Glenn Murcutt took an opportunity to speak out against Australia's "number crunching" planning officials during a private viewing of his show Glenn Murcutt: Architecture for Place in Sydney.
Glenn Murcutt took an opportunity to speak out against Australia's "number crunching" planning officials during a private viewing of his show Glenn Murcutt: Architecture for Place in Sydney.
Murcutt, who has suffered 13 court cases over planning issues winning all but one, said most planning officials were “barely out of school” and should not be wielding the axe over Australian buildings.
“For each case it takes three weeks to prepare, six weeks to get over the stress and a win is better than a Pritzker prize,” he said.
“There is a spatial sense when one is drawing. The hand is an extension of the mind, an extension of the eye,” he said.
To cheers, Murcutt said the progress of architecture has been stilted by the invention of computer programs such as AutoCAD.
“I have not seen any improvement in the quality of architecture in the last 20 years since the advent of AutoCAD,” he said.
www.architectureanddesign.com.au
28 Comments
Right, and there's no spatial sense when drawing with a computer because you're pushing a mouse with what, your elbow?
He's right about planning review, though. And the ironic thing is that bad planning is way more toxic than bad architecture.
765, I'm not saying CAD-produced architecture has to suck (certainly not all of it does), or that hand drawing always taps into some primal spatial sense, but drawing by hand is undeniably a more physical act, because you're dealing with a physical medium. Drawing with ink on vellum, ink on mylar, pencil on vellum, or charcoal on newsprint are all different physical experiences.
And, much less likely to cause carpal tunnel. Just cool calluses ;-)
the hand is not an extension of the mind when using AutoCAD? from where the orders to move your fingers come from then? from your nose? who supervises what's happening on the screen and how the drawing evolves if not the eyes - as reporters for the mind..?
let's all do only models, they are even more physical than drawing on a paper... in fact, forget plans, let's project directly on site, like Adolf Loos..
sounds more like Prince Charles speaking rather than Murcutt... people get old fast.
right on medit!
Ugh. That's not at all my point. You're willfully missing it.
All I'm saying is drawing by hand is a physical act.
I never said any thing - CAD, video games, online sex - causes the movements of the body to not be an extension of the mind.
What I said is drawing a line on a physical medium with a physical medium is a more physical act than is making a line with pixels. Whether that influences one's ability to make good architecture is completely irrelevant.
Kindly get your panties out of a bunch. ;-)
Hey LB, aside from stating the obvious, pen and paper are physical, yes, what IS your point? do you agree with master Murkutt or not ?, 'cause the point he IS making is related to AutoCad and the quality of architecture.
panties what ?, please leave out the panties :p
I was responding to 765's comment, which seemed to equally compare hand drawing to computer drawing, because they both employ moving your arm. I was pointing out the differences.
I also carefully said I don't believe good architecture is dependent on the means (hand drawing, CAD drawing, whatever).
To Murcutt's way of making architecture, however, the means are obviously critical. (He is, I'll point out, a Pritzker winner.)
liberty...I agree with what you're saying and in many ways what Glenn's point is. As someone who has had the benefit of spending time with Glenn and some of his contemporaries at a workshop he runs I can say that he is very passionate about the direct connection of hand to paper that gets lost using a computer.
The ability to hand draw is something that is sorely lacking in many of the young architecture graduates I've juried and worked with. The younger generation tends to "default" to pixel and mouse and can create seductive images and forms but will lack in rigorousness. Many still can't "draw" with computer and by that I mean even their most simplest of 'drawings' can lack clarity, depth or spatial understanding. And this becomes most evident when their CAD drawings lack readability.
Tell a young graduate to draw by hand and some look at you as if you're a living anachronism. What differentiates an architectural drawing from a drafted plan is the clarity and understanding of what is trying to be presented and represented with line weight, composition, etc. If a contractor can't read your drawings and clearly understand what your intention is then you haven't done your job as an architect unless you plan to on stand on site and gesticulate wildly to explain what you "see" happening there to the contractor.
I design using all the tools at my disposal and simply limiting oneself to just the computer, I believe, inherently limits one's ability to see and spatially compose what we are trying to create. Drawing by hand, studying with physical or digital models all inform the process. But there is something more direct when drawing by hand...even if it's the simplest of sketches or details that can be far more informative to my design process than simply drawing in CAD.
If anyone thinks the best architects working today are only digital then they have been purely seduced by the digital rendering and not what has gone on behind the scenes to get to the 'money shot' ,to borrow the adult industry phrase. (Now where did I put my lead sharpener and eraser shield...)
I've also spent a lot of time with Glenn and know how passionate he is about this stuff.
