Every Sanavi project begins the same way. Before any drawing, one of us spends a full week on the site with a two-metre pole, a compass and a notebook. Every hour, we mark the end of the pole’s shadow on the ground.
What a week of shadows tells you
By Friday the ground is covered in arcs of chalk. They show where the sun will be strongest, where the neighbours will steal it, and where the wind sits. More importantly, they show which corner of the site wants to be a room.
A plan drawn from the shadows rarely needs more than three windows. A plan drawn from the brief usually needs fifteen.
We transfer the chalk marks to a 1:100 drawing and lay the first walls along them. It is slow, and clients sometimes ask why we are not drawing yet. Four years later, they tend to understand.
Tools we use
A two-metre pole, plumb and levelled
A sighting compass corrected for local declination
Andrew Marsh’s sun-path diagrams for cross-checking
A notebook with one page per hour
