y'all - why's it gotta be either/or? Can't it be both/and?

The thing happens when ideas meet stuff, simple, right?

meta i can see how you are imagining formal manipulation, but i can't see how it is architectural. and the way you imagine that manipulation is also completely CAD like, i don't think your ability to do it in isolation is a demonstration of the mind's flexibility, more like a complete internalisation of different modelling functions, push pull sheer align scale offset reflect...it could be anything. i mean what exactly do you intend for this this tapered key, red bull can footing of yours?

we are losing sight of the original question though, which i have no answer to, i'd be quite interested to know how non hand drawing tutors teach, i mean you don't need to be able to hand draw to get a handle on experiences of space or patterns of behaviour, that's just human, what does scare me are those guys who do crazy form and then stick a label in an empty space that says bathroom and hey presto! we get architecture....

emilio, you wouldn't get computers without all the other stuff that axo's and rulers came with. certainly when axos were done in pencil as military drawings they had a very different meaning to when they were redone in paint by constructivists or redone again on computers by eg royksop, or on a different continent in china or japan (and maybe i got the wrong examples but i don't think those are the same axos at all in fact) in tapestries etc. so even though the technique has a visual similarity, the production and perception was completely bound to historical circumstance, they were each for radically different things, enabled and inflected by their specific practices of production.

765, you're right, it's not a clear cut either/or. But two lines of thought are clearly expressed in this thread, those who think that the mind is more important and those who think the tools dictate. I am clearly in the first camp, and I call this "tools are the main generators of visual ideas and concepts" theory a silly thing.

righteous, what I'm trying to argue is that all those different ways of doing axonometrics are different physical "manifestations" of the concept, but the concept itself originated in the mind and remains the constant. The concept can be held in the mind (or written down) and taken to a different place and re-used with slightly different tools, with different looking results.

Leaving the earth in a rocket was "imagined" and "envisioned" long before it actually happened (Jules Verne comes to mind, but there are others). When it actually did happen, the Russians did it differently than the US, with slightly different tools and different rocket designs. To me, the fact that Verne didn't actually design or build rockets to leave the earth doesn't defeat the point: it actually reinforces it, since it shows that the concept or vision pre-exists, in fact needs to pre-exist, the actual occurrance, but that the actual occurance will have to follow physical restrictions and the available materials and tools, and thus not be exactly like the original vision.

You might need to read back a bit Emilio, because I don't think anybody has claimed that tools 'dictate' anything. The two positions I see are:

1. that ideas exist independently, and tools are a means of expression.

2. that ideas are formed as they are articulated through tools.

Obviously pencils and rulers don't draw axonometrics themselves. But the ruler privileges designing with straight lines. Sure, it is possible to construct curved surfaces with rulers (like the roof of LC's Ronchamp). But the inbuilt tendency of the ruler is to emphasise straightness and alignment. As soon as you pick up a ruler, this bias enters your designing. And if you have worked with rulers long enough, this bias enters your thinking.

Bruno Latour argues that it isn't productive to persist with a dichotomy of minds and tools. Thinking and acting takes place in a network of exchanges between the material and the conceptual. Neither is prior to the other.

I agree with Latour's statement totally, and am not suggesting a separation of minds and tools. I would say, though, that the mind is the swiftest and smartest tool of all, and works continually, not just when it's picked up or turned on, and has amazing powers of visualization and integration of (apparently) random ideas, and so will always have the heads up on tools.

By critical use of your tools, you worked against the inbuilt tendencies, but that doesn't mean those tendencies don't exist. At least in part, the education you referred to is carried out by the tools themselves.

But they didn't use the toilets to, for example, drive to work, or make drawings. They worked within the tendencies of the technology.

i have never said that "tools dictate". in fact, i have tried to say that they don't dictate, but that they have particular consequences.

i judge language to be a tool. as i mentioned previously, when we gain use of it and especially when we gain fluency, we use it as if it had been with us forever. therefore, it doesn't feel like something we acquired. if feels natural and as if it has been part of us forever.

but as a tool, i don't think it ever "dictates" to us. nonetheless, to know one language versus another language is to deal with the consequences of a particular form of cognition that emerges out of the particularities of that language - to see objects as feminine or masculine or not (for Romance languages versus English). in other languages (and their attendant cultures) social relationship way beyond brother, sister, cousin, aunt, etc can be enunciated. this is not just about having more vocabulary, it is also a different world-view, of which the language helps in the formation of the consciousness to view the world and act in a particular way.

i guess i am mostly just trying to be sceptical of the notion that ideas and imagining take place in a mind - in a pure and un-adulterated form - and then they get messed up by being forced to deal with the world. again, this is well annunciated in Panofsky's book on "Idea".