It's impossible to push an argument like this without verging into superstition and mysticism - physicality is just a shorthand for some imaginary spiritual power that's transmitted from mind to hand to pencil to paper, a circuit that is, in this line of thinking, broken by the screen as mediator.
The next thing that's usually invoked as the manifestor of this energy is resistance, to make things we need physical resistance, as if Autocad had some kind of brain plug peripheral that translated concept to execution seamlessly (BTW - where's metamechanic at?).
There's always physicality and there's always resistance. To get absurd about it - I'm moving the mouse with my wrist, and it's encountering resistance on the mousepad, but it's also encountering conceptual resistance in the different softwares and platforms I'm using. LB says ink on mylar, graphite, marker, trace, ... what about Illustrator, Maya, Sketchup, Autocad? They all behave differently, with different grains and affordances, different stickinesses and flows ... these programs themselves are really just bits of tiny iron bubble moving around a magnetic disk, it's all physical, just tiny.
I say this as someone who draws by hand, a lot, I stayed up last night til 2 am drawing in my sketchbook just for fun. It's ridiculous to get all worked up about the lost mystic power of hand drafting - crap buildings have been around for thousands of years ...
i've spent a lot of time with glen 'draws by hand' small, and never once heard him complaining about drawing by computer or by hand.
he only complains about everything else.;.)
I can tell my keyboard and my monitor are 100% physical .. cause I can touch them (touch), I can see them (sight), they make little noises (hearing) and if they are new I can smell the plastic (smell)... that's 4 phenomenological acts that validate the physicality of my instruments and therefore the possiblity of recreating in my mind the potentialities of the architectural space that appears in my screen in a not so different way than Murcutt's romantic (and no less reactionary) view,...
and when I work with a different keyboard -different size, different shape, different material- I can feel the difference exactly like when some time ago I changed from 2c (to draw boundaries) to 4b (to draw shadows) in my old school's sketchbook
“I have not seen any improvement in the quality of architecture in the last 20 years since the advent of AutoCAD,” he said.
Murcutt seems that fails to understand that AutoCAD or 3d studio were not invented to make architecture qualitatively better in these past 20 years, but to make the quality of the practice of architecture easier... and I think those programs have succeeded for the most part, at least for those offices and studios open to new types of physicalities different than those that Palladio or Walter Gropius experimented.
I got your back, lb. I fully understand what you're saying, 'cause I've said it myself before.
I'll put it another way, in musical terms.
With the computer, you can make literally any sound you want, and even make it perfect (though you're limited by your speakers, I guess). But the act of creating a sound with a musical instrument is PHYSICAL. Yes, the end result might sound exactly the same, but the physical act of using the instrument to make the sound is absolutely more related to the human body than is moving a mouse around a computer monitor.
There's definitely a place for computers and technology and software, but none of those negate the fact that humans are analog, not digital, and for most of us there's a satisfaction that comes from having a physical relation to work (and play).
We're not musicians, Dustin, we're more like composers.
... and besides, are you going to say that, by extension, electronic music is soulless, too? Cause that's a whole other thing ... ;D
architects are composers and orchestra directors, bricklayers and carpenters are musicians
architects are film directors, screenwriters and art directors, bricklayers and carpenters are actors and actressess
why people think that computers aren't "physical" things at all anyway?
they seem to fall into the category of "Any entities which are composed of matter and/or energy, as well as the physical properties of those entities; and not merely items of thought or belief", just like a simple pencil... is there some sort of secret hierarchical order of physicality?
a bamboo mouse is physical enough? i'm sure it "feels" like a traditional wood pencil
765, you're right that a lot of this is metaphysical bullshit. All that matters is whether the end product is good.
But! but, but but...IIT for years only did ink on mylar on FLAT drafting boards. Why? Because an ink line on mylar on a sloped drafting board is going to be weighted to one side - gravity will draw the ink downward before it dries.
In my opinion, and in my practice, architecture is a physical act. I can get inspired by renderings, like in computer games even, but ultimately, for me, what matters is the built building. To me that means that the use of gravity in making drawings is relating in some metaphysical, spiritual, alchemical, whatever-mystical-bullshit of the week way with what I'm planning to build.
Of course, I do all my drawings with a computer, except renderings, because renderings are faster by hand. And, I don't think the tools necessarily matter, only the building.
The day the cell-sized building-bots can create physical matter from the program I've written in the computer - no carpenters involved - will be the day I actually celebrate computer generated design having arrived into its full value and potential. I'm seriously looking forward to that day.
