how computers are changing the art of architecture.

Source: residential architect Magazine
Publication date: 2008-08-01

By Cheryl Weber

Part of the mystique of architects has traditionally come from their hand sketches, those fluid doodles that brilliantly capture the evolution of ideas. For centuries, the use of graphite on paper has reflected not just the way architects think but also their signature style, the way a piece of fine art expresses the creator's point of view. These handmade images have unique qualities—an inherent warmth, the happy accident of a line gone awry—that are so different from the dimensionality and slickness of computer renderings. But it's not just that hand drawings are lovely to look at. A pencil is the most immediate and versatile design tool there is. Architects can communicate ideas to others with a few swift strokes, whether they're in a conference room or coffee shop.

With fewer students being trained to think on paper, is the classic napkin sketch going the way of the hand-drawn Disney movie? The jury is still out, but just as technology has changed movie animation in recent years, it's profoundly changing the creative process for architects. No one wants to return to the old ways of doing things. The computer has been a boon to handwork, enabling architects to scan their drawings for digital tweaking and 3-D takeoffs. And who can argue with the ability to explore on-screen the play of natural light at different times of the day, to test material connections, and to walk clients through their house before it's built? Still, many architects are conflicted about the diminishing role that hand sketching plays in the exploratory process. What does it mean for design when the virtual appears to be real much earlier in a project? In an era when a Photoshop image can look sexier than a real-life snapshot, some worry that the software is taking priority over creativity.

What's more, many architects (particularly those over 40) view hand sketching as an indispensable tool for team collaborations. “It's an ideal means of communication between everyone in the office,” says Robert Hull, FAIA, The Miller|Hull Partnership, Seattle, who looks for drawing skills in new hires. “You can always do a quick sketch and talk about it better than you can go to a computer and bang out a drawing. It's a right-to-the-right-brain communication device, and you can cover a lot of territory because of that connection.” However, he adds, “I have heard people say the same thing of a computer.”

It's tempting to frame the manual/digital divide as a generational issue. And it's true that people are most comfortable with what they've grown up with. But that may be only part of the picture. Many architects simply think best in low-tech, and today's firms take a hybrid approach that capitalizes on the talents and technologies at hand. One example is Juan Miró, AIA, a principal of Miró Rivera Architects in Austin, Texas. In the early 1980s in Spain, his architect father began drawing everything on the computer, whereas he is partial to his No. 2 pencil. “Many times you don't know exactly where you're going, the way you think aloud. With drawing, your hand can be a bit ahead of you,” he explains, adding, “I don't like to have things between me and the paper. I don't like iPods either, because I don't like to have things mediating between me and the music.” He does acknowledge, however, that his early schemes get tested fairly quickly on the computer, through Google SketchUp and other modeling programs that allow him to scan and manipulate the drawings, print them out, and draw over top.

Christophe Vorlet

Even when architects sketch by hand, their ideas are making the digital transfer much earlier than they used to. Hull, who is “quite a bit over 40,” doesn't use computers himself, but he and his team work back and forth to develop the drawings electronically. He'll often trace over printouts, though he avoids the hierarchical hand-off. The firm is starting to design houses in Revit, which allows users to create idea diagrams that are easily circulated among the design team and consultants. As the building takes shape, the group often gathers around a computer to solve problems on-screen. “I love to look over someone's shoulder to work on a wall that's not resolved,” Hull says. “With BIM, a whole new dimension is created that allows you to look really deeply into a project, and you don't have to go back to hand sketches.” (For more on BIM, click here.)

Computers have brought traditional model making up to speed too. Like hand drawings, physical models encourage open-ended exploration and direct manipulation, and now they can be laser-cut from CAD drawings. “There's something about making physical models, where you don't know where you're going, that makes them essential to design,” Hull says. “When you send something to the computer, the idea is already formed. The computer can't mush around, but you can take a piece of basswood, turn it on its side—whatever it takes to jar your creativity.”

Boston-based Höweler + Yoon Architecture also uses software commands to generate and test ideas, whether the project is a house, an interior finish, or a piece of furniture. The designers doodle on paper, draw on the computer, sketch over printouts, and use 3-D files to build physical models, which are then cut apart, reassembled, and returned to digital form. MIT—where co-principal J. Meejin Yoon teaches—is a source of fresh graduates who can write computer scripts to improve on 3-D geometries. One intern recently figured out how to optimize a waterjet cutter to make a stacked-glass piece with a compound curvature for an office lobby. The calculation reduced the fabrication cost from $200,000 to $53,000. “At Cornell in the mid-1990s we were taught that you have to make it to know it, and you don't know it till you draw it,” says co-principal Eric Höweler, AIA. “Sitting down at the computer seems so far removed [from that mind-set], but we have no problem switching back and forth between digital and analog and different software programs.”

The equal-opportunity approach also kicks presentation drawings up a notch. Although Fayetteville, Ark., architect Marlon Blackwell, AIA, works with a “big fat pencil,” he and his staff use Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop to add materials, line weight, and color to scanned perspectives, which then read as a polished sketch. “The problem with highly refined computer drawings is that they take exactly the same amount of time as highly refined hand drawings,” Blackwell says. “So it's about craft and using the mediums to describe what they are best at describing.” At the University of Arkansas, where he is a professor, students are printing their computer drawings on hot-pressed watercolor paper, infilling by hand, and creating montages with colored photos. The result is a layered, spatially rich surface one could never achieve by digital or hand alone. In the absence of a one-to-one physical object—an advantage other artists have—it constructs a sensibility about the project that clients can understand.

