In Drawing and Representation 1, first-year undergraduate students are introduced to principles and techniques of graphic communication. Because this year's studio took place in the midst of a pandemic, students were asked to study and draw the only built environments they could access: their own homes. Over the course of the semester, they expanded their studies from single rooms in their homes to the entire buildings.

For their final projects, students were required to create large compositions that combined plans, sections, axonometric drawings, and perspective drawings. Cassandra had been studying her family home, in the Ottawa area, but she chose not to represent it literally. "I wanted to address the idea of living in my room for the past year straight," she says. "So that's where the idea of the bunker came from."

Cassandra's final illustration. Click here to view a larger version.

In her final illustration, Cassandra imagined her home as an underground burrow in a hollowed-out mountain on the edge of a city. Her callout images show a girl, modelled after her sister, clambering up a ladder and opening a metal hatch to take a brief look at a distant skyline. The depiction of her home as a fortress is a reflection of the anxiety she and her family members have felt over the past year. "My dad is the only one who leaves the house, because my brother and sister are both immunocompromised," she says. "There's no room for risk."

In the bunker's interior, inhabitants are shown engrossed in various pandemic-friendly pastimes, like video games, Netflix, and cooking. A dusky pink colour scheme unifies the visual presentation throughout all the different rooms and viewing angles.

Instuctor: Scott Norsworthy