Passion Within My Sketches

There are moments in my life when I want to forget the problems of my daily chores. These are the times when I immerse myself in concentrating on what I enjoy doing best: Sketching!

It is my passion. I experience elation when I feel that I accomplish a vision that shows a concept that I see in my mind. This is usually during the development process of an architectural concept, which I need to explain to others, in particularly to clients.

Here’s an example where I was asked to illustrate outdoor café in a shopping precinct surrounded by elevated highways. It may seem ordinary but it usually initiates a dialogue: “thinking out of the box”. I surround the seating area with trees and dense landscaping together with perimeter colonnades giving the area personalised scale and protection from external pedestrian traffic.

This is a casual outdoor café similar in ambience to Parisian sidewalk café. It is a sketch along specific streetscapes in the client’s existing Mall. I see it as spontaneous creative place, invented by the retailer and not being planned by the architect and or the owner. What I am suggesting to the client is to relax restrictive rules in some areas of the development to allow tenants freedom of their expression.

In this other sketch the highway is almost at the boundary of the client’s site; it illustrates how the outdoor café is juxtaposed between the elevated highway, the adjacent road, and the external Mall corridor and retail shops. Of course this sketch is an interpretation of the mood and scale of the area that would be initiated by the tenants, giving them the passion to create personalized retail areas.  This concept is prevalent in areas such as Turkey, Bulgaria, Greece, and such iconic countries. However in the Western world such relaxed innovations would be classified as chaotic and undesirable.