Design Integration Laboratory

Architecture 222, 410/510, & 610

Project Three -- Orthographic Section Drawing

Objectives

Further develop your general two-dimensional drawing skills with PowerCADD.

Learn to use advanced drawing tools, such as tool methods and positional modifiers.

Learn to express depth in a section drawing using appropriate line weights.

Explore the graphic qualities of laser printed drawings.

Procedure

Find a nice section drawing of a good building in a published source. You will probably want to use the AAA Library, books and/or periodicals, as a source of building drawings. The Great Buildings Collection is a useful source of references. The drawing you find should be to scale, and large enough that you can derive accurate dimensions from it.

Redraw this section accurately in PowerCADD, using the largest scale which will fit the drawing attractively on an 8 1/2" x 11" page (either portrait or landscape orientation). Be sure to include a graphic scale, and title your drawing, indicating the orientation of the section view (which direction you're looking in).

The amount of detail to show will depend on your subject space, but your finished drawing should be graphically rich, and include interior elevations as well the cut plane. Pay careful attention to graphic details like poche and line weights, and adjust them according to test prints. The fundamental principle of line weights for a section drawing is that lines get fainter (thinner, using a laserprinter) as the objects get farther back from the section plane. This goes from solid black poche for actually cut areas, to 0.001" lines for the far wall of a space.

Note --
The line width 0.001" = 1/1000th inches, which due to the limits of printer resolution is a functional equivalent for our purposes to 0.01 points = 1/720th inches, as is shown in the DIL default setup for PowerCADD 3.0.)

When you start drawing in PowerCADD, be sure you have an accurate grasp of the scale of the drawing you're working from, and of the overall dimensions and dimension of major and/or repeating parts of your building itself. If you need to derive the dimensions yourself, see the web page "Scaling a Drawing" for detailed instructions. And don't be afraid to ask for help! It can be difficult to accurately pin down the scale for some drawings.

Nicely drawn and accurate sections of buildings which are listed in The Great Buildings Collection will be considered for publication in future editions (with your permission), with credit to the illustrator (you)!

Be sure that the drawing title features the name of the architect and building. The building location and date would also be nice. Be sure to also show a graphic scale, your name, the date, and the course ("Architecture 222, Fall 1996") on the drawing.

The photocopy you'll be handing in of the original section drawing should clearly indicate where it comes from, i.e., book page number, title, author, and publisher. You don't need to follow formal bibliographic style - you can just hand rite the information on the photocopy - but the information should be complete enough that anyone esle could locate your source easily.