SKYLINE
The study of skyline and silhouette shows how important
tall buildings are to the character of different towns. Many
cities are marked by distinctive skylines: London’s
Houses of Parliament (and particularly Big Ben), the Eiffel
Tower in Paris, the Empire State Building in New York all
give a unique stamp to the urban silhouette. Lesser
towns have their own characteristic skylines, too, though
on a smaller scale. Places like Guildford, with its
twentieth-century cathedral, and Antalya in Turkey, with
its collection of Roman monuments, have skylines that
shape the perception people hold of the towns.
Drawing skylines requires a bold approach and much
use of dark shading. The skyline should ideally be drawn
from both inside and outside the town, and from different
angles. You may well find that tall structures denote the
town centre, acting as markers to the commercial core. It
may be, however, that the tallest buildings are the least
interesting. Many modern office and apartment blocks are
dreary structures, while the lower church spires are more
profiled and hence worthier of note.
When sketching the skyline, one is also free to use
one’s imagination to modify the silhouette of the town. By
re-profiling tower blocks or by adding new structures to
the roof, the shape of the building can be changed to the
benefit of the city skyline. As most of the high buildings in
Britain were built in the 1960s and 1970s when the
aspirations of building design were not very high, the
opportunity exists to use the sketches to speculate upon
how such structures could be enriched to improve the
skyline and hence legibility of our towns.
NEIGHBOURHOODS
Big towns are really a collection of villages of which each
is a separate entity, a neighbourhood shaped by
distinctive building types (terraced houses, semi-
detached, tenements, flats) or different land uses (offices,
warehouses, educational areas). Land use is usually
reflected in building type, reinforcing the sense that a big
town is really a collection of different districts each with
its own characteristic architecture.
Freehand drawing is a good tool to use in analysing
neighbourhoods. First choose an area that is not too large
or too complex to draw. Determine the boundaries of the
area, its centre and key urban and architectural qualities.
Study where the public spaces are and how they are
designed. Look at how different districts are defined by
major traffic routes or natural features such as hills or
rivers.
Sketch the major building types in order to record and
understand their form. Look at how buildings and spaces
are arranged in plan form and perhaps in section. Draw
characteristic details such as bay windows and entrance
porches if you are dealing with a residential area, or
glazing grids and office doorways if you are sketching a
commercial neighbourhood.
The heightened awareness achieved by such an
exploration allows students of architecture and design to
intervene in a fashion that enhances, rather than destroys,
the inherited patterns. The task of the urban designer
should be to strengthen the character and culture of
places and to add new richness. Places should be visually
firm and well structured, with additions reinforcing the
existing style of the neighbourhood.BOUNDARIES AND BARRIERS
Towns, and even the countryside, consist of places with
marked boundaries. These are often natural features such
as rivers, but they can be railway lines, motorways and
embankments. These barriers help divide the city and its
surrounding countryside into parcels with clearly defined
edges. Edges, corridors and boundaries are rewarding
subjects to draw because of the way buildings interact
with them. In London, for instance, the Thames forms aExploration through the sketchbook 201