Architectural Elevations Explained + How to Draw Them

In this video, I'm going to tell you everything you need to know about elevations, and I'm going to show you how to draw them. An elevation is a scaled, two-dimensional view of one side of an object. Just like a plan is a view from above, an elevation is a view from the side. In architecture, elevations describe the vertical surfaces of a building. Since buildings have vertical surfaces on both the outside and the inside, elevations can be either exterior or interior. In this video, though, I'm going to focus only on exterior elevations. Exterior elevations do several things. They help you visualize what each side of a building looks like. They provide accurate vertical dimensions. For example, they show the overall building height and the locations of different exterior elements. They also map the locations and extents of all exterior finishes, materials, and colors. The easiest way to draw an elevation is from a floor plan. The primary job of any building is to serve its function. So architects usually begin by developing a floor plan that shows how the building will do exactly that. Once the plan is established, they move on to the elevations. Of course, in reality, the design process is a little more complicated than that. Plans inform elevations, and elevations inform plans. There's a lot of back and forth. And these days, there's also the option of designing in 3D, where plans, elevations, massing, and everything else come together in one model. It's a game changer. I honestly spent most of my professional life working in 3D. But in this video, we're drawing by hand the traditional way, because it helps us explore the why and the how behind elevations. The good news is that if you start with a floor plan, you already have nearly half of the information that you need. Specifically, you already know all the horizontal information. The building's width, its overall shape, and the locations of doors, windows, and other elements. Now, all you have to do is add the vertical information. Before we start drawing, let's talk about how many elevations we actually need. A building has as many elevations as it has sides. A rectangular building has 4 exterior elevations. A hexagonal building has 6. And a building shaped like this has 10. So, do you need to draw all of them? Well, that depends on why you're drawing them. If you're creating elevations for a school project or a client presentation, you'll only need enough elevations to clearly communicate your design. You'll probably focus on the most prominent one, the front elevation. That's usually the side facing the street or the one with the main entrance. You might also include a side or rear elevation if it helps you tell the whole story. On the other hand, if you're documenting the design for construction, you'll need to be much more thorough. For example, how will a builder know what finish to apply to the side wall of this niche if you don't provide an elevation for it? You'll need an elevation for every exterior vertical plane, including niches, the backs of arcades, and even parapets. Now I will show you how I would draw a set of exterior elevations for an existing building. The building I'm going to elevate is a small community center in my neighborhood. Sometimes the best practice projects are the buildings that you're the most familiar with. I already have a floor plan of it. I actually have another tutorial on floor plans where I show how I drew this plan step by step. You can check it using the link in the corner. As you can see, this project consists of two buildings. Let's call them the event building and the lounge building. I'll create a separate set of elevations for each one. Let's start with the event building. To make the drawings easier to understand or read, I'll organize the elevations the same way we read text. I'll start with the south elevation. Then imagine walking counterclockwise around the building, drawing each elevation in the order that I encounter it. South, east, north, and finally west. Then I'll follow the same sequence for the lounge building. Here is my half-sized sheet of paper, also known as Arch C. For consistency, I want the format to match my floor plan. I won't draw the border, but I will leave a 2-inch space at the bottom for a future title block. I'll start in the upper left corner and arrange the elevations from left to right and top to bottom, just like reading a page. I always start an elevation by establishing the ground line, which represents the finished floor level. Then I transfer the grid lines from the floor plan. For this elevation, those are grid lines 1 and 2. Next, I transfer the rest of the horizontal information from the floor plan. Now it's time to add the vertical information. I actually visited the building again to make measurements and reference photos, which will help with this step. Using those notes and photos, I can now outline the rest of the elevation. If I were preparing these drawings for construction, I would actually create two separate elevations for the walls at grid lines F and E, because some elements at grid line F block what's happening behind them. But since my elevations are diagrammatic, I'm going to merge everything on this side into one view. Once you finish the first elevation, the rest start going much faster. So let's move on to the east elevation. One trick that makes transferring information from the plan much easier is rotating the plan, so it matches the direction that you're looking. Imagine that you're standing directly in front of this side of the building. First, I transfer grid lines B, C, D, E, and F. And then I fill in the remaining geometry. Each elevation gets a little easier, because you've already established the important heights in the previous one. So you can simply project those across. This is one of the reasons I like drawing elevations as