Medit, you're just kidding, right?
having just come off of three weeks with no access to computer drafting software, and having done a LOT more drawing with wood pencil on trace than i have in a long time, i have to say that -
the experience of graphite on trace is different,
the thinking is different,
the immediacy of wrist>fingers>pencil>graphite>line>paper as a seamless thing is different than translating from mouse/keyboard into a computer language involving different colored lights hovering some distance away from any part of my body.
when the infinitesimal variation of my hand pressure travelling from pencil to paper and creating a ever-so-slightly darker or lighter line can be reproduced in a computer program,
when what i draw with a movement of my hand can be displayed exactly as i intended without any mediating language or need for reproduction which changes not only its quality but its medium,
then maybe i'll believe that working with a computer can communicate design thinking in an equivalent way to hand-drawing.
i don't hate my computer. it's become a necessary tool to achieve my goals. but hand-drawing remains indispensable. the problem, as i see it, is that students are learning ONLY the computer tool and not hand-drawing. if you don't have the facility to communicate quickly and clearly - whether with a pencil on a 2x4 in the field or on the back of a folder at a meeting - you're missing critical tools.
some of robert campbell's comments about the drawings of wright in this month's archrecord are apt here.
architects are architects. what is all this nonsense about architects are this or that? just do your jobs. we are not film directors, engineers, sex symbols, composers and being an architect might not always get you laid!
stop feeding the culture of 'i am so creative and special and i am an archhhhitect.' because it is like a caricature!
Medit, to go more directly to what I'm saying, and if you disagree I'll know you are just toying with me:
A line created with a mouse - or even without the mouse, which has more correlation to drawing than inputting coordinates on a keyboard -requires exactly the same physical movement whether the line you're drawing is .05 mm thick or 10mm thick. That is what I mean by "physicality". No one is saying the box sitting on my desk isn't a physical object.
I know how y'all feel, really. Working in Revit everyday has made me nostalgiac for Autocad! Revit is the beginning of the death of lines.
Very funny you say that, 765, as when I formulated my comment about line thickness I was actually thinking to myself "Lines aren't really our main tool of communication anymore anyway, are they?"
I too have studied under Glenn quite recently, and if we can all agree on one thing, he sure is old.
Regardless, I don't think his argument is so naive to suggest that it's time to pack away our keyboards and mouses, and pull out our clutch pencils in protest to modern times. I believe his argument is more a reflection on the poor current architectural situation within Australia (or maybe that's just my argument).
I mean did anyone see our Award winners?
I know (and agree) about the difference, but that does not answer Murcutt's argument about how drawing by hand has "more" capacity to provoke a spatial sense to the designer than the act of giving mental orders to a computer through a mouse with just some clicks... because "feeling" or sensing the space you're creating or imaginating is a mental thing not physical, so it doesn't matter which medium you use.
another thing, in my opinion not related at all with sensing the space, is that drawing by hand can be -at least for us who love drawing- much more enjoyable and entartaining than using a mouse, but having more fun with a pencil or watercolors won't alter your mind's capacity of perception of space... I remember students in school who hated drawing by hand but then made really good projects, well proportioned and with remarkable plastic compositions.
in fact, the only extra thing that drawing by hand will give you, at least from what I remember in school when they made us go out and draw building details in the street, is that you'll learn how to look at architecture in a more accurate way, you learn how to focus your sight on precise details, shadows, etc... but that's just a two-dimensional experience (sit in front of a building and draw it) and sensing the space -as Murcutt say- is a whole complete different thing -3D- that, I guess, involves other extra mental areas. So drawing by hand alone is not a fundamental thing, and you can use those extra areas when you sit in front of a computer, wether your hand is always doing the same type of physical "clicks" and routines.
(but I was kidding about the bamboo mouse, of course.. :p)
stop feeding the culture of 'i am so creative and special and i am an archhhhitect.' because it is like a caricature!
orhan, architects are architects of course... but one can compare this profession with others.
and yes we are creative, maybe not special, but definitely creative. you start with an idea and there's a built object in the end... that's being creative and there's nothing wrong -or special- about it.
OK, got it, Medit - no, I don't think hand drawing inherently gives a designer "more" of a spatial sensibility than computers do. Good or bad design can come from either, it's the designers ability AND their ability to use their tools (whatever they are) that makes good buildings.
Orhan and Liberty Bell are special!
(I can't stop thinking about your IIT, ink on mylar story, LB, that's amazing)
.;.)
yes architects are architects. everybody else want to be just like us!
i think the point might be not of the qualities of the tool (autocad) itself, but what we have done with it. I would suggest that CAD has made the process quicker, and therein lies the problem. Not much as in the process itself (i think we've managed to adapt) but our profession has used the tool to produce faster, cutting fees, and cutting the time design can actually grow (and it does take TIME)...
from the article, quoting murcutt: “I have not seen any improvement in the quality of architecture in the last 20 years since the advent of AutoCAD,” he said.
Block this user
Are you sure you want to block this user and hide all related comments throughout the site?
Archinect
This is your first comment on Archinect. Your comment will be visible once approved.