This book reveals the profound connections between placemaking, mythology, and experience as focused on creating vital and meaningful places through the process of drawing. By delving into these concepts, Tabb explores how we can unlock powerful tools for designers, architects, planners, and communities. Exploring ancient stories, embarking on journeys to historic places, and cultivating the art of drawing, six different drawing techniques are covered, including in-situ sketching, studio-enhanced drawing, mythic landscapes, diagrams, watercolors, and conceptual masterplans. These drawing techniques relate to dwelling by showcasing a range of experiences including becoming more present, capturing immediate impressions, and envisioning future developments. By analyzing these drawings, planners and designers can learn from the featured places, architectural examples and best design practices, gaining practical insights into the complex interplay of factors that contribute to successful placemaking. This book is based upon research and drawings completed by the author over the past 25 years.
This book is essential for practitioners, planners, designers, artists and students interested in concepts of place, myths, experience, and drawing.
Table of Contents:
Foreword
PART 1
Introduction to Part 1
1. Concepts of Placemaking
2. Placemaking and Mythology
3. Placemaking and Experience
4. Placemaking and Drawing
PART 2
Introduction to Part 2
5. In-situ Drawings
6. Studio-Enhanced Drawings
7. Mythic Landscapes
8. Diagramming
9. Watercolors
10. Masterplan Drawings
Conclusion
About the Author :
Phillip James Tabb is Emeritus Professor of Architecture at Texas A&M University and held the Liz and Nelson Mitchell Professorship of Residential Design. Since 2001, Tabb has been the master plan architect for Serenbe Community – an award-winning sustainable, biophilic, and wellness community being realized outside of Atlanta, Georgia, and is the architect of his solar residence in Serenbe. He has been a design educator for 20 years and a practicing urban designer and licensed architect for an additional 30 years.
Review :
"While reading Placemaking Through Myths, Experience, and Drawing, memories of classic guidance from Goethe and Dürer came to mind regarding the intrinsic value of drawing. I had the pleasure of traveling and drawing with Dr. Tabb in Italy, southern Colorado and Northern New Mexico. We often would stop and sketch or watercolor a beautiful scene or building. Combined with other conceptual tools in Dr. Tabb’s design toolbox, an essential methodology is presented for meaningful placemaking, especially facilitated by drawing. A clear reminder is given that static observation is vastly different from looking and seeing with awareness. We all have the potential to see from the soul and experience a more wholesome environment. Tabb provides us with a handbook for creating meaningful places. Stop! Smell, hear, touch, taste, and see where you are. Experience the place, the space, and yourself, then, perhaps, create a simple drawing. Think of the stories, the myths, that proceeded you, and that might follow you. Envision what was here long ago, what is here now, and what could be here. This is a book not just for architects or planners, but for anyone yearning to fan the spark of creativity within themselves and the joy of making or experiencing meaningful places."
Robert Armon, Architect, Denver, Colorado
"In Placemaking Through Myths, Experience, and Drawing, Phillip James Tabb offers a rare synthesis of drawing, mythology, and experiential reflection as fundamental tools in the making of meaningful places. Drawing from over forty years of journals, travel sketches, conceptual diagrams, and master plans, Tabb reveals how architecture can reconnect us to memory, myth, and spirit of place. As a longtime colleague and admirer of Dr. Tabb’s work, I have long appreciated his ability to bridge abstraction and the built world through drawing. In this volume, he brings together a body of work that is both intellectually rigorous and emotionally resonant. His drawings are not mere representations—they are acts of architectural inquiry, layered with social, cultural, and historical meaning. They invite us into stories of place, shaped by mythology and experience, reminding us that architecture at its best is not about image-making, but about engaging the human imagination across time. For students, designers, and scholars alike, this book is both a call to mindfulness and a celebration of drawing as a way of knowing. It is an inspiration, and a gift."
Smilja Milovanovic-Bertram, Associate Professor, School of Architecture, University of Texas at Austin