Jules Verne could conjure up the possibility of rocket-powered flight because:
1) he had seen rockets
2) he knew about gravity and planetary rotations
3) he could write well and create a convincing world through language
4) and most importantly, he did the WORK necessary to make it all believable.

i know this is not at all what Steven W was asking in his starting lines, but to bring this back to education, i suppose my concerns exist around a long experience of teaching where the conceit that you can think it out in advance leads to not much WORK - just a lot of frustration and mental constipation.

meta -

this is going to sound inflammatory, but it's just what's just gone through my head with your last post.

re: 1) people with vision use 'tools' and 'empercist' (sic) language to explain things to people without vision.

how do people with vision explain things to other people with vision? telepathy? or are you now giving WORDS primacy over both hand and digital drawing communication?

if words are all that's necessary, how do you know that your words are creating the same vision in the other visionary's head that's in yours?

by considering yourself among the 'people with vision', aren't you basically saying 'you other people just can't get it' or 'you can't possibly understand'? kind of a cop-out, no?

Well, this is getting way off the original topic, but it is interesting.

"Jules Verne could conjure up the possibility of rocket-powered flight because:
1) he had seen rockets
2) he knew about gravity and planetary rotations
3) he could write well and create a convincing world through language
4) and most importantly, he did the WORK necessary to make it all believable."

I never said you don't need to know your science, math, physics, biology, geography, etc. etc. to have visions of things not yet made: you couldn't do it without that.
And I agree that just about everything is a tool for something (communication, making), but, again, I consider the mind a very special tool, unique and not really comparable to any other tool in its powers of visualization and synthesis (and the computer itself is a very pale imitation of the mind, so far).
Verne's mind was able to synthesize what he had seen and knew into a vision of something that had not happened yet, just as Leonardo and others have done. Science fiction writers imagine machinery and scenarios which, at this time, have really no way of being built or realized...but it doesn't mean that some of them won't be in the future. These visions are mostly created and visualized in the mind, and, yes, then they are expressed in words, a tool, but you can't really say that they didn't begin in the mind.

I agree with Bourgeois, that inbuilt tendencies stem more from social mores and impositions than any inherent suggestion from tools. In the example of perspective, yes, it was first drawn with triangle and t-squares, but the initial major use of perspective was not in architecture, but rather painting. Now, is the inherent nature of paint brushes and oil paints to draw meticulous and accurate depictions of reality, staying within the lines and being faithful to the geometric grid? Not if you've ever let go with a brush and some paint. But social mores dictated that paintings should depict reality faithfully, so it was hardly possible thereafter to be a painter and not learn perspective. It wasn't until the late 19th and early 20th centuries that painters finally said F this, I'm going to let go...going against social inbuilt tendencies.

this is an interesting discussion. i really don't want to jump in and ruin it, but it does make me think of an interesting moment a few years ago. i was sitting in a lecture where lebbeus woods and michael sorkin were discussing work related to social responsibility. they were paired with a person in detroit who was developing projects to transform the neighborhoods the projects were in. the interesting thing was that there was a general theme of the "collaborative vision" beginning to emerge within all of their discussions...but i felt that it was slightly at odds with the process that michael sorkin was describing. after he was finished presenting, i decided to ask the question " did he feel that the presentations that were being made marked a shift from the architect or designers as an internal monologue into a creative dialogue with external forces." to reiterate the point i was trying to make i appended "can we possibly begin to see design as a creative negotiation with outside forces". lebbeus immediately jumped in and stated that "visionary design cannot be conceived of as a negotation and should never be conceived of as such...negotation is for politicians and no one who is an architect or designer should conceive of the act as a negotiation". but for me this is an important question that i think gets to the heart of the matter. if necessity is the mother of invention, then true acts of invention would seem to be necessitated by a negotiation of our desire with the external world. therefore tools are created or manipulated to that end, or we conceive of our invention through those very tools. the question of invention or representation is not in this way purely within the mind or purely through the tools at our disposal. we face a situation of diminishing returns, how much do we need to invent in order to communicate our inventiveness and test it within reality. in some ways, i can't help but think of heideggar's invention of the word "dasein" to describe a distinct concept in order to pose a philosophical argument. the means toward creating that word took a large portion of the book....the creation of one word and its formulation to describe a concept. to need to create more words requires even more formulation....and so there is a limit to our ability to create without a negotiation with the world of tools that surrounds us. i also can't help but think of the austrian arts and crafts architect (i can't remember his name right now) who spent his entire life developing the concept of the perfect house and in the end stated that he should have not let the idea become so precious, that there is more to learn through experimentation and failure...and his idea would have been stronger through that negotiation with reality.

