don’t want folks • Read More »
The acronym CAD stands for Computer Aided Drafting or CADD which is Computer Aided Drafting and Design. Simply put, a CAD program is a drafting board built into a computer program. But it’s even more than that! The accuracy obtained in these programs can be measured to 1/1000 of an inch, even though this can • Read More »
A dimension is the measurement of one point to another. In the case of an architectural floor plan, it’s what guides a framer to build the building. So in fact, dimensions are one of the most important elements of a floor plan drawing. Without them there would be no way to determine the geometry of • Read More »
Colonial architecture was and is the architecture of rectangles. On the floor plan, these rectangles intersected each other much the same as they would in a game of dominoes. In the elevations the parallelogram was used almost exclusively, with its looks enhanced by a great deal of horizontal lines. Arches, curves and oblique shapes were • Read More »
At the beginning of 2010, an article in a newsletter caught my eye. It was about the ZWCAD Design Contest 2010, and the topic for the contest was on designing the future. Winners would receive an iPod Touch or iPod Nano music player, and a license of the new ZWCAD 2010 software. The way I • Read More »
There is a definite relation between the work of the house keeper and that of the architectural designer. It is a part of the business of the designers to do what he can to make housekeeping easy. He or she can do a great deal. They should understand the principles and practice of good housekeeping. • Read More »
I have spent the better part of my life studying architecture and drafting. As a boy, I used to pester the daylights out of a local architect who had an office close to my home. I would offer to clean and take out the garbage just to get a chance to watch him work. He • Read More »