Announcing the 2024 Cocktail Napkin Sketch Contest Winners

Founded in 2010, our annual Cocktail Napkin Sketch Contest honors the legacy of sketching in architecture and design. This year, RECORD editors sorted through over 300 entries submitted from across the country. The winning entries, shown below, showcase the skills and imagination of a diverse group of architects and related professionals.

Click sketches to enlarge

Winner, Registered

Ryan Chester
Senior Project Architect, JGMA
Chicago

Architect Ryan Chester works in Chicago and sketches cityscapes several times a week. “It’s a city that offers so many inspiring perspectives,” he told RECORD. Prior to the competition, he only drew from a ground-level perspective, but over the month of August, when he challenged himself to draw once a day, Chester chose to only depict Chicago from the air. This sketch, of Chicago’s most famous towers poking above the clouds, is a fabrication, he says, but was inspired by an afternoon watching a storm rolling in over Lake Michigan with the John Hancock Center in the foreground. “Sketching is the only way I can begin thinking about the design process,” he said. “I am certainly a minority in the way I work, but the act of drawing has become a way to express ideas much more quickly than traditional computer software can.”

Winner, Non-Registered

Pauly De Bartolo
Design Principal, DBRDS
San Diego

A native of Australia, Pauly De Bartolo was first inspired by architecture during a class trip to the Sydney Opera House. “I'd never seen anything like it,” he said. “I was instantly inspired, although too young to understand why.” His winning sketch is of the Central Library in San Diego, where he currently lives and works. “In addition to being a living, breathing, sculptural piece of the urban fabric, it's socially important for the community it serves,” said De Bartolo, who is an active member of the city’s architectural community, serving as president of the San Diego Architectural Foundation from 2018 to 2022. Drawing by hand is foundational to his design process, he told RECORD, “nothing is more exciting and fulfilling than bringing a design to life through sketching.”

Runners-Up, Registered