the simple act of drawing isn't the issue, it's whether or not people understand that it is a medium that provides feedback for learning about architecture, just like BIM, collage, or blue foam models.

It's more a case of ignorance than obsolescence.

I did mean perimeters, as in boundaries, but parameters is probably also apt.

The Beaux-Arts method of designing can be seen to be heavily shaped by the emphases of the hand-drafted plan. The method of composing a plan which is then 'elevated' lead to architecture that privileges single-level and the ground axis. Hand-drafted plans don't force the buillt architecture to be planar and axial. The tool doesn't determine the output. However, it is biased towards a certain type of outcome (the planar and axial).

I like the idea that each tool provides different feedback.

steven,

to answer your actual question - i do think we're getting very close to a time wherein students who are graduating have probably made greater use of the computer as a design and visualization tool than any other media.

however, this whole discussion seems silly. it's like arguing whether a hammer is better than a saw. or peanuts better than chocolate.

use the tools, any tools, to communicate what you need to. i think bruce mau's suggestion (invent your own tools) is more interesting than computer v. drawing.

now, if implied in your question, is something about the differences, then i would argue, yes, we are seeing a radical shift (maybe more over the last 30 years) away from the articulation of a vertical surface as the primary means of communicating architectural intent (which i think is more emphasized through drawing). and i'm not including looking at surface effects, ala h&dm, etc. as part of the vertical surface, since those explorations seem to be more computer driven. instead, we're more obsessed with shape grammars, morphology, etc. that seem more about the big spatial gestures than not. but that's just an observation.

last thing - i have a copy of alvar aalto's original drawings for the baker house project (my wife worked on the renovation) - there was more communicated through the raw drawings (with less notes) than almost any set i've ever worked on. what i do think we're losing, with revit, etc., is an ability to make the drawing sets truly communicate at a high level. instead we're more worried about the quanitative documentation and most students i see have no idea how communicate qualitatively...

just to add to the references, the debate over "idea", has a well written story by E. Panofsky, in "idea: A Concept in Art Theory". this book delineates an interesting history of the use of "idea" in western art practice (including architecture) and provides a nice narrative on the Platonic bias of an Idea.

or perhaps G. Flaubert's desire to write a story without any meaning, where only the power of words (as tools) could create its own effect.

or even Greg Ulmer's: "Teletheory: Grammatology in the Age of Video"

i think what is missing in some of the comments is an understanding of the absolute pervasiveness of "tools". regiggins, meta, imply that there are ideas, nicely formed in the head, and then there is a decision on how to make them visible and then communicated. this decision looks for the right tool to express the idea. unfortunately the tools are inadequate and insufficient. "The act of thinking and doing refines the idea and gives it form, the tool is just the mechanism by which we "do."

but can we really think 'before' tools? aren't all forms of thinking an outgrowth of using particular devices to understand the world? speech is a tool. thinking in plan, section, axo, perspective, these are all particular tools that we live in in order to make sense of the world.

when your grandmother or the carpenter can't read an architectural plan, it doesn't mean they don't live in a physical world, but it does mean that they don't have one particular means to describe a particular spatial potential. the carpenter can probably quite easily imagine how to make a table, cabinet, etc, but he can easily do so because he/she too has a fluency in use of particular tools for conceiving and executing the object.

as an architect, i think in axonometric. i don't just decide - depending on the project - if i'll try to imagine it as a perspective or set of plans or over-all image; i think it out in an axonometric spatiality. this is me. not implying in the least that anyone else needs to think this way. but having gained a certain fluency in this manner of describing space, i can no longer think of a thing and then decide i'll think of it in axo. and like all conditions of fluency, the more languages (tools) you know really well, the more agile and open are your possibilities. or you could just know one 'language' exceedingly well.

the implication in many comments is that somehow "tools" are limits - to be wrestled with. but that is to underestimate the fact that we mediate the world by living in it - not just in our head - and our processes of thought are themselves the consequence of being in a world that always already has structures and forms of representations in which to exist. this is called living and growing (as opposed to already "being").

is there any point in noting that photography and film was supposed to mark the end of painting, and then Braque and Picasso proved otherwise?

to the original question - i believe Steven Ward is Right.. and Wrong.


