hand drawing is not the same as data or CADing.

data is neutral, discrete, systemic presupposes a subject object distinction, hand drawing is sensate, proportion, rythm, strength, continuous. the continuity of a hand drawing isn't simply that of displaying a range of values but a reciprocity between perception and recollection. a CAD drawing is an explicit structure for decision making where all content is choice, a hand drawing is a field of references put into play by experience and perception. when i click my mouse button to snap to, press enter to restrain orthogonals and key in 7m it is emphatically different from placing my pencil a third way down the page and teasing a line in and out of legibility. whatever the similarities of effect and intention the judgements that go into making a hand vs CAD drawing are qualitatively different.

i'm all for difference, but if you can't recognise what the specifics of each tool are then there's no point in making this show of different strokes for folks when you are simply ignorant of what the hand does. i'd give you marks for enjoying your collective alienation but it looks more like disciplined amnesia....

hyungmin pai's got a really good book on early american modernism that brings together transformations in social values, client priorities, industry competition and discipline navel gazing as fought within the representational battlefield of hand drawings shown in practitioner portfolios and diagrams that increasingly come to dominate architectural magazines, really relevant.

on email

while a few above have nibbled around the fringes of this idea, isn't this topic really all about "communication" -- everything else is just about picking, and mastering, the right tool for the task.

there are many situations in our profession that simply don't lend themselves all that well to drawing on a computer ... i.e. those napkin sketches over lunch with a client, a problem solving session in a conference room, a site visit where you need to work through some complexity with the superintendent. but, there are still many, many situations where the computer remains the best tool.

in offices we tend to have the most use for those individuals who know how to communicate well -- be it verbally, on a computer, via hand-drafting or through sketching. these broad, diverse abilities help make individuals more effective in a real world setting and those who concentrate on only a few of those skills are, IMHO, at a disadvantage.

in my view, the schools need to concentrate more on helping their students communicate well in a wide variety of settings ... the choice of tools should then follow naturally.

If the point was about needing faculty "classically trained" Vs "cad reared," If I had to choose one over the other, I'd choose classically trained.

Try life drawing in cad!

i don't think it's quite accurate to say that the computer (or the pencil) is 'just another tool'. Every technology causes us to think and relate in a different way. The important thing is to reflect on how our tools structure our thinking and action.

agfa -- I don't believe anybody but you has used the phrase "just another tool" in this thread. but, your point that "every technology causes us to think and relate in a different way." is well taken and a useful addition to the dialogue.

no, i wasn't suggesting anyone here said that. I was at the RAIA conference in Sydney, and one of the panel discussions became slightly surreal as everyone fell over each other to say computers were 'just a tool'. (Michael Hensel excepted).

It's odd to me how my hand-drawing starts to work like digital modelling (booleans, wireframing, etc).

There are times that I swear I can feel the cursor snap to the point I want. Is this a CAD-induced hallucination, or has my brain re-wired itself? Does it really matter that the kinesthesia of a pencil versus a mouse is different? I can still create effective drawings no matter which tool I use. Is it because I was taught to draft with a lead pointer, or was it something else that I've learned along the way that transcends the tool? I'd like to think it was the latter, otherwise there's little hope for future designers' ability to produce informative drawings (hand techniques, while romantic, don't seem to be favored by students--at least the ones that I've been seeing).

Lamenting the teaching of one tool over another is a bit pointless--we should worry about the content that is created, not how it is created.

thanks bourgeois, thought i saw a little prisma influence in those renders... i wasn't picking on you specifically, but i think my (slightly crouchy) point stands, i don't think people are sensitive to the difference between hand drawing and CAD, and given the current state of practice, where both design and construction are subordinate to demands of explicit representation, are less inclined to enquire or sympathise. on the issue of CDs for example, the changing demands of construction and contractual responsibility in turn of the century US meant that the drawing was already an explicitly codified representation even before the advent of computers, so when CAD hit the scene the issue could only ever be framed between technical convenience and efficiency vs sentimental nostalgia.

