Returning after a two-year hiatus, RECORD’s Cocktail Napkin Sketch Contest was founded in 2010 to showcase the passion and skills of a diverse group of architects and designers and honor the legacy of sketching in architectural design. This year, RECORD editors sorted through over 500 entries to select our winning sketches, which were submitted by readers across the country.

Click sketches to enlarge

Born and raised in Japan, artist and architect Iwasaka has been drawing and painting since she was a child, and was drawn to architecture because of her fascination with how quality of space can influence mood and feeling. The subject of her winning sketch is Kisho Kurokawa’s 1972 Nakagin Capsule Tower in Tokyo, a rare example of Japanese Metabolism. “When I was living in Japan, I walked by this building many times and was always curious about the life inside the capsules,” says Iwasaka. Despite calls for its preservation, the building was dismantled in April 2022.

Iwasaka draws almost every day: “Sketching helps me clarify my ideas, identify issues, discover different thoughts and perspectives, and move up to the next level,” she said. “As I freely move my hand with a pen, ideas start to overflow without boundaries.”

In 2016, Hadidi moved to Memphis, Tennessee, from her hometown of Damascus, Syria, and graduated from the University of Memphis’s architecture program in 2022. “ I like to sketch in all levels of the design process,” she says. “It is so much more freeing than trying to make ideas work in a computer program.” Currently working at a local firm, Hadidi chose to capture a building she thought best represented her city, a million-square-foot mixed-use project called Crosstown Concourse, formerly an abandoned Sears warehouse, near her office in midtown Memphis. “I wanted to sketch something that shows the progress the city's making architecturally,” she says. “This building represents the beautiful heritage we have in the city and the positive efforts we place in bringing these structures back to life. It's a lovely Art Deco building, too—one of my favorite architectural styles.”