Idea: Real Scale Drawings of Buildings Made in a Parking Lot

[Courtesy of Vardehaugen]

To help visualize is an art on its own. Whom have already had in hands the drawings of a project (of a house, a bicycle or any given industrial piece) knows the effort it takes to project himself into the future and see how the final object will look like. But if one hand the author of the project already has a certain predisposition to imagine how will it be (after all the project might be fruit of his imagination), on the other hand to transmit such image to another person – a client, for instance – than the question changes its figure.

For the architecture office Vardehaugen, based in Oslo, Norway, the solution is somewhat simple. This team of architects resorts to a low tech and elemental method to visualize and simulate the fruition of the spaces they project, using chalk and duct tape to make in the parking lot floor real scale drawings of future buildings.

[Courtesy of Vardehaugen]

[Courtesy of Vardehaugen]

Indeed, for any architect, the ability of visualizing the what’s yet unbuiltis an important part of the trade, so much to evaluate as to experiment an communicate solutions. However, the difficulty resides in transmitting the sense of scale and size of the projected spaces through the conventional 3D visualization techniques (be it digital renderings or scaled models). To overcome that obstacle, or at least to minimize it, Vardehaugen, in a written presentation of its working process, states that "[we] conduct real scale drawings in our back yard, to ensure a greater understanding of size and proportions in our projects. This enable us to simply take a stroll through our projects and get a sense of dimensions and spatial sequences, – even before they are built."

[Courtesy of Vardehaugen]

[Courtesy of Vardehaugen]

“The body is architecture’s conduct” wrote visionary architect Neil Spiller (previously). Therefore, architecture is something that is intimately related with our bodily experience. And it’s that experience, with the sense of space and proportion, size and scale, that opens up the door to architectural possibilities.