a complete set. You're not starting from scratch every single time. There's one element that complicates this elevation. The connecting canopy. If I wanted a perfectly straight-on view of this side of the building, I'd have to slice away the lounge building. So that's exactly what I'm going to imagine doing. I'll cut through the canopy. This will give me a clear view of the facade, but it will also leave me with the canopy section where it's been cut. Now for the north elevation. Once again, I'll rotate the plan as though I'm standing directly in front of this side of the building. The same grid lines appear here as on the south elevation, except this time grid line 2 is on the left and grid line 1 is on the right. This side also features a row of square windows. Finally, I'll draw the west elevation. It's very similar to the east elevation, except it's mirrored and doesn't include the canopy section. Nice and simple. Now let's move on to the lounge building. It has a smaller footprint, but it's actually taller because it contains a concealed rooftop mechanical space. Once again, I'll begin with the south elevation. I transfer the grid lines and the horizontal information from the plan, then add the vertical information using my sketches and photographs. This line here marks the level of the mechanical well. Then I'll continue around the building, completing the remaining elevations. At this point, everything is constructed in pencil, which means we've finished the hardest part. If your page looks like complete chaos right now, that's actually a good sign. Mine definitely looks messy. There are construction and projection lines everywhere. But it's okay, we're about to make sense of this chaos by tracing the final lines with ink using three different line weights. The thickest lines, created by tracing the same line with my pen twice, represent cut lines. We actually don't have many cut lines in elevations. In our elevations, the cut lines are limited to the ground plane in each view and the outlines of the canopy sections where we cut a portion of the building away. I'll trace the rest of the building geometry with a second line weight, which is going to be a regular single line drawn with my pen. The lightest line weight is reserved for material hatches. I'm going to make these lines with a separate very fine tip pen. And this is a good time to talk about exterior materials and finishes. As I mentioned earlier, one of the purposes of elevations is to show the locations of all exterior finishes, materials, and colors. Looking at the reference photos, we can see several different finishes. To represent them in our drawings, we need to develop a graphic system. We could render everything realistically with colored pencils or watercolor. Or we could take a more diagrammatic approach by assigning each material its own hatch or color. There is no single correct way to do this, and every office will have a different position on what elevations should look like. I want to keep these drawings black and white, so I'll assign a unique hatch pattern to each finish, apply those hatches throughout the elevations, and create a legend that explains what each one represents. The most common finish in my building is plaster painted a light dusty mauve color. Plaster is often represented with randomly scattered dots that resemble sand, so I'll use that convention here. I will add a plaster hatch to the legend, and then apply this hatch to all surfaces that have this finish. Another finish used in the building is stone. It looks like dry stack stone veneer to me. I'm obviously not going to draw every individual stone. I'll be here all day if I try. Instead, I'll create a simplified hatch of horizontal lines intersected by diagonal lines. And I will apply this pattern to all surfaces that have stone veneer. Then we have a standing seam metal that's used on the roof. I represent it with evenly spaced vertical lines. And finally, we have painted metal, which I won't hatch at all. And we have glass. Some architects like to add small glass marks to every pane of glass to distinguish glass from metal. And just like that, we have a clean legible set of elevations. There are just a couple of finishing touches left. This is where architectural drawings start becoming useful instead of just pretty. First, I'll trace and label the grid lines. Grid lines use a long dash followed by a short dash and are drawn with the thinnest line weight. Next, it's a good idea to add dimensions. As a rule of thumb, elevations shouldn't contain any horizontal dimensions. Those belong on the floor plan. Most of the dimensions on an elevation are vertical. These can be shown as datum lines, which work like horizontal grid lines and establish consistent vertical reference points throughout the project. Typical datum lines mark the tops of floors, roofs, parapets, and canopies. Or you can also add individual vertical dimensions to specific elements like the sill and head of windows. Then we need to name our elevations something and reference them on the floor plan. If you'd like a refresher on architectural reference notations, I have another video that covers those in detail. You can find it at the link in the corner. We'll number these elevations from 1 through 8 and name each one by its building and compass direction. For example, elevation 1 is Event Building South Elevation. Then we'll place the corresponding elevation symbols on the floor plan. And that's it! Of course, every architect develops their own graphic style and every set of drawings looks a little different depending on its purpose. But hopefully, this gives you a solid foundation and a great place to start experimenting with your own elevations. Thank you so much for watching and thanks for sticking with me all the way to the end. If you found this video helpful, please consider subscribing. And I'll see you next time! Happy drawing!