Undergrads do come through and some have Very little experience in freehand drawing, perspective and 3d projections, or rather, are just not 'manually' artistic. nowadays we can be just as artistic with technology', and in many cases surpass the strength of a design in its communication with others that are unable to fill in "imagination gaps" (those who suck at interpreting any form of creativity at complex levels)

eg - presenting CAD concept plans to a client versus presenting them a simple free hand concept sketch.


with that said, there are those of us (myself included), who have come through vocational training first, were the skills of drafting and freehand are encouraged and in some assessments REQUIRED. The differences are noticable in the work, especially concept design. We all know that the skill of freehand drawing is an invaluable tool, and learning the techniques of manual drafting and freehand drawing is the most practical way of understanding what we now tell technology to do instead.

and although sadly, these skills are seldom required in academia, it's use in the professional world is still respected as a necessary attribute of anyone in architecture.

i'm enjoying this immensely.

benoh, i don't know what it means that i was right OR wrong. my first entry was simply a question that came up in our office.

--

this is the scariest statement i've read in the whole thread: "how come the GC already knows what it looks like without drawing it!!!!" i've had a lot of c.a. experience on some fairly large and complicated projects and can assure you that even a highly skilled and sophisticated gc is not likely to know any more about 'what it looks like' than those who draw it. and sometimes they don't get it until the finishes are installed.

i've had multiple experiences in which a fistful of rfis were followed by change order proposals for something that the gc was convinced wouldn't work - until it started to go in. then the issues (and, presumably, any perceived $$$ value for all the time i wasted chasing this stuff down) disappeared.

i'd correct it to 'the gc THINKS he knows what it looks like without drawing it'. cuz that's almost always true.

sorry Steven, i should have said he answer is both yes, and no because of the reasons i stated.

dlb wins.

If all thinking has to take place within a modality, by way of a tool, then the question is: When the tools change, what are the consequences for architectural thinking?

During thesis I struggled because I "stayed in my head" and didn't test my idea.

Now, while teaching, my partner and I have at least one student a semester that goes through this. We always encourage them to test their idea, to draw, to model, to write--whatever method or tool that works. The tool is never the answer--it is the act of testing that is important and the thing that is frequently not taught because the tool gets in the way. It is easy to forget the real reason that we draw and model. We draw to think, to see our idea. The method by which we draw is inconsequential because the value (for the designer) of drawing is the act itself. It is another matter when presenting the idea to another, but similar in principle.

So, does it matter that "hand drawing" is no longer taught (or being taught less)? No, as long as the thinking/testing/doing that "hand drawing" represents is still taught.

tools are always embedded in their social practices, so using the tool will always mean it resists one type of practice and facilitates another. it's not that tools get in the way of/are accidental to pure ideation, nor that tools completely determine the idea - despite seeming opposition both these ideas share the notion that design is an act of isolated creativity, which is impossible. there is no such thing as pure ideation, you are always creating something in a context, working within your institutional limits, whether this is professional practice, virtual prankster, academic student, romantic reverie etc. etc. even the creative overcoming of transcendental genius works within a historical narrative. what the indeterminate vs determinate camp share is an effacement of these limits, rendering design a linear conceptual production from inside my head into the outside the world that prioritises the individual above the goals and relationships which precede him.

maybe this idea of communication comes closest to recognising the respective protocols at work in different situations. drawings for yourself, drawings for a contractor, drawings for crits and drawings for clients are all completely beasts with different claims on representation and subsequent revaluation of different tools, every tool both resists and releases creativity in different contexts, this is what i understand in the value of difference.

is it me or does this discussion seem more militant than previous hand vs CAD discussions? maybe that's the new faculty's influence.

did anyone catch this interview with kristina luce?

