

Architecture and the Lost Art of Drawing - yummyfajitas
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/02/opinion/sunday/architecture-and-the-lost-art-of-drawing.html?_r=1&src=me&ref=general

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nkoren
I was trained as an architect and worked in the field for over a decade.
Drawing had and still has an important role to play in all of my creative
processes. However...

It's all to easy to put drawing on too high a pedestal, and Michael Graves is
possibly the best example of the dangers of doing so. His drawings are
pleasing: humourous lines, stimulating juxtapositions of shape and colour. But
they are _not_ architecture, and Graves' focus on the art of drawing has made
him a terrible architect.

Architecture is not experienced in two dimensions: it is experienced in four.
It is only ever seen in perspective and in time. What it looks like as a two
dimensional projection is irrelevant to the actual embodied experience of
architecture. People who spend too much time immersed in drawings tend to lose
sight of this.

Moreover, architecture is not just a visual. It also creates a tactile,
acoustic, and olfactory environment. It conveys ambient and radient
temperatures, and channels the movement of air. It exists within diurnal and
seasonal and social cycles, continually changing. Drawing can represent NONE
of this, and the architect who approaches their art purely through drawing
will lose sight of these facts. Graves certainly has. His buildings --
rendered in three dimensions, out of actual materials on actual sites -- are
tacky-feeling, hollow-sounding monstrosities: dank where they should be airy,
glaring where they should be shady, completely disconnected from their
environments, and not remotely conducive to work or socialisation or rest or
any other purpose that humans might want to put a building towards.

But hell, they look great on paper, and that's what counts, right?

The truth is that architecture is a difficult art, because it cannot be
iteratively developed and refined in the same way as other arts. If you're a
painter, you paint; if you're a musician, you play music until your fingers
bleed. But if you're an architect, you develop your art through indirect
representation. Through virtual reality, as it were. And drawing is just
another form of virtual reality -- better at representing some aspects of
architecture (emotional characteristics of a design, for example) -- and
almost incapable of representing others (four-dimensionality, acoustics,
tactility, air). It should be quite an important form of representation within
the architect's toolkit, but if it's too highly prioritised, then you'll end
up as bad an architect as Michael Graves. A well-balanced architect should
develop _all_ forms of representation available to them -- both visual and
non-visual -- if they are going to fully grasp all aspects of their art.

~~~
zwischenzug
Interesting about the four dimensions point.

I studied the history of architecture at university (1660-1720 British). It
was beaten into me over and over that to really get close to understanding
what was going on you had to actually see the buildings to grasp the effect of
them.

This came home to me when I stumbled upon Bramante's Tempietto in Rome.

<https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=bramante+tempietto>

Only when I saw it, and having seen what came after it, and knowing that all
the great British architects had seen this in Rome (or had been told about it
second hand), did I grasp its significance to those that had seen it rather
than simply seen it drawn in a book.

Similarly with the Pantheon in Rome. A 2D drawing just doesn't cut it, and can
mislead. And yet those are the sources we (mostly) deal with as architectural
historians.

Of course, I was looking at it with "modern" eyes, so there was still a level
of indirection...

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stephengillie
As much as we like to discuss paperlessness, the simple act of taking a pen or
brush to paper or other surfaces to record visual ideas is too widely
applicable to be really replaced. Working with stainless steel kitchen
equipment fabricators and installers, you see ideas faxed from office to
office, scrawled over, faxed back, scanned, emailed printed out, marked up
again, faxed over again, and finally turned into a custom table to fit
perfectly in one restaurant kitchen.

Integrating that kind of workflow will be essential for groups looking to
automate construction, such as PlanGrid. Ideally, you would be able to print
out a CAD drawing, draw some extra lines (or measurements) on it, scan it, and
the software would somehow import the hand-drawn lines into the CAD file.

(In some ways, this situation is mirrored in sheet music - the beautiful
instrumental melodies you hear are often played from sheets that have been
copied, written on, erased, written again, copied after that, and written on
in pen. I'm surprised nobody's developed a sheet music app.)

~~~
zmmz
Note that the use case of PlanGrid is different from anything that the article
addresses. The article is actually addressing the things that architects do up
until the point that a building goes into being constructed, while PlanGrid is
about distributing/sharing _finished_ construction documents to a construction
site.

Graves points out the weaknesses that exist in software content creation
tools.

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expralitemonk
When I get truly stuck on a software problem I leave the keyboard, go to a
coffee shop, and draw-diagram-doodle a solution.

------
zmmz
Architect in the making here.

I was expecting Graves's article to be some form of luddism judged by the
title, but after reading it I assume that it is linkbait that was added by the
editors. In fact, I don't see anything overly negative that Graves said. He
correctly points out the reality: that there are certain parts of a ‘creative’
work flow that are not addressed by any software at this moment. CAD has it's
place and has made drafting easier, but honestly drafting is not where the
value or enjoyment lies in an architect's day-to-day. The term "CAD monkey"
exists for a reason.

There is a very important distinction that Graves points out: “referential
sketch”, “preparatory study” and “definitive drawing”. Each of these is very
different and has different requirements.

I used to dream of something like a unified work flow for this stuff, where
you could do everything in one, well integrated (digital) ecosystem. It does
not exist, not for architecture, and I suspect it's mainly because an
architects requirements at the first stages are almost the inverse of what
they are at last stages. Compare the properties of a sketch to construction
documents: in the former you don't want any friction and keep things abstract
and detached from technical requirements, whereas the latter has to stand up.
An analogy would be going from a fashion designer's ‘inspiration board’ to
instructions for making the clothes.

The first stages are rough, contradictory, abstract, idiosyncratic. Things
that software is not very good at being. I feel that especially the last word
on that list is crucial, since there are some people (like me) who don't even
draw that much, I much prefer to work with text and more abstract references
in the stage that Graves described as "referential sketch".

CAD has addressed the points where communication standards exist, but nobody
brainstorms and researches in the same way so it's difficult to build a tool
around that. As an example: another architect, Steven Holl, travels
frequently. He does small (A5-ish) watercolours with a pocket set, takes a
picture of it with his iPhone and sends it to his studio in NY. His staff
knows him enough now to understand them and can use them to develop their
projects.

~~~
7952
I wonder how much Graves has actually used software. It is hard to be
expressive in a medium that you lack the education to use. And it is very easy
to pretend that a form of craft (like drawing) is creative in itself.

------
discreteevent
The people who wrote "How To Design Classes" seem to think the same thing:

"Diagrams Draw them by hand. Diagrams are the programmer’s doodling language.
Using a tool that draws them for you from the existing code defeats the
purpose. Assigning students to do so defeats the purpose of learning to
doodle."

Its the first statement in the book.