i draw in CAD too, am doing it now in fact, intend to reckon with processing as well in the future, but I also hand draw and i imagine differently when sketching, as i've said the judgements that go into constructing each drawing are different, i think we can all agree to that. to take your quote, that influence isn't a one way street. if we hand draw to 'generate data' this is only because CAD tools have encoded their logic of representation into the way we design - less a matter of 'intrinsic' properties of each tool or our innate mental capacity to adapt project whatever, than a reflection of current social norms (or maybe that's what you meant?). it is interesting to an extent to consider the hand for data...but maybe more so if you knew when it wasn't.

backing up on your definition of data as facts - ultimately a form of scientific representation - observations made with the intent of finding repetitions and patterns, dependent on external series, banks, databases for meaning....of a different order from the hand drawn line.

calling it amnesia wasn't very generous but i was frustrated by the terms of the discussion, framed as some sort of generational chastisement ('u can haz *.dwg?') when the primary conflict remains one between traditional and modern modes of representation.

Shock Me, it's not that I lack dexterity with software. I've been using CAD for industrial design since about '99 (basically my entire adult life). Nothing you posted in those links is either A) groundbreaking, or B) messy or experimental. All that data had to be inputted by somebody in very specific terms.

I think the nail was hit on the head when somebody mentioned this being a question of communication and representation. I've seen both sides of the equation (CAD-heavy industrial design AND a fine arts education in a previous lifetime) and to me, the mode of representation has a direct effect on how one experiences a particular design. How do you thnk 'blobitecture' happened in the first place? There are complexities now that basically weren't possible before the advent of 3D modelling (try drafting compound curves by hand!) but that doesn't mean that the essential experience of inhabiting a space designed with a computer is any better.

I'll bring it back to Denari, because he's a good example of what I think architecture basically shouldn't be. He seems like a pretty rad dude but if you look at his designs, the people are missing. Or they're posed awkwardly. Architecture, at least to me, should be about more than shiny surfaces built for robots to inhabit.

I need to think more about this question, but I will say that I probably have an educated bias toward physical modelling and hand sketching/drawing. I also know 3D modelling and 2D drafting, so I don't feel I'll ever be left behind. Ultimately, I find that of the spaces and places that I'm drawn to, elements of human and natural intervention are allowed and encouraged to happen. This is what happens when one designs something PURELY on the computer - scale, texture, subtlety and weight are lost in translation.

I don't think I design in cad.

I block out in cad, print out and use as a background and then use trace. Hard-line back in cad and then tweak on paper.

Not so good for the trees, but it works for me.

"This is what happens when one designs something PURELY on the computer - scale, texture, subtlety and weight are lost in translation."

This is a gross over-simplification. Digital tools may make it easier to skip these considerations, but they don't stop you from thinking about them let alone accomplishing them. You are still able to take the time to think about scale, subtlety, texture, etc. But the fact remains, you have to be aware how easy it is to forget these things when using a digital tool and remind yourself to "zoom out" and take a look at the bigger ideas. To be fair though--you can just as easily forget about these things when using a pencil. It's not an automatic process and you still have to draw with intention.

I fully believe you can do blobitecture or scripting or whatever the style of the day is with pencil and paper, if you had enough time. The problem with Architecture is when the user lets the tool dictate the design. Tools should be arbitrary and a slave to the user.

the pre-cursors to "blob-architecture" were all active in the 50's and 60's. think of F. Kiesler, etc. none of these people had computers, but the imagination for a particular spatialization of the world has been transferred to a new generation. the technological production (as construction technology) may well be conjoined with this direction, but the spatial imperatives are also there prior to "digitalization".

new forms of representation do not necessarily replace older forms, but time, expediency and familiarity do lead to the extinction of certain techniques. when was the last time you used a ruling pen? or who was taught how to use a 'french curve' in school. certainly not at mine, so no one ever used non-geometric curves in their designs. we all produced designed based around the limitations of parallel bars, triangles and circle templates. lack of access (experience of technique or availability of technology) does lead to lack of opportunity (awareness of and fluency with alternative modes of production).

tools are never arbitrary or a slave to the user. we are shaped by our tools as much as our tools shape us.