During the Renaissance when triadic form was adopted (meaning the systematized use of plan, section and elevation as a means to conceive of, represent and transmit architecture), when this new conceptual medium was adopted for architecture, it was no coincidence that the professional role of the architect was also stabilized, that a new form-based aesthetic was accepted, and that the very definition of design as the prefigurement of form was pioneered.

upcoming AA symposium on critique of the new also looks interesting, this caught my eye from doreen bernath who I remember also did a paper on the intrusive render, exploring chinese appropriation of western imaging.

thanks meta, not sure i follow...'stabilisation'?

i do tend to get protective when we talk about hand drawing because i'm pretty good at it, but i don't think we are, as you say, rid of stabilised conditions.

if we want to be nasty we can work out who's providing the hegemonic impulse in this conversation, people who are advocating hand drawings only go so far as to say they are an important form of representation with their own affects, rules and value, separate from CAD, in fact seem to be CAD users in the majority themselves. people who advocate CAD give lip service to the value of difference, but when push comes to shove, why bother with anything else? conceptual production demands efficiency, volume and manipulation that hand drawings can never match.

but therein lies the catch, the discussion is already set against a traditional or contextual understanding of design, the terms of reference are those of the problem. the accusations of hand drawing's reactionary nostalgia then are launched from positions which for all intents and purposes are maintaining the status quo, one where design is entrenched in explicit systemic conceptual production in which the logic of CAD is merely a symptom.

bored of good intentions?

natch, a suggestion for your next name then, the picaresque supermacy?

metamechanic, i think i disagree with you point by point on just about everything!

Your example of the contractor who can visualise better than the architect is a perfect example of how tools shape thought. The contractor, through years of practice, has absorbed the operation of the tools into his or her thinking. He or she looks at a drawing of something and is immediately cutting the pieces and fitting them together in his or her head. In other words, the contractor thinks like the tools, and that is what makes him or her good at the job.

And I'm sorry, but I don't believe in students who think they are working in their head. Most of the time they just aren't working.

A tangential anecdote:
Some classmates and I were discussing the merits of a design communication class that had just become part of the curriculum. We all agreed that we wish the class had been offered while we were in that particular section of our education (2nd year class, 5th year students).
The class contained no hand drawing/drafting but focused on modeling and animation programs. The topic shifted to the discussion found here and we all became suspicious that the faculty behind the class was perhaps incapable of analog design communication. Fast forward to the annual faculty work exhibition. The same group of students filtered through the standard fare of watercolors, woodworking, professional projects etc. And then we came across two of the most beautiful drawings in the room. Amazingly technical, hand-drafted and inked, abstract design drawings. Executed with extraordinary craft by the professor whose hand techniques we had earlier questioned.
for what its worth..

hand drawing is better for the environment than CAD.


i am amazed to work with recent graduates who have no idea how to draw, let alone like to draw. i think that there is great value in being able to draw, to construct space through drawing and to understand the principles of drawing as an architect. it seems to me that this is being lost on the latest crop of students / young professionals. there is a lot of focus on the end product, rendering or whatever and valuable lessons / training is lost in the fray.

it's convenient to say that drawing / drafting is archaic and irrelevant in today's world, but without drawings, where would we be?



do this on a computer!

http://www.mccallie.org/MOMAA/castor/

Agfa--

that's not at all what I wrote or intended. I struggled in my thesis because all I did was think about my idea--I didn't test it enough. I see students do the same thing now--they think and think and think, and talk and talk and talk, but they don't draw or model. They become impotent with rage and anxiety, falling into a vicious circle of dread where they think that if they think enough about their project that it will come out perfectly the first time they actually sit down to draw it. Obviously this never happens…
Theory without testing is worthless. We test our ideas by drawing and building, then drawing and building again until it's right, not by thinking and talking.

Meta--

i've always been very patient, but I have my limits and certain pet peeves (like blaming a printer or the software for bad drawings or not showing up with work or something to work on)

I don't mean to criticise your teaching practice, rehiggins. I've observed exactly the same thing. I was directing that more at metamechanic, who seemed to be suggesting that the think-and-do-once approach was viable (correct me if I'm wrong meta).

In my experience another source of anxiety for students is not being able to formulate an idea. That's why I try to emphasise the process work (draw, build, repeat) as part of the production of an idea, not just the representation of an idea. But I completely agree with you about the importance of testing your productions. Hand-drawing and digital modelling are different ways of testing - they produce different kinds of feedback on your work.

There's a building that's under construction right now in Cambridge that looked pretty interesting in rendered form, but in reality it's not looking so hot (to be fair though--it's not finished yet). Is this a failure of the renderer to convey the idea accurately (lack of skill with a tool or the completely wrong tool) or is it a failure of the idea (lack of testing)? Would it look better now if it had been rendered with charcoal? Would that charcoal rendering (a much less accurate tool) have taught the designer something that the 3D render didn't?

