A drawing is not a picture of a building. It is the instrument the building is made from.
Design is not the invention of a form and then its documentation. It is the repeated fitting of a form to a context that already exists — a slope, a boundary, a climate, a family, a budget — until the conflicts between them are resolved rather than concealed. Each drawing below is one step of that fitting, and each step is made so that the next one can be judged against it.
What follows is that process shown rather than described, in five stages: the ground, the sketch, the comparison, the iteration and the detail. It includes work that was never built and work the studio did not win, because the method is the subject here and a page that shows only successful projects is a sales record with the thinking removed.
Before the plan, there is the ground
A site is not a blank on which a building is placed. It arrives with a slope, a boundary, a road on one side and a neighbour on the other, a direction the air moves in and a direction the sun comes from, and those are not constraints on the design — they are most of the design already. Drawing them first is what makes the building a consequence rather than an import. Alexander puts it as fitting form to context; the practical version is that the plot is drawn, dimensioned and understood before a wall is proposed.
Sheet G3. A long field off the road, the plot in pink, and the house held in one corner of it. Nothing about the house is legible yet, which is the point.
Imphal Residence · sheets G3 and A1.101 · 1:75
BASIS — measured off the issued sheets. The travel is one scale move, computed from where the building falls on each of them.
Guard house, parking, signage and the feature wall set down before the house has a shape. The approach is decided here or it is decided badly later.
Living, kitchen, store, toilet, bar and dining named on the site rather than on a blank sheet, with informal seating against a gabion wall and the entrance experience noted beside them.
The arch dimensioned as an emergency vehicle gate. A plan that cannot be reached is not a plan.
The site and its setbacks, then the same square three more times, each with more of the building in it. Nothing is added before the ground is understood.
North and south set on the plan, the canopy drawn in red, and the air taken through it and out in blue.
The block drawn against a falling ground plane, over and over, until the relationship between the two is settled rather than assumed.
Trees, water, paths and levels drawn at the scale of the building rather than appended once the building is finished.
The same site washed through: lawn, kitchen garden, the planted edge and the drive. The building occupies a small part of a drawing that is mostly ground.
A sketch is an argument, not a picture
The first drawings are not attempts at the building's appearance. They are attempts to find out whether an idea survives being drawn — whether the section closes, whether the light arrives where it was promised, whether a person standing in the room can see what they were meant to see. Most of them fail, and a failed sketch is not waste: it is the cheapest way to discover a conflict that would otherwise be discovered in concrete. This is why the sketchbook is full of the same room five times.
Drawn 10 August 2025. Two vaults, a dense soffit, and the room aimed at a single opening. The drawing is testing whether the ceiling can carry that much weight and still let the far wall read.
The same house from the ground, once. Where the roof lands relative to the eye is a question a plan cannot answer.
Sheet and frame drawn loose and overlapping, with a small section under it. The sketch is arguing about depth, not about style.
Risers numbered and the going set against 2520, 2700 and 1800. The moment a sketch acquires numbers it has become a proposition that can be checked.
The span drawn with people under it. The size of the room is being decided by how many can sit, not by a grid.
One perspective and five small studies of the things that will stand in it. The building and what fills it are drawn on the same page because they are the same question.
The building set on falling ground, twice, with the stair that reconciles them.
Drawn on dotted paper so the geometry stays honest. The plan below it is the same idea from above.
Utility above, bedrooms and kitchen elevated, void at ground, and a structural wall used as the datum everything else is measured from.
The plan again in board, built over a printed base. Some questions are only answerable with the thing in your hands.
Built at scale and carried outside, because a model indoors under one lamp tells you almost nothing about how a building takes the sun.
The roofs, the court and the approach in one view. The model is doing the work a plan cannot: showing the volumes against each other.
Nothing is chosen until it has been compared
A first idea defended is not a decision, it is an attachment. The way out is to draw the alternative properly — at the same scale, on the same sheet frame, with the same care — and then look at the two of them side by side. Held in register, the comparison becomes almost mechanical: everything that stayed still is agreed, and the argument is only about what moved. Most of the value of iteration lives in this step, and it is the step most often skipped.
