How a drawing is made

A new way of seeing

Are we making these drawings more communicable? That is the question driving every drawing convention we adopt.

A photogrammetric mesh is a very accurate picture of a surface. It is not a drawing and it does not explain a building. It records what light reached the camera (the weathering, the biological growth, the vegetation at the base) and it records those things exactly as faithfully as it records the mouldings that carry the dating evidence.

A drawing chooses. It says: this is the part of the building that means something and here is how it is put together.

Cut, lift, register

The Vaayil drawing is built by three operations on the model.

Cut. The building is sectioned, usually at plinth level and the cut stone is filled with hatch. Poché is the oldest convention in architectural drawing and it does one job: it distinguishes solid from void, instantly, to anyone who has ever read a plan.

Lift. The superstructure is separated from the body and raised clear, so that the two can be seen at once. Nothing is deleted; the building is taken apart in place.

Register. Dashed projection lines hold the separated layers in alignment. They are the drawing’s claim that these parts belong to one object and stand in this exact relationship. The same dashed line runs through this website as a section rule and it means the same thing here.

What survives from the mesh

The photogrammetric surface is kept where it is evidence: the weathered dome, the eroded course, the damaged corner. It is removed where it is noise. The finished plate therefore reads simultaneously as a measured drawing and as the building’s actual condition, which is the point. An engineer reads the geometry; a conservator reads the surface; both are looking at the same plate.

What a drawing does not carry

A drawing is not a substitute for the model it came from. Where a plate is published without a scale bar, it is because the plan dimensions have not been established and a scale would imply a measurement we have not made. The record states this alongside the drawing rather than omitting the drawing.

Every published plate can be opened at full archival resolution in the deep-zoom viewer, down to individual courses of stone.