Which is more important: the image of the thing or the thing itself?

What's mostly been left out of this discussion is that tools and processes become obsolete, or historical, and yes, something is always lost but other things are gained. Defending CAD over drawing or vice-versa may be pointless, since time and commerce have a way of sorting all this out.

I tend to concentrate on what is gained rather than what is lost (although a certain sentimental attachment remains to the old ways). It's certainly a shame that manuscript illustration by hand went the way of the dinosaur, but hell, a lot more people where able to have access to books when the printing press came in. Now the printing press itself has been (mostly) booted by digital printing methods.

But no one sits around arguing whether a current teacher of printing design and methods should actually have hands on experience in carving stone tablets, drawing on papyrus, hand printing and illustrating on vellum, or using Gutenberg's press - some knowledge of the history of those methods, sure, but actually be experienced in using them? Now, people in fact still do some of those things, just as hand drawing will always have practitioners in architecture: but it will never again be central to our practice as it once was, and we will just have to live with that, as we have lived with many other changes.

It's based on experience, meta, a modality, a way of interacting with the world. Yes, even dreams.

I'm surprised that you read such realist philosophy and stuff, when you're spitting straight-up classical idealism here.

I get what you're saying about the vision, but it's so easy to fool yourself that you've got some great idea and if only someone would invent a brain-jack you could express it. And yes, I agree with some other people here, that attitude in students also correlates very highly with a certain kind of lazy belligerence.

When I used to DJ, I would have this dream all the time where I went to the record store and was browsing, found something and took it back to the listening station ... and it was the Perfect Record. The perfect beats, the perfect intro, perfect everything.

The Perfect Record doesn't exist, the Hacienda must be built, and to do that you've got to engage with stuff, with tools, the engagement is productive, and I agree with dlb, there is no thinking without it.

765, that's not what meta is saying, he's not talking about perfection, rather what is the generator. The mind is ALWAYS the generator, not tools. Tools mostly facilitate, but the mind is a very special and unique kind of tool. There are certain animals that can use rudementary tools, but none of them can imagine what a human mind can and then build it. And yes, it is all based on interaction with the world, but if you're talking about the things that we humans have made, then they mostly start in the mind.

"but it's so easy to fool yourself that you've got some great idea and if only someone would invent a brain-jack you could express it."

There's no fooling there, no wool over the eyes at all: that's exactly what we do, we react to the world (ie: we're cold, so we invent ways of heating; we want to go farther than we can walk so we invent vehicles): but the mind imagines it first; and the brain-jacks are also invented by us, they're the tools and machinery we've made to turn the visions into reality. But yes, none of them are "perfect", rather they're all variations on what we've imagined.

I dunno, I was getting a harder core vibe from meta's posts, but what you're saying, Emilio, is something I could get behind. Break it down like this: you've got the vision, and you've got the medium, and you've got the thing. The thing is the vision run into and effected by the medium. The thing isn't entirely about the tools, and it isn't entirely about the vision, it's a third term, that presupposes the other two, and couldn't exist without them.

I like this because it maps pretty well to the hardcore formalist focus on aesthetic and internal consistency vs. the hardcore functionalist insistence that every decision reflects the direct influence of something pre-existing and real. Both positions are basic silly hyperbole when you look at them for more than five minutes, but so much in the academic side of our world depends on these overstatements of nuanced conditions.

Can I invite all you guys and gals to my crit tomorrow? This is great.

to say that the mind "imagines first" and then we apply tools and processes to get those "thoughts" out of the mind, returns us to Plato's notion of ideation and perpetuates a sense that the mind sits outside our body - complete and un-effected by the world.

for me, the mind (and therefore imagination) is constructed by experiences in a world.

therefore the very possibility of seeing and making sense of the world through imagination is linked in a direct way to having already been effected by the world. the mind doesn't exist before or in isolation from the world.

examples:
1) the famous story of the 'bubble-boy', born with severe immune-deficiencies, grew up - from birth - in a isolation room at a hospital in Houston. as series of small, single hospital rooms. upon the age of about 10 years old, NASA produced a small space-suit, that allowed him to go out side with a controlled environment around him. being outside and following his dad around the front yard, he grabbed at a tree to catch his dad. upon gabbing the trunk of the tree, he became frightened. when asked what was the matter, he explained that he didn't know trees had thickness. he had only previously seen trees from his hospital window and saw them as being thin images. in other words, his experience of sight was 2-dimensional, as he had not fully lived in a 3-d world.

