2020 Sketchbook- Architectural Ideas

This is Jamie Roberts. I am an architect and this is my 2020 sketchbook. In my sketchbook, I typically use it for urban sketching and for architectural ideas and to generate different ideas and play around with different things that I don't necessarily get to do in my architectural career. So let's take a look. So on the cover here is the Golden Gate Park music stand in San Francisco. This is some historic picture that I got a picture of. I started this in the last months of 2019. So this is my second sketchbook for 2019 and it is a sketch of the Ferry Building and Golden Gate in San Francisco. And this is a leaf that I drew. I'm starting another book called Second Nature and this is the cover for that book and so this is to represent nature with the leaf. This is a really bad sketch I did in San Francisco and it was so foggy and wet that day that the watercolor wouldn't even stick to the page. But it ended up coming out really bad. The weird thing was that a couple days later I went to the same site and there was a homeless person drawing the same building and he was doing such a better sketch than I was. It was just unbelievable. So it just kind of shows you that the homeless people in San Francisco are probably former artists or something. They're not just crazy people living out on the streets. So this was a picture that I was just playing around with watercolor, textures, and kind of abstract shapes and whatnot. And so this was a picture of that. And then I was thinking about that homeless person so I drew a picture of a homeless person. This is an architectural floor plan and what I was thinking about was a building that was supported by just posts in the center of the building and then the outside structure of the building could then just be a glass wall. And so it was one building, a pool, and then another smaller house. So that was my ideas there. Here what I was doing was I was playing around with three different types of watercolor paint. I believe it's called My Marie Blue, which is an Italian company, Daniel Smith Paint, and Schmincke. Schmincke is a German company and it's what I use for everything. All my architectural watercolors are done in Schmincke and it's what I've been using for the last 20 or 30 years now. So I wanted to test out My Marie Blue and I compared it with Daniel Smith. Daniel Smith is very intense, vivid colors, but they're very difficult to control. So if you're doing a very wet watercolor technique, Daniel Smith is great, but if you're trying to do architectural watercolors like I do, they're just not usable as an architectural watercolor technique. My Marie Blue is a different type of watercolor. It doesn't have the same binders. It's only gum arabic. And so it's almost somewhere between a student grade watercolor and a professional grade watercolor. It's good for light washes, but it's not good for very intense color, like you can get out of a Schmincke or a Daniel Smith. So it has its limited uses, but I think architecturally Schmincke is the best for, at least for the type of work that I do, which is architectural watercolors. So this is like an axiometric of this building that I did. So this is what it would look like in plan. And then this is what it would look like in elevation. And I was thinking it would have this kind of butterfly roof system, just supported by columns in the center and then a glass box on the outside. So that was the kind of idea that I was playing with there. That's Thomas Jefferson. I used to do a lot of like fantasy sketches, watercolors. I used to do, I used to do like comic book fantasy, comic book stuff. And I still have it in me, but I just don't do it anymore. This is Audrey Munson, and she was going to be in the book that I was working on, which was San Francisco sketchbooks. But I stopped working on that San Francisco sketchbook idea because of COVID. And I just couldn't get to San Francisco anymore. So I kind of gave up on working on that book. This again was from the San Francisco sketchbook book that I was working on. It's the Bay Area, and that's, this is San Francisco. And this is the entire Bay Area as a, as a plan. This is a map of the San Francisco Bay Area. This is an idea that I had for going back to this, this, going back to this idea. This idea is what if I use concrete columns here to be the internal load bearing columns, and then a glass outside wall, and then wood, wood roof or ceiling. This was an idea that I had to do kind of like these cylinders that are coming out of a retaining wall on the side of a hill. I did a whole video on this, kind of showing my idea for this, so I won't go into great detail. This is the plan of that same building. Here we have rotating walls, so the walls move, and you can place the wall wherever you want to. And this is a section through the building, kind of showing the wall. You actually enter the building here from the other side of the mountain, and then go into this room, and then, and then this room with the rotating walls, and a view of, of the landscape beyond. This is a, just a quick sketch that I did of, it was the San Francisco Zoo. I couldn't finish it because I had my daughter with me, and I was trying to draw with my daughter, but I started it at least. This is a video that I was doing on accessory dwelling units. So this is kind of showing the different types of accessory dwelling units as a graphic, and more of that. And this is a small house, maybe an accessory dwelling unit, maybe not, with a bedroom, bathroom, and kitchen, and then a two-story space to go upstairs. And this is an elevation of that same space, of that same building. And then this is a section showing, this is a two-story space, and then this would be the bathroom, or the bedroom. This is from the San Francisco sketchbook idea. This is, this is actually, Audrey Munson actually modeled for this, and this sculpture is in the San Francisco Palace of Fine Arts. So these are the kind of angels from the San Francisco Palace of Fine Arts, and Audrey Munson was the main model that modeled for that, for those, for these sculptures. This is an idea that I had going back to this. This seemed very boring to me, just kind of a boring facade. So I said, what could we do to kind of make this more interesting? And so these are skylights that come down into the space. This is showing accessory dwelling units, and it kind of shows the different types. So detached, attached to a home, detached