Beginning of sketchbook for Ba1b- Architecture

Before starting my sketchbook and producing work and ideas for this, as a group for one of our session we were told to look around Norwich's city and start to research and decide which buildings we'd like to specify on during our architecture project, I had thought about choosing several different places for my pre -1900s, for example, the Castle Museum, Norwich Cathedral, churches within Norwich and just older buildings in general, and then for my building built within the past 20 years I was thinking of simply looking at one of the modern NUA buildings, Rose lane or St Andrews multi-storey car parks or the NUA accommodation that's next to Norwich bus station. However, despite these all being sensible places to choose, I ended up deciding for my pre 1900s building to be the Royal Arcade in Norwich's city centre and my building built in the past 20 years to be the new 'luxury' flats built at Riverside, near Carrow Road stadium.

Both types of buildings are interesting to look at and study as they're both complete opposites, mainly due to their age, the Royal Arcade having more textures, surfaces, pattern and shapes to it and the flats having a basic, simplistic shape/style to them.

The reason I have chosen these two buildings is because I feel that they both portray a sense of unique style that is extremely reflective on the year in which they've been built and designed and will enable me to produce different designs, drawings and samples.

To start my sketchbook off I have firstly drawn a basic outline of my perspective of one end of the Royal Arcade to start off my ideas and thoughts, I feel that just drawing my buildings for this project is not the style of work I'd like to proceed on, I find that this would get boring and shows little insight and eye for design, therefore I'd like to focus more on what I can develop from these buildings, focusing on the colours, shapes, styles, perspectives, angles etc. However, this first simplistic drawing of the Royal Arcade has inspired me to focus on the perspective, in this case, the entrance. I've began to simply draw lines and squares to portray this perspective, I feel that I have enabled myself to begin my project off successfully by focusing on a certain area of the building, rather than the building as a whole.

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I feel that these drawings and sketches show a beginning for my project in the sense that I'm focusing on a specific perspective and area of the building, however, I do feel that they lack energy and colour, mainly due to the plain white backgrounds, the top left image and the two bottom ones especially look less exciting and bold due to the simplicity of the drawing, however I feel you could look at this point as a positive as it reflects upon the delicacy of line and focus of perspective, whereas if it had a bold, coloured back ground this could take the focus off of the line and ruin the image as a whole. For the top right drawing I have drawn out the same perspective, however used layering of textured paper, I used dark grey coloured paper and layered this within a light yellow paint, I tried to reflect the textures and surfaces of the Royal Arcade building to create lines and patterns with my paint using different materials. I feel that this has worked and has emphasised the line within the page, the dark and light colours contrasting presents an interesting aspect and creates a more interesting design.