2) numerous histories exist from the 19th c. of people born with cataracts on their eyes being able to undergo primitive operations to have them cut off the eye. upon recovering and removing the bandages, they recoiled backwards. their experience was that the "view" in front of them was 'touching' their eyes. they had to learn to see.

the point i am trying to make is that we fall into understanding the world through language, seeing and comprehending and attribute this to our mind as having an innate, complete and substantial independence, when in fact it is the consequence of an un-seen accumulation of participations with the ways and means of living in the world. these ways and means are what i would call tools - whether they be actual implements or whether they be systems of cognition.

this is why i like Ulmer's "Teletheory". he describes the different ways in which thought itself is determined by different social and cultural environments, be it in the age of story-telling (words and narrative), the age of literacy (texts and writing), or for him the age of videocy (images and visuality).

there are numerous studies that show that different cultures - partially as a result of different language systems, but also as a consequence of different social relationships - produce different forms of cognition. the manner of making sense, of defining how experiences are given value and reference are unable to be separated from their experiential context. that is to say, there is no mind before experience.

maybe there are unique individuals who can "think it all up before putting it down". i certainly can't. i would dispute that their "thinking it all up in their mind" was pure and un-compromised by prior experiences that determined the direction of their thought.

but in the context of schools, there is nothing more frustrating than students who have been seduced into believing that it all exists in their minds and they just need the time to let it come out. that the idea is pure and complete at the beginning and you just need to select a mode of representation. that no matter how deficient the final product, the idea was (is) complete and therefore un-questioned, but the means of representation just falls short right now.

i rather advocate the direction of agfa: the production of ideas. or to make it a bit more architectural - the fabrication of thought. we construct understanding and cognition - we don't find it hidden and already complete and well-formed as in a "vision" from the gods.

rehiggins: (on your last) Perhaps the renderer hadn't yet discovered certain things that another tool would have exposed: detail drawings or a site plan or something might have revealed the project in a different way which could have helped it to develop better. This isn't a failure of expression, but a failure of testing, which is why I think multiple tools are better than one.

To split hairs: to the extend that it's an 'image-of' (not just an image) then its of less importance than the thing itself; but images in general aren't of less importance than things.

too much chatter. let's look at drawings.












all paul rudolph. yeahhhhhhhh.

yes, but did paul rudolph do these drawings?

i remember being told about a chinese guy in rudolph's office (back in the 70's and 80's) who could just sit there and draw these most amazing perspective pencil renderings. he would lay out a 5 or 6 foot long sheet of paper and start at one end and work towards the other. they were all 'constructed' perspectives, with 1 or 2 vanishing points. amazing hand.

but my understanding was that they were primarily done after the design was well on its way to documentation, which means they were renderings of an already conceived form. not to take away from his incredible talents, but in this instance they were effectively images "of" a project - not drawings on the way to conceptualizing a project.

i would suggest that the japanese woodworkers are not "playing the design in their heads" so much as they are very "fluent" in the details.

for most of us, our first language became part of our way of thinking long before we even realised we had the language. so, we can't recover the experience of a time before the language.

but when you learn a 2nd or 3rd language, you go through a 'conscious' process of incorporation. you are aware of its 'artifice' until the moments when you become fluent. then the language disappears - not because it is gone, but because it is now part of you as opposed to being apart from you.

i can only imagine that these woodworkers knew so well their craft - they were so fluent - that they didn't even have to think of what was best for the next task - it came out like pure thought. this is really about incorporation - as in being 'corporeal - or of the body'. in which case, it is the body that is the primary 'tool'.

meta, a nice illustration of the agility and power of the mind...my response is less poetic and visual, but here it is anyway.

dlb, I would never deny that there is a "physicality" involved in every process of creation and use of a tool. We are obviously bound to this planet and we walk through it and experience it physically, and respond to those experiences. And, yes, something, call it directness or body sense, is usually lost (or, more correctly, changed) in subsequent evolutions of a process or practice. In the example I gave of printing, it started with the very direct act of carving into a stone tablet, then passed to various hand processes until it became more and more mechanized. In architecture we have passed through a similar transition. And to be so facile with your tools that you almost forget you're using them, that they become extensions of your body (what you termed incorporation), is a truly wonderful thing (and is a sensation that can also happen using a computer).