so in the end i guess that's what i'm positing. read through and glean at will. i'm not going to try to boil it down beyond this. just my thoughts for the day.

Agreed that nothing really changes without vision. Without vision, you're really just rearranging givens (keyboard, meet red bull can). Sometimes, though, in order to have that vision moment, you have to have steeped your mind in those same givens, and worked with them until their tendencies, grain and kinks become cognate with the patterns and flow of your own thinking.

And then later, when you're on the train, and you're thinking about something else entirely, there is vision.

I'm calling out Steven Ward, who's hardly said a thing on this thread. Your original question seemed to have negative connotations, but maybe I'm misreading. What do you think, Steven - two generations out from direct, practically applied education in hand drawing, what are the consequences?

Who knew indeed! Adjustable triangle, meet bikinis...

metamechanic: nobody's denying the existence of mental visualisation. Where we disagree is in how it takes place.

i didn't ask the question because i had answers, 765.

these are my opinions only, obviously, but i'll offer them for what it's worth. (i'm cringing because of how i know s.m.i.b. will run with this.) so here goes:

i do value my skills in hand drawing (not JUST drafting but ALL drawing - the reason i didn't make a distinction) at least as much as my skill driving autocad or revit or sketchup. all of these ways of 'drawing' have their place and their importance and i would hate to be missing any of them as ways of communicating a 'vision'. and i love to learn new ways, new software, and new media even though i'm getting to be the old gray hair that you guys like to pick on.

but without my $.25 pen and scrap of any paper or piece of wood i can find, how would i show someone some incidental thing that i'm talking about (assuming i hadn't printed it back at the office) while out at a bar or standing at my client's desk or during a visit to some agency? would i have to have my laptop with me?

when i taught ('til '05) i had some students who had to DEPEND on their ability to b.s. through a description of what they were trying to do because they couldn't draw it except via a kind of sketchy scrawl, no one ever having taught them the way to efficiently sketch an idea in 30 seconds or less. sure, i think there is a loss there...

i have never believed that hand drawing is purely a talent. it's a skill that is learned and practiced. i have limited patience for people who say 'i can't draw'.

re: the vision thing. i do absolutely think that things have to be produced in some capacity - whether drawing, modeling, mockups - so that critical responsiveness can happen and a designers vision can be tested in the world - both by the designers' own rigorous critique and subject to the reaction and criticism of others.

if it stays in the head, it hasn't yet had time to breathe and live. if it can't be shown, it isn't. a vision is a hallucination until others can be witness too.

i think metamechanic's position is unique among all the others. it occurs to me that without hand drawing, one would have had to come up with a completely different way of pursuing architectural design activity in, say, the '40s or '50s. how would one have communicated then?

i've always been intrigued by stories of gropius who, by his own admission, was not a drawer. he was dependent on the drawing efforts of others and he simply acted as a master critic, requesting that things be tweaked until they matched his intention.

thank goodness for adjustable triangles!!! i wonder what happens if you google "lead pointer"?


i appreciate the discussion regarding vision...but what's vision without the means and methods to convey it to others? lots of us have ideas...but, we lack the skill set to realize those ideas in some form that others can understand, there's a major disconnect.

so, why wouldn't we still teach hand-drawing to students? isn't part of being an architect to have a discerning eye? i struggle to understand how working with computers alone would serve to develop us as architects and observers of the world around us.

i think that it would be wise to be well-versed in all (or many) of the options for expression available to us. i just happen to think that drawing is the MOST important one because it is the foundation for the rest.

