{{ p.title }}
{{ p.sub }}
I am Zilong Tan, an architect in Chicago. I work on complex commercial and institutional projects — the kind with long schedules, many stakeholders, and buildings that have to keep working for decades after the ribbon is cut.
Work
Commercial and institutional projects, in progress and delivered. Filter it however you like.
Nothing matches that.
Writing
Notes from the drawing board, mostly on the parts of practice nobody photographs. Roughly monthly.
{{ postCount }}
Tell me about the project.
A program, a site and a schedule are enough to start. I reply to everything within a week, including the ones I have to turn down.
17 August 2026 · 6 min
On drawing before knowing
The first drawing of a house is always wrong, and I have stopped treating that as a problem. It is how I find out what I think.
I used to wait. I would read the brief three times, walk the site, take my measurements, and then sit down to draw the thing I had already decided on. It felt responsible. It also produced buildings that were exactly as good as my first idea, which is to say not very.
What changed was a small house on a slope where nothing worked. Every arrangement I brought to the site failed the site. So I drew badly, forty or fifty times, in the way you scribble to get a pen to work again. Somewhere in there the stair moved outside the wall, and the whole house followed it.
I do not think this is a technique so much as a way of being honest about the order of things. Understanding arrives after the drawing, not before it. The drawing is the question.
What I do now
Two hours of drawing before I let myself open the survey. No scale, no straight edge, nothing I would show a client. Then the survey, and the drawings get slower and more careful, and by the time they are careful they are usually right.
It costs me a morning. It has saved me at least one building.
Zilong Tan is an architect in Chicago. If you are building something, say hello.