But I still hold that the mind is the ultimate generator and controller of the process, not the tool, and that concepts that are deemed to be lost when a certain way of doing things passes (like hand drawing) are in fact not lost because they did not reside in the old tool or old process, but were in fact transferred into the new method. Let me give an example: someone in a post above (I don't feel like re-reading them to find it) stated that many interns come into the office and don't know about line weights and it's because they never hand drafted. Now, this is just silly. This:

"In a plan drawing, cut wall lines should be the thickest, elements not cut through should be a medium thickness, and paving and hatching should be the lightest weight"

is a conceptual idea, one that has been tested through much drawing, but still a mental concept that does not reside in any one tool. I have taught interns that concept in a couple of minutes and they have applied it with CAD immediately and successfully. With a pencil we do it by varying line pressure, with pens we do it by choosing different widths, and with the computer we do it by assigning line weights: but the concept remains the same. Similarly, "perspective" and "axonometric" where not concepts that resided in the pencil, triangle, or parallell rule: they were mental constructs that have been transferred over, with countless more agility and possibility, to the computer. The process of incorporation and fluency still happens, just in a different way.

(Having said all that, let me state that the act of holding a soft lead pencil and quickly and confidently sketching onto tracing paper or nice white bond, the brain guiding the hand guiding the pencil until a building form, or a leaf, or a doodle sits before your eyes, is something that makes life worth living.)

I'm fairly confident I understand you, metamechanic. I just disagree completely.

Your vision tutorials show how deeply 3D modelling software has formed your mind. You think that way because those are the tools you use. The tools shape your patterns of thought. The evolution of the idea is already technical (tied up with tools) while it is in your head. Even more so once drawing or modelling, or other feedback processes take place.

"In a plan drawing, cut wall lines should be the thickest, elements not cut through should be a medium thickness, and paving and hatching should be the lightest weight"... is not a 'conceptual idea', it is a technique. and you are right to say it can be employed with many different 'tools', but i can't see how it qualifies as even a concept, much less an idea.

perspective and axonometric not only "reside" in pencil, triangle and parallel bar, they were developed as a consequence of these instruments. perspective comes from a constructed representational system, which relies on straight lines and quantifiable ratios to produce a simulation of a particular visual reality. or at the least (think Dürer's image of the perspective frame and the reclining nude) it constructed out a mechanical framing instrument for one-point viewing.

axonometric comes from the French military engineers who wanted a means of drawing a volumetric representations that could be accurately dimensioned - unlike the non-dimensional accuracy of perspective. axonometric is even more constructed as a representation system than perspective and is inherently dependent on the drafting instruments of triangle, T-square, pencil and measurement.

the ability to "transfer over" these methods to computers reinforces the sense that techniques are not constrained by the superficial notion that tools are dumb objects with singular identities.

"perspective and axonometric not only "reside" in pencil, triangle and parallel bar, they were developed as a consequence of these instruments."

That's because it's the INSTRUMENTS THEY HAD to formulate a mental and mathematical representation of the idea. You give me examples of when these things were developed and say that the TOOLS dictated these developments, not the mind of humans and their understanding of mathematics and geometry. I say that's total nonsense. Perspective and axonometric no more reside in pencil, triangle and parallel bar than the rotation of the planets "resided" in the first crude telescopes.

"a constructed representational system, which relies on straight lines and quantifiable ratios to produce a simulation of a particular visual reality"

So the pencil and the triangle did that, huh, not the human mind...ok.

If perspective hadn't been developed when it was, but today, you can bet your ass it would happen using the computer, but that doesn't mean it "resides" in the computer. You have everything bass ackwards.

Oh, and the axonometric method of representation was used by Japanese artists long before French military engineers, and with different tools.