Essay: Perspective drawing

When an architect is going to design an architecture, he or she must make drawings to illustrate it, so that the construction workers know how to work on it, and also the clients know how the outcome is going to look like. It is different from fine art drawings which everybody can have their own understandings to the artwork, architectural drawings are quite technical and rigorous. If there is any misunderstanding about an architectural drawing, the final outcome of the architecture will not be the same as the architect’s or client’s expectation, and this may cause some serious problems. Nowadays, architecture drawings play an important role in the industries, ‘Drawing reveals, edits, persuades, highlights, and sometimes obscures’,¹ we can say, that without architectural drawings, architectures cannot be constructed. Therefore, it is prominent for us to know and master the techniques. As Alberto Giacometti said, ‘One must cling solely, exclusively to drawing. If one could master drawing, all the rest would be possible.’²  Architectural drawing is the basis of everything else. Generally speaking, architectural drawings can be divided into two categories, perspective drawings and orthogonal drawings. I am going to introduce these two types of drawings, and compare the advantages and disadvantages of both of them.
Perspective drawing is more closer to realistic, which means that when the architecture is finished, human eyes will see a similar view to that drawing from one specific point. Like Rendow Yee has said, ‘On a two dimensional surface, pictorial views of three-dimensional forms can be represented in a visually believable manner using perspective methods.’³ Perspective projection can take the form of one-point, two-point or more points, for each of them the drawing methods are slightly different, but the concepts are similar, which is aim to illustrate what the architecture looks in real life. Unlike three-dimensional perspective drawings, orthogonal drawings have no depth, all the elements shown in an orthogonal drawings are on one plane. When one flatted the three-dimensional lines on a perspective drawing into one plane, it becomes orthogonal, so orthogonal drawings help to depict an architecture in different but related two-dimensional views.⁴ In this way the two drawing methods are similar.  There are mainly three categories of orthogonal drawings: plan, section and elevation. Each of them shows the view from different angles, and the combination of these three can tell the details about an architecture.
As we can see from above, although they both illustrate the design of one piece of architecture, the two types of drawings are still quite different, so there must be some pros and cons related to the characteristics. First of all, perspective drawings are much clearer in telling ideas than orthogonal drawing, both to the clients, and to the architects themselves. This is because perspective drawings are based on three dimensions and are closer to reality, so they are much easier to read, as David Dernie said, ‘It [Perspective drawing] is a vehicle for synthetic thinking of the project of space as a whole.’⁵ As long as an architect has sketched a three-dimensional drawing, he or she can imagine clearly about what the architecture will look like, and how it will fit with the surrounding environment, etc, which is not a two-dimensional orthogonal drawing can do. Raphael also talked about this in his letter to Pope Leo X that, ‘Architects must know perspective because he can better imagine the whole building furnished with its ornaments’⁶, showing the importance of perspective to an architect. As based on that, architects can amend the design and sometimes ‘open up new ideas’. Also because of this reason, perspective drawings can be developable. During the post World War II period, modernist architects often tried to use more artistic perspective drawings to show the concept of their designs, as this kind of drawings do not rigidly adhere to the accurate measurements of length and width, so architects can draw much quicker and easier, as well as giving the drawing a sense of beauty. For example, Hugh Casson has drawn a perspective drawing about the decoration for the Statue of Eros (Pic. 1). It is for the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. He used watercolour and clearly showing the contrast between the light decorations and the dark sky.⁷ It is one clear representation of perspective drawing showing the reality and it is really simple for anyone to understand. Besides that perspective
Pic. 1: Hugh Casson (1910-1999)
Decoration for the Statue of Eros, Piccadilly Circus, London, England. 1952. drawings can easily communicate with architect’s thinkings, it can also tell ideas easily to the clients. Designs are always made to satisfy the clients, therefore architectural drawings must first be able to be read by them. In this way, perspective drawings are the best choice. As Neil has said about perspective drawings in early twentieth century that, ‘Great perspective drawings at this period were made to seduce the clients, dazzle the exhibition visitors and be published.’ Actually, not only in this period, but throughout the history, perspective drawings are the most common way for architects to depict the design to the clients. If clients cannot understand the design, they will not know what the outcome should be. Thus, orthogonal drawings which are full of professional architecture languages are not suitable for this requirements. In other way, one better architectural drawing to the same building can be more attractive to clients. In summary, one merit of perspective drawings is that it is much easier in communicating the ideas of a design with both the architects and the clients than orthogonal drawings.
However, as said before, perspective drawings do not adhere rigorously with measurements, so it is not possible for it to be measured, therefore difficult for engineers and construction workers to build the architecture. In other words, perspective drawings could not present buildings objectively or analytically, thus difficult for constructors to work on it.⁸ Due to the characteristics of perspective drawings, the lines which put on two-dimensional surface are an approach to illustrate three-dimensional surface, and they are usually distorted. Perspective drawings are the view from one specific point, therefore if the viewing points are different, the drawings will be completely different. For constructors to work on an architectural drawings, it must be clear in explaining the length, width, height, instead of a subjective view of an architecture. In consider of this, plans, sections, and elevation will be the best choices. For an orthogonal drawings, all the elements are in scale, and the angles looking to that space cannot be adjusted.  It is an unreal world projected to us, as there are no parallax errors in orthogonal drawings. For example, due to one-point perspective, the height of an architecture in the front will not be the same as the height form the back. However, with orthogonal drawings, both the front side and the back side of that architecture can be illustrated into same height using two separated elevations. From the example, we can know that everything on orthogonal drawings are objectively shown. Anybody who is drawing one building will get the same image if they are drawing in the same scale. Thus, constructors can easily measure the drawings and find and cut materials for building it. During the period of nineteenth century in America, most of the architectural drawings are orthogonal which only show the flat surface, showing the preciseness of architectural drawings. To sum up, orthogonal drawings are more precise approach to illustrate an architecture for the constructors, unlike perspective drawings which can be very ambiguous in this situation.