Sketch Series: Mark Borkowski

Stone Shop Drawings for the Presidential Bungalows at the Beverly Hills Hotel

Profile Template_MARK

Welcome to our "Sketch Series," a periodic peek into the notebooks and minds of Rottet Studio designers. Through their notes, doodles, and working sketches, we hope you get a glimpse of the design process behind some of our award-winning projects - and the tools we grab when inspiration strikes. In this installation, we hear from Mark Borkowski, AIA, LEED AP, a Los Angeles-based senior designer, about how his sketches take different forms depending on the function they serve.Tell us about your drawings. When I heard about this segment my first thought was, “I’ve got this covered, easy.” But as I started looking through my sketchbooks, I wasn’t finding any good sketches, just lots of notes and basic brutish sketches that help me work out how to detail something. Not much to write home about. Needless to say, I was a bit baffled. I knew I had done several decent looking sketches and yet I wasn’t finding any of them, at least not in any of my sketchbooks. So I went back to work and let it go for a bit. Later in the week, when I was showing someone in the office a detail from another project in one of my half size sets, it finally dawned on me that all my really good sketches are littered throughout my half-sized field sets and Construction Administration responses to things like submittals and RFIs. It is only when I needed to communicate a design or detail idea to someone out in the field that I was doing some of my best sketch work.The sketches included cover a full range: pages from my day-to-day sketchbook, scans from submittal responses, scans of pages from my half-sized field sets. The submittal responses have the most polished sketches based on time and the need to communicate design intent. The sketches from the half-sized sets are a bit rougher, with a certain immediacy to them that comes from sketching something while standing around a group of subconsultants trying to describe the finer points of our design (or sorting out a ‘Plan B’ based on field conditions). Finally, the sketches in my sketchbook are a loose kind of shorthand with very little organization or polish - I know what it is supposed to represent, so there’s not as much need to dress it up.How did you first get into sketching and drawing?It goes all the way back to grade school/high school, when I would doodle regularly in my subject notebooks for each class. Little vignettes and sketchy marginalia are littered throughout the pages, sharing space with the inventor of the cotton gin, Avogadro’s number and quadratic equations. In college, one of the things the architecture program impressed on us fairly early on was the need to keep a design sketchbook, so I started to keep a ‘formal’ sketchbook for my design classes. Meantime, the trend of sketching in my class notebooks continued, just with a bit more of an architectural bent. As for my current sketchbook, I would characterize it as a junk drawer for my notes, rough calculations, square footages, furniture piece names, fabric names, meeting notes and yes, the occasional sketch.What do you sketch when you’re not at work?Usually work-related things. When there is a particularly challenging detail I am trying to work out, I will think about it as I am going about my business at home. If something comes to me, I will sketch it out on whatever is handy: backs of envelopes, business cards or newspaper articles. It does not have to be a pristine surface, just a space to allow me to hammer out some of the thoughts I have at the time that I need to get down before they slip away. It gives me a chance to test my idea and decide whether it will work or not, as well as refine it to a point where I can formally draft it up.What are your favorite tools?The Bee Paper, Super Deluxe 9in. x 6in., 93lb 150gsm 60 sheet notebook. It has a sticker on it that says, “The Only Sketch Book You Will Ever Need” (underline theirs) which I find to be a humorous statement. Yeah, it is the only sketch book you will ever need… until you run out of pages and have to buy another Bee Paper Super Deluxe sketchbook!I like this sketchbook for the heavy weight paper that allows me to write/draw on both sides of the sheet without much in the way of bleed through. I also like it because it is spiral bound and can be folded over to one sheet, which takes up less space on the desk and gives you a nice flat surface to work on. As for drawing utensils, I generally stick to the Precise V5 rolling ball ink pens. I tend toward pen/ink sketches and only venture into pencil when I feel like getting softer transitions and gradients, as well as graphite all over everything. It can get quite messy for me, which is why I gravitate towards ink pens for most of my sketch work.Are there certain techniques, themes, subjects or explorations that you tend to focus on?For some reason, stairs show up in a lot of my sketches - that and volumetric studies, when I am trying to figure out the three-dimensional footprint of something based on reviewing a bunch of two dimensional references. The other things that seem to show up a lot are enlarged details, relating how things fit together. These tend to be wall, ceiling, or door elements which usually find their way into a detail at some point down the road.What was the last thing that inspired you?I don’t know if it was inspiring as much as it was thought provoking. There is a blog I follow and in one of the posts, the artist was trying to recreate/reinterpret a drawing done by another artist from several years prior, which was seen as something of a masterpiece in the realm of illustration. After a few attempts, the artist was still having trouble reproducing the essence of the original with the reinterpreted subject matter. To try and figure it out, he enlisted the help of the readers, showing the original along with all the attempts to rework it, and asked them to weigh in on the matter. For some reason, I got completely sucked in. What was it about the first illustration that resisted reinterpretation? And what moves or modifications could the artist possibly make to get close to the flavor of the original? What does that say about emulating the work of others and that work’s ability to or resistance of being copied? There is value in trying to copy something, for sure, but it comes more from the analysis of what makes the copy turn out good, bad, or mediocre when compared to the original. In a way, it forced me to think more in terms of criticism than in execution or technique.