Though I'm enjoying this discussion, we've strayed away from Steven's initial post: that the people educating the next generation have what seems to some practitioners to be a huge gap in their own education.

So what other professions are seeing this benchmark change? What other professions are losing some portion of their tradition while learning new skills? Probably all of them, actually.

dlb hit it on the head, when I first started school we had to draft completely by hand and I found it an extremely limiting medium because I have always drafted to true scale, I was never one of those students who simply "guessed" because I was always worried a juror would call me out on it. In other words, if I couldn't measure the length of a line accurately I wouldn't draw it. I think this has more to do with my anal personality than anything else.

I can relate, Apu. I'm an anal-retentive control freak most of the time, but I have to say that it's been fun during those moments when I can let go, say "fuck it" and let the chips fall where they may. I find I'm getting a lot out of it.

In my design undergrad, the head of our department told me over beers one night that he didn't believe in hand-drawing, because in his words "once you've got the idea, go right to the computer." His thought was that drawing was a waste of time. I never saw him draw anything by hand. He was in love with technology (and to his credit, he's one of the most well-known (and deserving of it) industrial design consultants in the world). His partner, though, taught our drawing course. So who knows?

I would say that the tools we use DO shape how and what we design, but they shouldn't. Our tools SHOULD be slaves to our needs. A pencil can only do so much, and the same is true for the computer.

When you say tools should be slaves, aren't you really saying that tools should contribute nothing to designing, in order to be pure and transparent mediators of intent? Isn't it because every tool shapes our designing in different ways, that we work with multiple tools?

the idea that tools should be 'slaves' or act as 'transparent mediators of intent' (nice phrase), falls back on the cliché that as designers we have these "great ideas" and we just need something to get it down on paper (or the screen). that the idea is pure and complete and just needs to be "represented".

from my experience, this is the greatest fallacy of any creative person, whether architect or otherwise. that: "i have a great idea for a movie/novel/film/building/facade/etc.." and all i need to do is show it to the world.

i don't believe it works that way. until it is made apparent and communicated, it doesn't exist - whether in words, images, or any other mode of representation. and the mode and technology (or technique) of that representation IS an aspect of the idea. there is no idea without the representation.

so the question is not so much the right or wrong of 'tools', but the specific consequence of the tool in creating the idea. there will be and always are tools present (in one form or another) in the creation of all ideas. ideas do not exist before or outside of tools. because we exist in the world already (we are not abstract) then our ideas come into presence through the mechanics of the world, which is tools - whether speech, writing, action, fabrication, etc.

the more tools we have, the better we are at using the tools, then the more ideas we can generate and communicate.

Marshall McLuhan would be very happy to hear that medium is still the message.

not sure i believe it.

does it matter if a teacher can draw by hand? not sure. it is an intriguing idea.

we had an opera singer and a world class painter (who was an amazingly crazy fellow) for our first year of archi-education. i don't think the opera singer drew anything in that year. i certainly don't remember him doing so anyway. but i guess he was still fine as a teacher. in those days the first year archi-ed was about folding paper, making dodecahedrons, and color wheels. then we topped it off with an eisenmanian exploration of the cube. it was all spatial and material. drawing was part of it, but not the important bit and the teachers judged content not means of expression...

i drew the elevations and plans of my cubey procedural thing using minicad. it was 1989 and macs were still black and white and silly/useless (my C64 was probably better)...nobody cared but me that i had done it by computer...they looked at the lineweights and critiqued it just as if i had done it by hand...

anyway, it will be interesting to look at this question again in 20 more years...

following your example, then McLuhan IS right.

nothing is said that you HAVE to draw, just that drawing with one technology or another produces different ways of creating different ideas. so, to not draw, but to make models, folded paper, etc, was a form of exploration by a particular technology. it would have been different again had you been asked to only use drawings or only use CAD.

and i am sure that your teacher, if he didn't draw, i would imagine that he was quite precise and directed in his speaking, in his instructions, in his descriptions of ways to move forward. speaking well and intelligently is not just something that happens as you get old - you have to practice it and work at it - just as you would at learning to draw or learning to make object or using a particular computer program.

the point about McLuhan -"medium is the message"- is not that we valorize one technique over another, one medium over another, but that content is created within the process of expression, and different expressions (techniques/technologies) produce different content.

then, we can decide if we value this particular content or not.