The entrance foyer is a diagonal room, the stair runs along the spine, the dining sits south of the living.
Chandok Residence · sheet A-1.101 · 24 May 2023
BASIS — the two pages of one issued PDF, registered on the sheet frame.
Once in red with the glazing set out, once in black with the openings placed. Two answers to one question, drawn side by side so they can be compared.
Ground plane, water and the volume separated, so each can be judged on its own before they are put back together.
Servant quarters, bedrooms, guests, the activity block, the pool and the barrier between them — named and joined up before any of it has a wall.
The same curved wall tried as a ramp and as a stair, with the bedroom and toilet counts noted at the top. The arithmetic and the geometry are argued on one page.
The round room in plan, in section, in elevation and in the round, four times over. A shape is not accepted until it has been drawn from every side that will be built.
The whole is redrawn, not adjusted
An iteration is not a correction to a part. When the plan changes, the section, the roof and the approach change with it, and the honest way to find out what a change costs is to redraw the whole thing and see what breaks. This is the loop the studio runs: the model is printed at a stated scale, drawn over by hand, and the marked sheet goes back in as a reference against which the model is rebuilt. The file keeps its name, so the sheet it feeds updates in place and nothing is lost between one version and the next. Held in register across months, the grid does not move and the design does — which is exactly what you want to be able to see.
A2.101 at 1:50, stamped Not for Implementation. The plan is proposed in red over the grid, and the marks are still arguing with the whole of it.
NYAY, Villa 105 · A2.101 → G3.1.1 · 1:50
BASIS — measured off the issued sheets, registered on the sheet frame. No image was moved to make them line up.
The first plan, set diagonally, with the entrance and the open side noted by hand.
Sengupta Residence · SK1 → SK13 · March 2021
BASIS — five sheets at five sheet zooms, and the building was rotated between them, so these are normalised on the drawn plan rather than registered on the sheet: the plan keeps its size and centre, and the scheme is what changes.
A screenshot of the model with the roof and the frame argued over it in red. The model is the base, not the answer.
The gable as modelled, with a structure drawn onto it that does not exist yet, and the path below redrawn to reach it.
The room as built in the model, and over it, in red, the joinery that has to be tested before it is modelled.
A single bracketed canopy drawn onto the wall in black, from three directions at once, until it stands up.
Sheet A2.101 on 16 October. Loose, because the plan is still a proposition.
A2.101 again on 5 November. The rooms have hardened; the marks have moved to the walls between them.
The detail decides whether any of it was true
Everything above is a claim, and the claim is settled at 1:1. A jamb is where the wall thickness, the plaster, the frame and the shadow either agree or do not; a sill is where water either leaves the building or does not. These are drawn on site, in front of the thing, and sometimes drawn full size onto the wall itself so that a body can be put into the room before the room exists. A studio that stops at the general arrangement has not finished the argument — it has handed it to someone else to lose.
The daybed, the shelf and the picture drawn full size in marker straight onto the plaster, and then occupied. A drawing at full size is the only one that cannot lie about proportion.
Greenshire 2214, the architect's own flat · drawn at 1:1 on site
BASIS — two photographs of the same wall, before and after. Nothing is registered here; they are simply the same corner.
115/230/350 wall, a 50–60 mm jamb, a 30 mm tapering notch and a 10 × 10 groove — drawn in section, then again in the round so the shadow can be seen.
Italian marble on basalt over brick, fillets at 3–5 mm, the drop dimensioned at 10 and 20. Drawn and signed at the building, 6 November 2022.
Sheet, batten, insulation and the rooflight through it, drawn until the layers have somewhere to go.
A chair, a bench, a bed, a stair — sectioned and turned over until each one works. The building does not stop at the wall.
Two sample panels built on site and photographed. One colour and pattern accepted; the other refused — not random rubble, and too dark. The reason is written on the sheet.
The finished spatial argument, pulled apart: public, semi-public, private, servant, circulation. A drawing made after the fact, to check that the building says what it was meant to say.