Meta - I think that some would argue that new forms of descriptions (from other fields or by accident) have also helped the "architectural visionary mind" evolve. I actually think your side of the argument is valid, but at the same time does not automatically negate the other argument.

As an analogy to painting, I think the approach of utilizing tools as an integral part of the creative process would be similar to the "painterly" styles where the medium of the paint -like brush strokes- is part of its expression (impressionist style would work here). Your approach on the other hand is similar to styles where its purely about the subjects the painting represents (I can only think of Frida Kahlo's work right now - even though her works are clearly "painted", her subjects and themes are so strong that the medium is insignificant). Interestingly though, in my mind amateurish paintings are usually unclear, unthoughtful mixes of both. I guess my point is that both of these approaches are valid.

The reason I rarely take hand drawing past sketches and schematic drawing is that because of my art "background" I am too easily seduced by the aesthetics of it. I would spend too much time making that 2D surface look good than making a good design - but thats just due to my weaknesses.

Steven, no answers expected, just ways of approaching the question. I think architects will always be scribbling on pieces of wood, whether they've had two semesters of Constructed Perspective and Lineweight Drills or not - TV didn't kill radio, and if the skill is useful for the perpetration of our craft, it will persist. Again, the sky is not falling.

And: that moment, right? where you come across the student who's trying, awkwardly trying, to rely on some kind of stilted verbal description, also know as BS, to describe their idea, because 'no one's taught them how to draw', isn't that what they used to call a 'teaching opportunity'?

We should always ask what the material wants to do…


But what you're saying seems to imply a heavy importance on the image, that the students are learning to design by copying their prof's "cutting edge" ideas. They become technicians for replicating this style; this is Beaux Arts methodology…learning by rote.

Maybe this is the problem with the state of drawing in education--schools teach the mechanics of drawing (using whatever tool) but don't necessarily teach the thinking, the intention, the questioning that drives a drawing.

I have no idea--my school doesn't seem to be pushing any style (I certainly don't).

Which schools are pushing "traditional" (Notre Dame??)??

'Ask a brick what it wants to be' implies that the technology of bricks has certain inbuilt tendencies that should be recognised (if not necessarily respected). Just like technologies of drawing and modelling.

Yeah, that's why I'm saying you could rewrite this whole dialog as a formalist/functionalist argument. Formalism -> idea is primary and pre-existing. Functionalism -> idea is emergent from an engagement with pre-existing conditions and tendencies.

Think Eisenman's diagram vs. Koolhaas' diagram, to grossly oversimplify (or not).

After all this talk about hand drawings I decided to do one nice hand drawing for my presentation besides my rough process sketches. 10 minutes in, I totally tried to Ctrl+Z.

I'm about to ctrl-s and ctrl-q up in this mug.

I thought that the brick wants to get laid.

working against tendencies is still working in relation to them. that's where i would differ from kahn's aristotelianism (and why i added the parenthetical statement in my last post). eladio dieste's bricks still behave like bricks. in my view it's possible to recognise tendencies without falling into essentialism or determinism.

the bricks at kahn's exeter library apparently wanted to be veneer.

s.m.i.b.: dismissiveness is exactly what i might have predicted.

that is what i would predict too. an unfortunate pattern...


you know, much of this thread reminds me of a lecture by derrida at columbia a few years back where the students started heckling him, and derrida got all defensive and threw down his intellectual superiority as a a shield...of the "you morons are too stupid to understand what i am saying so fuck you very much and come back when you are smarter...i am done with you all" - kind of thing. it was quite remarkable, especially for how petulant the man of learning had become. what a serious loser. and the students were right to criticise him...or at least the way his ideas had been used in architecture...


actually a much more interesting twist to the topic might be found in the analogy of the argument between niels bohr and rick feinman. feinman was proposing his way of dealing with QED theory which involved graphics, and bohr was pissed off cuz he said the quantum world could not be conceptualised except with mathematics...he denounced the whole thing....not because it was wrong or even looked wrong but largely because feinman was using imagery and not just mathematics to advance the theory. and bohr refused to believe physics at the quantum level could be imagined. he just refused to beleive it.