in a garage, or actually in the house itself. So the different, the four different types of accessory dwelling units. This is a brain. This is my old color palette, and I have a color palette that does this. These are all Schmincke watercolors. This is one of my daughter's toys, so I was just playing around. This is Mount Tam, and I tried to do a quick thing on Mount Tam. It was very foggy that day, and so the watercolor wouldn't stick to the page, but it was an attempt. This is my newer watercolor palette, and this is Schmincke again, and as you can see, my palette is very gray and black and blue, because I use those colors a lot in architecture. So that's why I have a lot of these colors, and then these colors are more for landscape painting. So it's specifically designed for the type of art that I do. This is at the Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco. There's a quick sketch that I did. I had my daughter with me, so I couldn't spend a lot of time on it, but it's Joan of Arc in front of the Palace of the Legion of Honor. This is Stowe Lake in San Francisco. This is China Camp in San Rafael, and this, this is Lover's Point in Monterey, and it goes over two pages there. That's one. So this is Lover's Point, and then these are the rocks here at Lover's Point. This was an idea that I, this was a piece of property that I was looking at, and I was looking at the setbacks for the piece of property, and the setbacks only allowed you to have a house in this area, and so if you put a house here and a garage here, that pretty much took over the whole site. So after looking at it, I just said this is too small of a site to put a house on, so I didn't look at it anymore, but it was just a quick sketch to look at that. This is the Santa Barbara Mission, and it's in Santa Barbara. I went in with an ink pen. I have a, this is the pen that I use a lot of times nowadays, and I put water waterproof ink in it, and I can draw on here, and I kind of like this, this one. This is looking at putting two wooden boxes inside of a glass box on a pedestal, basically. So this is an idea for a house that I had, and then these are kind of the plans for that. This is the highest level. This is the main level, and then this is the lower level, which would probably be like a garage or something, and then I tried to do like an elevation, but what I realized is this is just too high. This part here is too high, so if I would redo this, I would need to cut it down and make it smaller. So this is looking at it, instead of two boxes, it's looking at just one wooden box inside of a glass box, and then I kind of did this kind of see-through, transparent look, so I could see what it all would look like. This is a dinosaur. This is another dinosaur. This is actually the same dinosaur, and this is a diagram that I'm using for my book called Second Nature, and what it is, is it's looking at the different maps that we put over reality. So we have objective reality down here, then we put maps over that, and then there are social maps like economic maps. There's population and urbanization maps that we put over that. There are greenhouse gas emission maps that we do, and so what you end up getting is, instead of reality, you never get back to reality. You just kind of talk about these different maps, and you never really get back to reality. So that's what I was trying to show here. So this is a sculpture. I never finished it, but this is a sculpture in front of the Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco, so looking at that, and then so this is very modern. This is a very modern sculpture, so it reminded me of Malevich, who did these abstract geometric figures, and so this is the start of modernism, which was around the 19th. This is from 1916, but modernism started about that time and then progressed around 1920s for art and architecture. This is a quick sketch that I started in San Francisco, and it got dark, and I just couldn't finish it. This is a study of my daughter's eye, and I ended up turning this into a little sculpture, and then from that sculpture, I'm doing a larger sculpture. So this is a watercolor study of a sculptural study of an actual sculpture. So this is a project that I was looking at, and basically these are two houses with a canopy that goes over it, and this is what it would look like from a perspective view or an axiometric view. It's basically a canopy over a typical house, and this is a cutaway section of it, and these are the two houses. There's an area here for a garage or a driveway, a driveway for a garage, and then these would be garages, and then a little garden in the center of the space, and then this is kind of an exploded axiometric, and you would have solar panels, and then your canopy, and then glass boxes, and then wooden boxes, and then the site itself with the garden in the center. I used to do a lot of these exploded axiometrics, not so much anymore, but I think it's a good way of showing the kind of components of a building. This was a failed attempt at doing a section of that same building, and then finally I did this, but after doing this, I realized this is a very boring building, so I kind of gave up on it. Oh, and then what I did was I, instead of just having two buildings, I said, well, what if you did four buildings, and then you had gardens in between the four buildings, and so this is that concept, so it's enlarging it to four units instead of two units. This is a lantern fish. This was a piece of property that I was looking at, and I was trying to see what could you build on this piece of property, so it was a pretty small piece of property, so I figured, oh, you can build a house here, you can build a garage, and that's about it, and then what would that look like in elevation, and I came up with this elevation. It is very, it's California. This style is called Spanish, Spanish style. It was very prevalent in California in like the 1920s or 30s because they kind of thought that was the indigenous style of California was to harken back to like the mission style or mission architecture, and so that's what I was trying to get at here. I don't know if that's a good idea or not, but that's what I thought of for this plot of land here. That is my sketchbook for 2020. It was a bad year. I didn't get out to do much urban sketching, but I did some architectural sketching, and so there you go. I'm Jamie Roberts, and I hope you enjoyed looking at my sketchbook. Thanks. Bye.