Current methods for recognition and interpretation of architectural drawings are limited to either low-level analysis of paper drawings or interpretation of electronic drawings that depicts only high-level design entities. In this paper, we propose a Self-Incremental Axis-Net-based Hierarchical Recognition (SINEHIR) model for automatic recognition and interpretation of real-life complex electronic construction structural drawings. We design and implement a series of integrated algorithms for recognizing dimensions, coordinate systems and structural components. We tested our approach on more than 200 real-life drawings. The results show that the average recognition rate of structural components is about 90%, and the computation time is significantly shorter than manual estimation time. q 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.