but of course Bohr was wrong and feinman was right. times had changed, but more than that the problems needing to be solved had chaged too, and the tools had to evolve or the whole thing looked to stall. and there was bohr, pissed off cuz this 30 year old genius was using diagrams to get past some road blocks. what a putz. and sooo ironic that bohr himself had gone through a similar showdown with einstein and others when he was young.

the lesson of course is that things change and the point is to solve the problem...and not get too concerned with methodology as long as it is rigorous. the same can be said of teachers growing up in the computer world...as long as they can do work of a certain quality it doesn't bother me too much if they can draw by hand or not...

meta sez: at some point I realized my dwg looked nothing like reality. pretty much from then on I had decided dwgs do not do justice reality.

it was all downhill -- or a left turn -- for him from there, no ?

he was forced to pursue his career of choice without one of its basic tools. the development of alternative ways of communicating, and (as a result ?) ways of seeing himself and his abilities, set him on a road apart. as he says, CAD gave him his life -- understandably so !

but why should he assume that the great majority of his peers and colleagues lack the ability to visualize as he does ? in truth, most who choose the field have better-than-average structural visualization (as the aptitude tests call it), don't they ?

surely it can be said that as the twig is bent, so grows the tree ? interesting to see the one with a deficit turn tables and point to an (assumed) lack in others -- a perfectly understandable and all-too-human response. of course there are those who do not visualize well -- one wonders why they persist in a field that so obviously demands it. but to persist in claiming that one has an almost unique ability. . .

can we not let this break down into accusations and personal slights? this has been a really good discussion, and I've appreciated all the contributions.

I'm sorry to be playing Emporer's New Clothes, or 'gotcha.' That wasn't my intention. This is a highly important, useful and meaningful discussion, and I reread all of it before posting.

But it would be less than a complete and honest examination if any of the evidence were ignored --wouldn't it ? Granted, there are more diplomatic ways of stating the obvious than the words I used. . .

In an attempt at full disclosure, and by way of apology to metamechanic (and any others I may have offended) I should say that I left off any dreams of an architectural career when it became clear to me, as a sophomore architectural design student, that I was hopelessly out of my depth as a delineator. RISD was years away from its eventual acquisition of Steven Oles as master of the subject; we were entirely on our own in acquiring the skills necessary to present our work. I limped to the end of my four years in Interior Architectural Design, put my BFA in a drawer and eventually found myself as a cabinetmaker. It has been some consolation to me that I eventually learned to draw acceptably.

If you could draw at TEN, then yu can draw at #).
Everything thing in-between is merely affirmation.

a drawing/sketch of a jean nouvel building no matter how well done would be the most boring thing ever. it would be much nicer to present an abstract filmed cinematography of light, colours and reflections to convey the building's ambience. on the other hand, you can't but draw (or sculpt) the utzon sydeny opera house and nothing but . the nicest drawing of the yokohama terminal would be a sketch/diagram picking a flat uniform ground up and polyfurcating it into striated ground 'threads'...would be nicer to have the very clean computer hidden-line drawing with abstract (hand or computer, nonplussed...but i'd like to see some cherry red and bubblegum pink in it...i think the inside needs to be a bit more powerpuff girl) rendering. the zaha hadid proposed abu dhabi performing arts centre would actually look nicer as a water colour than as a computer rendered image, even if it was to a large extente computer generated....it would so fit in sharoun's watercoloured archi-fantasy portfolio and it would look like a sweetly painted colour-sheened mosquito cleanings its legs by a lake. Mies' buildings are just so much nicer to talk about than to draw. i think what would really be nice to hand draw is eric miralles buildings for the simple reason that they unfold virtuosically, so many ideas and shapes stringed episodically one after the other.

not that i can draw well though

eeny meenie miny moe

This is what I take from "what does a brick want to be. . .?":

Question precedent, don't blindly accept what has come before; seek the essence of a thing, then play with it.

This discussion shouldn't be about "style", or formalist vs. functionalist, or vision vs. non-vision. . .these are all means to an end with the end being a solution to a problem and the means, a personal interpretation on how to solve that problem.

Implied in the initial question was an apparent loss in the ability of future designers' ability to solve problems--I think that we can all agree that this is not a problem, right? Or do "hand" drawings really make a better design? (this seems to be the implied direction of the original question)