Announcement of the winners of the Cocktail Napkin Sketch Competition 2024

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

Click on sketches to enlarge

Winner, registered

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

Winner, unregistered

Born in Australia, Pauly De Bartolo was first inspired by architecture during a class trip to the Sydney Opera House. “I’ve never seen anything like it,” he said. “I was immediately inspired, even though I was 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 is also socially important to the community it serves,” said De Bartolo, an active member of the city’s architectural community and president of the San Diego Architectural Council. Established from 2018 to 2022. Drawing by hand is the foundation of his design process, he told RECORD, “nothing is more exciting and satisfying than bringing a design to life through sketches.”

Runners-up, registered

Runners-up, unregistered

Student Award

Nice entries