📖 The Quote
‘We tell ourselves stories in order to live.’ - Joan Didion, The White Album
✏️ The Sketch
Step 1. Draw the plan of your home.
For this exercise, you can apply some tricks on how to use colour in your sketches we learned in previous posts. For example, you can sketch the plan in light blue.
Step 2. Annotate each of the rooms in the space.
You can do this in many ways. You can either write the living stories in it in a more creative way, such as ‘reading corner’ or ‘little spot that gets a nice evening light in Summer’. Or you can be more analytical and just annotate the use each space has, such as ‘living room’, ‘kitchen’, etc. You can also refer to materials or colours in your notes or even indications of how light enters the space.
Once you finish annotating your drawing, you’ll have a sort of visual map of your home where, if you’ve been creative with the text, you’ll be able to read your own ‘living story’. If, on the other hand, you were more analytical in this step, you will be able to read the uses of each of the spaces and the connections between them.
Step 3. Sketch those spaces on top of the words.
Work with tracing paper or with a different layer on your tablet so you can separate the two drawings later. You can draw the spaces in plan, in section, in perspective, sketching with only one colour, or with many… The choice is yours!
Once you have finished with this second drawing, you can compare how the two drawings (words vs. lines) differ in telling the story of the space you live in.
💡 Some Thoughts
As architects, we draw and design ‘living stories’. Indeed, stories can be greatly pictorial and words can be an effective design tool to depict spaces.
We could invert the process above and start with mapping out the space we are designing with words, telling the stories we envision living in. For example, a lounge with big windows and views of the sea that is connected to a small kitchen that gets some early sun in the winter months… The warmth of the wooden floor to walk barefoot any time of the year stops right at the entrance, where the cold stone merges with the street… The corner with a bookshelf where we read to the kids, surrounded by plants that get light in the evening...
🖼 A Few Examples
If any visual artist has mastered the bond between words and lines, it is Saul Steinberg. Coincidentally or not, he trained as an architect. He used to call himself a writer who draws.
In ‘The Making of A Room’, Louis Kahn depicts his design thinking on a sketch using words that help illustrate the space.
Paula Bonet tends to empower the deep social meaning of her illustrations with words and quotes.
Boa Mistura is a multidisciplinary team rooted in graffiti art. Their art intervention ‘Luz Nas Vielas’ takes words directly into the physical space at the urban scale.
Cheers and happy sketching! 💫✏️
Ana