patb12•20d ago

Checked out the old courthouse plans at the county archive and the detail is just... gone

I had to pull some old reference drawings for a project, so I went down to the county records office. They had the original 1928 blueprints for the main courthouse rolled up in a tube. Unrolled one of the elevation sheets and man... the line work, the hand-lettered notes, the little flourishes in the title block. It's all so clean and full of character. My boss wants me to 'match the style' for an addition, but how do you even do that when everything now is just layers in a CAD file? The notes on those old sheets told a story, you could see where someone thought about a detail. Now it's all just text on a layer that gets turned off. Has anyone else tried to bring that kind of craft back into a modern drawing set, or is it a lost cause?

2 comments

2 Comments

piper_wells6520d ago

The hand lettering was really that good? I can't even picture it... my boss just prints everything from the plotter and the text is always blurry. Those old draftsmen must have had crazy steady hands. Trying to copy that now would take forever, they'd never pay for the hours. It's sad how much personality just got deleted when we switched to computers.

andrew_kelly19d ago

I mean, it's not just the steady hands though, right? It's that they had to think about every single line before they put it down. You can't just hit undo. So my question is, what if you tried to work that old school limit into the process? Like, force yourself to draw the new addition details in one go on a tablet, no erasing. Maybe the messiness that comes out is closer to the real craft than a perfect CAD layer ever could be.