NOW this is getting really interesting.

That's what I've been saying Meta…this is really an issue of communication.

The idea should exist outside of the tool. Thinking that the tool shapes your idea is limiting, and means that you will only come up with ideas that fit with what your chosen tool can accomplish. Tools should only shape the mode of representation, not the idea itself. The trick is in taking your chosen tool and making it work for your idea, a kind of hack if you will.

Meta, if you can't show it to someone else, it doesn't exist. you can talk all day about how cool the project in your head is, but unless you can get someone else to see it, it ain't real.

but the tool shouldn't matter, 765, only whether or not the idea is represented and understood. A bad idea will still be a bad idea when rendered with charcoal or ink or maxwell.

thanks SM,IB--I have my good days and my bad, but it seems that the students are learning something.

I have two questions that have been popping up in my head as a result of this discussion:

is the pencil the thing that teaches lineweight, texture, scale, etc. or is it only the medium by which those ideas are taught?

Was DaVinci limited in his imagination by the tools he used or was he only limited by his imagination?

...or was davinci unlimited because of the tools he used?

I love it when a physical tool aka the building material itself influences my design.

metamechanic, does that really mean I'm "a retard"? Don't we have room in this world for all kinds of designs/designers?

Idea for first year studio: Get a bunch of cheap bricks, concrete mix, steel, etc, and have the kids actually build something.

im pretty sure meta was calling you retarded, LB ;-) not really, though.

i actually think the message is the message. the medium does affect it, but its more like a tweak than the whole thing. i get his point but think macluhan was resorting to hyperbole to make it sound jazzier...like koolhaas. lots of nice sound bites and fundamentally true...just not entirely enough of the story...

our projects were about space. we attacked the issue in a number of ways that tinted the exploration, but ultimately the message was space, not dodecahedrons or complicated cubes, or computer drafted elevations. those were just the window dressing.


i agree with meta that an idea is more impt than the skill to present it. also agree that without being able to communicate an idea some way or other then you might as well not have an idea at all. i don't think anyone is retarded, except possibly george bush the younger. and he may just be badly advised, not what you call Actually Stupid.

it would be nice to think leonardo had more freedom with his tools than we do with our computers...a bit of ink and a quill certainly sounds lovely, and leo was just such a great drafstman that it would have been a shame if he had used a computer to draw with...but tools only limit us if we want them to. so no i don't think he had more possibilities open to him than we do.

metamechanic, if you can render 100% of your idea, all that proves is that the tool has trained you so well that it has taught you what kind of ideas to have.

I imagine that this thread will quickly fall into two positions which won't be easily aligned:

1.
ideas exist independent of their expression
tools are a transparent media of communication
(this is a broadly Platonist position - what meta calls the 'vision' position)

2.
ideas only exist through expression
tools play a role in the production of ideas through expression.
(this is my position, and i think dlb's. I would call it an 'envisioning' position, rather than a 'visionless' one).

and #3.
metamechanic is ka-razy!

It might feel like you've mastered the tool and forced it to do your will, but this feeling is precisely the effect of having been disciplined by your technologies.

I think your position is less the Kantian apriori, and more Plato's Ideas. Plato argued that the task of the maker was to make visible the invisible Idea. But Plato had no idea about art, imho.

agfa8x - where do I stand if I think ideas exist independent of their expression, but tools CAN play a role in the production of ideas through expression?

Often I find that the expression of an idea ends up being an imperfect translation. Its like trying to express something with a set of vocabulary (which in my opinion will always be limited). Hence my opinion that ideas are independent of their expression - but more importantly they must be expressed/communicated to the best of one's ability for it to have meaning to anyone else.

