Over the years I made many sketches of buildings in St. Louis, both by hand and using tools such as Autocad, Sketchup, and InDesign.  Sketches and drawings comprise an important method in built environment research, whether for analyzing spatial relations, attending to material details, or revealing patterns of architectural and urban organization.  The rendering below is from a larger study of the common St. Louis townhouse in 1999-2000.  It is an effort to break down the common Federal style, half-Georgian townhouse plan into its modular volumes.  It was the manipulation of these volumes, and the ornamentations of the façade, that established the variations on the theme for the St. Louis townhouse.