IT has become fashionable in many architectural circles to declare the death of drawing. What has happened to our profession, and our art, to cause the supposed end of our most powerful means of conceptualizing and representing architecture?
The computer, of course.
— nytimes.com
Michael Graves pens an opinion piece for the Times.
17 Comments
drawing is dead, sketching is not.
editorial actually that is roughly what Graves argues in the piece. He categorizes three types of architectural drawing and posits that while at least 1 of them (the “definitive drawing) have moved with good reason to digital, the other other two (“referential sketch,” the “preparatory study”) are perhaps better suited to paper/hand...
Regarding speed ,accuracy,and the ability to edit quickly, yes computer-aided drafting is the way to go. However, with hand drawn work, there is a honesty and character to which CAD cannot duplicate which is why some firms still use hand drawings in combination with computer-aided drafting.
Dunno... I always found Graves' drawings too mechanical and predictable to be called sketches.
Agree with Chris, the combination is where the magic happens
I profess and teach all of my students that the need for the art/ability to draw by hand will never go away, You need to be able to sketch what you observe. You need to be able to sketch what you see in your mind. You need to be able to instantaneously articulate in graphic form to your clients. You need to be able to sketch details and sections for your consultants (engineers, contractors, etc.).
Yes, we use cadd and graphics software because of the precision and efficiencies that go along with the medium. But living here in Southern California, the most important reason for being able to DRAW and sketch manually is, what are you going to do when the power goes out. How, when there is an earthquake large enough that all that infrastructure is lost, do you expect to be able to process work to help expedite the rebuilding process. Or will you be content to sit on the sidelines and wait for the power to come back on?
graves is an idiot. no news.
Graves isn't an 'idiot'. Don't talk like an ass.
Graves' observation is a bit of a dinosaur though, no?
Yes, to us professionals. He wrote that piece for the NYT Op-ed... not Architectural Record. It was probably illuminating for most readers.
Of course, in some sense drawing can’t be dead: there is a vast market for the original work of respected architects. I have had several one-man shows in galleries and museums in New York and elsewhere, and my drawings can be found in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art and the Cooper-Hewitt.
But can the value of drawings be simply that of a collector’s artifact or a pretty picture? No. I have a real purpose in making each drawing, either to remember something or to study something. Each one is part of a process and not an end in itself. I’m personally fascinated not just by what architects choose to draw but also by what they choose not to draw.
Hahahaha.....I shouldn't forget to laugh!
When we visited his office in Princeton in 1980, he wasn't there but about 4-5 people in the office were pumping out drawings on yellow tracing paper using prismacolor pencils. I suppose they were two grand a piece at Max Protetch Gallery at the time. His office was serial producing small hand drawn drawings before they were serial producing Target teapots in the factory. What was fascinating though, he taught them to draw just like he would... I thought it was really smart in the age of mechanical production with robot graduates and all.. This guy is more brilliant than all others when it comes to making money.
He didn't really delve into why, in my personal opinion which is totally subjective, hand drawing is so relevant to architectural study: it employs materials, and to me architecture is ultimately (and almost only) material.
But I do like that he's so cavalier about the use of CAD for the finished communicative product. It's pretty straightforward: the right tool for the job. And we can like more than one thing at a time, so no one needs to "reject" hand drawing, or computer drawing either.
CAD is more precise not more accurate.
Ones ability to manifest "creative" thought into visual or physical form is completely dependent on the skills of the creator.
Most undergrad students where born in the 90s, as in they have worked with computers their entire education. They will, and many are already, creating digital work that has all of the honesty, emotion, meaning, blah blah blah that any hand drawing might have. This will only be exasperated over time. Think if Architects of the past had been working with pencil from the time they were 4. (I don't mean first grade spelling class) The computer becomes an extension of the user at a much earlier age then the pencil ever has.
With that said there are still young designers that choose analog. I sketch like crazy. And model build like it is good for me. Schools are not completely throwing out analog design technique as some of the NYT letter writers have everyone think. I would like to here from someone at a school were analog is completely out.
The computer is a tool that can be mastered. Just as the pencil, or quill, or paintbrush.
Nice to see this issue come up in the Times. I've taught hand drafting at Pratt and am now teaching the first year studio, which includes a bit of drafting. And I've taught 3D and rendering for seven years now as well. Here are a few thoughts from an old blog post, where I tried to list out some reasons why I thought that teaching hand drafting was still the best way to introduce students to architecture (this was in response to NJIT's move at the time away from hand drafting):
1. Hand drafting makes it very easy to teach and critique work in a studio setting, because it’s all right there on the desk in front of you and the student. Mistakes can be fixed, and be seen to be fixed, almost immediately. Trace paper becomes a site for negotiation between instructor and student. In other words, the hand drawing is a site of shared learning; the drafting table acts something like a miniature surgical theater. The computer screen can’t yet provide this level of shared, quasi-public accessibility to the work in progress.
2. Hand drafting is the quickest way to learn about line-weight and its implications.
3. Hand drafting is the only way to really understand how projected drawings (axons, perspectives) work. I.e. it makes the difference between a 3D software “user” and an architect. Why? Because in hand drafting you draw not only lines that define the form of the space under discussion, you also draw lines that carry information about that space around the page, to project to other views. So you develop very quickly an understanding of which views are richest in information, or most productive in terms of comparing different parts of the space. Admittedly in twenty years when we are walking through BIM models in Glass, this won't matter much anymore.
4. Hand drafting allows beginning students to focus on the work and the drawings themselves without getting bogged down and stressed out with printing problems. It also fosters a palpably intense work atmosphere in studio because the students are all in there producing work at a scale that makes it easy to peer-review, or even just peek at over somebody’s shoulder. Finally, it lets students run through most of the major forms of architectural thinking and representation without needing to switch media or programs.
5. There is a rigor in planning and work-flow that hand drawing imposes that teaches time management. Hand drawing is a kind of performance: the speed of drawing affects the quality of the line; the transition from drawing one line to another becomes part of the craft and part of the thinking; the space required for each part of a drawing on the page is always in question; the best place to cut a section and the best direction to project information are contingent on the execution of earlier parts of the drawing.
Nice post, George. I agree that teaching beginning students to think three-dimensionally via hand drafting is extremely valuable. And I've seen that light bulb go on many times for them!
Agree. Good post. I think that there is an immediacy to using a pen and sketch paper to quickly study or communicate some aspect of a project that computers cannot currently match. For quick communication, being able to sketch is much faster than the computer.
And in my opinion, Michael Graves is certainly not an idiot.
I'm late to this discussion (at least on this forum) but I've written an extended response to this article here: http://heumanndesigntech.wordpress.com/2012/09/10/michael-graves-digital-visionary-what-digital-design-practice-can-learn-from-drawing/
I come at this question as a designer who operates almost entirely with digital tools, but who agrees with the meat of most of Graves' observations. For me the question is not "is drawing dead" but "how can digital drawing evolve to BE drawing, in the full sense Graves intends?"
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