I found the ability for tools to alter the design process when I started researching/experimenting with parametric design (my idea about parametric design was more about being responsive/flexible design than being cool/blobby geometry). It changed my understanding of the scope of "design" and allowed to achieve more with less time. As somebody mentioned earlier, I do think you can achieve anything that is done now with computers with pencil and paper - its just the amount of time it would take - and hence the value of it in the real world.

And back to topic - Even though I would be considered very young in this profession, I was taught hand drafting, sketching, drawing & manually (mathematically/geometrically accurately) figuring out how to do perspectives, shadows, and isometric drawings. I haven't done any of the above except sketching and drawing recently, but I found the lessons to be very valuable. Frankly I like how hand drafting looks, but I just don't see the value of it over CAD. As for figuring out shadows, isos, & perspectives, even though we can just get an output from 3D computer models these days, I like the fact that I understand the evolution of how we got to it and how it can be generated by hand. Knowing where it came from and how we got here allows me to have the ability to bend or break the rules (since I will know what rules are fundamental and what rules are out-dated/irrelevant). I find sketching and hand drawing to be a still valid part of the design process and don't see that changing any time soon.

I think learning out-dated/inefficient manual methods are still valid because it leads to a deeper understanding. I think its a lot like learning architectural history.

What is poorly expressed is poorly thought....try and prove otherwise.

How do you know you can visualize? Prove it.

i don't think this has anything to do with theorists being unable to deliver on their ideas, or being divorced from reality, or whatever.

we're concerned here with a fairly concrete question: when we are designing, are we coming up with an idea (a vision) first, and then simply trying to communicate it as best we can using various tools (pencils or computers for example)? or are we producing visions through the act of engaging with those tools (what I'm calling envisioning)?


Philarch - i think it's really great when we discover that a given technology doesn't do the job properly, because it makes us work with more than one tool at a time. But I don't think (myself) that this is because all the tools provide a more-or-less approximate version of the pure idea in our heads. I think it is because the idea is fluid, and keeps changing on us as we work with it.

"What is poorly expressed is poorly thought."

You know, guppy, some of the machines that Leonardo sketched in his notebooks turn out not to work very well when they are built based on his drawings (as several have been). In some cases, the sketches are so rudimentary and spare, that much has to be guessed in order to build them. So he had "visions" of, say, flying machines hundreds of years before the technology (or the amassed scientific progress) was available to actually make those visions work: does that then make him a poor visualizer, or a poor thinker?

The act of thinking and doing refines the idea and gives it form, the tool is just the mechanism by which we "do." I place a heavier emphasis on the idea and bend my tools to fit my will--if I lack the skill to use the tool to execute my idea, I force myself to gain that skill. Sometimes the idea changes, not because of the tool or my limited skill, but because the idea was bad or not refined enough. The idea has to be tested and refined and tested and refined. Pencils, paper, chipboard, Rhino, maxwell, etc. are just the test tubes and bunsen burners that I use in the experiment to test my ideas.

I don't want to live in a world where you can walk down the street and tell which buildings were done with BIM, 2D CAD, or hand drafting--if the tool dictates the idea, then this is the experience we'll all have. That notion feels empty; and essentially, that's where we are now isn't it?

I always lose interest in these topics when they go two pages. Too many clicks.

18th century picturesque landscaping (Capability Brown, Humphrey Repton) reflect the use of optical viewing devices such as the Claude glass and techniques such as watercolour. In a sense the picture-frame is 'embedded' in the project, even though it is not physically present.

I think it important also to recognise that I'm not advocating determinism: the tool does not dictate the idea, but the tool defines a set of emphases and perimeters within which ideas are formed. I'm also not suggesting that we want architecture to simply reflect the means of its production. What I'm saying is that ideas only form as they are articulated through some medium. That's different in my mind from a tool dictating an idea.

Perhaps the production of an idea is the goal, pursued by multiple designerly means; rather than the origin point from which designing springs.