Like Blackwell, Benjamin H. Ames, AIA, of Alexandria, Va., builds presentation drawings by layering hand sketches and computer graphics. He's noticed that, while recent graduates are confident with the cursor, fewer than ever are agile enough to express their vision on paper. To help them develop that ability, he routinely asks them to resolve details by hand and teaches them to control line weight on drawings. “Even if they're doing a simple floor elevation, it's important to make outlines punch and increase legibility,” says Ames, principal of Amestudio. “You want to make sure the drawings have some personality to them. It says to clients there's an energy and fluidity to what we're doing.”

In the presentation, clients are looking for intelligence, and multiple platforms can convey that quality. Still, Miró avoids photorealistic renderings that present a project as if it were finished. “You need to keep a sense of surprise,” he says. “What it's going to be isn't something you know for sure until it's over.” Hull feels the same way. Clients still like the “dog and pony show” of hand drawings that show the exploration, he says. And loose sketches invite them to get involved.

Of course, multifamily clients expect something more polished. Condo developers love the computer walk-through, says Ali R. Honarkar, Assoc. AIA, a principal at Silver Spring, Md.-based Division1 Architects, where the design process proceeds from hand sketches to CAD to building the project in 3-D using form•Z. The architects use sophisticated light studies to show clients how natural light infuses the building at different times of the day and year, and they also model different types of artificial light. “We don't show them hand sketches, Honarkar says. “And hand models are so time-consuming; we can do more with computer modeling.”

While the inexorable shift from paper-and-pencil to pixels undoubtedly enhances design development, it also introduces new challenges. The most obvious example is the ability to doctor perspectives by elongating lines and adding digital color, texture, and lighting, which makes it easy to misrepresent reality. That's why the Philadelphia firm Qb3 uses computers sparingly in design studies and client presentations. “We feel the physical 3-D model reveals the truth in scale and proportion and form in a building, and it's easier for us to design in that format because we're not deceived by how something might look in a rendering,” says partner Patrycja Doniewski. “It is what it is, not a perspective viewed from somewhere else.”

The precision of 3-D modeling is redefining the design process itself. While handmade models allow architects to find their way with the forms intuitively, BIM turns the design sequence on its head by requiring them to input detailed information up front—a hindrance that becomes a benefit later on. “You have to tell a wall to be 10 feet, 6 inches,” explains Takashi Yanai, AIA, associate principal at Steven Ehrlich Architects, Culver City, Calif. “In the physical model, you're not so much concerned with the wall's dimension as the sense of proportion.”

The order of design is changing, and with it, the way the newest generation of architects think. Höweler, who teaches at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, says first-year graduate students begin their design explorations in 3-D software. Then they slice the model to get a 2-D representation—a subtraction process that is a completely different way of imagining space. “For the generation that learned to design on the computer, 2-D drawings are a byproduct of their 3-D model, whereas we were trained that the drawing was the representation, and that's what we'd hand to the contractor,” Höweler says. “The new generation doesn't think in 2-D unless we ask them to draw walls so we can talk about them. We're trying to teach them to draw in section so they can understand the project spatially.”

For Greenwich, Conn., architect Joeb Moore, AIA, who works with a roll of yellow trace, one of the great frustrations of practice is that his youngest employees cannot think with a pencil. As a result, they don't understand how difficult it can be to join different materials together. “They think it's as simple as a command button on their computer,” says Moore, principal of Joeb + Partners, Architects. His office experimented with using a BIM program for schematics, but trying to resolve all the conditions simultaneously proved too labor-intensive for residential work. The staff spent thousands of hours in schematics and design development, which account for only 40 percent of the fee—time wasted when the clients changed the project scope later. Now the firm uses software such as ArchiCAD and Rhino for rapid 3-D modeling, ArchiCAD for plans and elevations, and 3ds Max (formerly 3D Studio MAX) and Maya for renderings and animation.

Nobody wants to be in a position where the computer is in control. And as architects use technology to hone their particular way of seeing, the challenge is to embrace the best of both worlds. “I am concerned by students who think only with the computer, because I think it's important to be able to draw an idea in real time,” Höweler says. “But I'm not one to lament the loss of the pencil. New opportunities have emerged that are as interesting as the napkin sketch.”

The ideal balance between drawing and computer skills is being debated not only in design firms but also at architecture schools, where the issue comes down to the best way to teach critical thinking. Yet there are no objective measures for how well people think in different mediums. “In the architecture profession, we haven't always been clear about why we educate the way we do; we just know it works,” says Brian R. Johnson, associate professor at the University of Washington College of Architecture and Urban Planning, Seattle. “That's the intergenerational challenge.” Traditionally the university has required students to use desktop drafting tools in tandem with computer software, but it will likely stop requiring them this fall.

While there's no question that students' future practice will be largely digital, there is a downside to a computer-focused education, Johnson believes. For example, when students aren't sure how to develop a project, they'll frequently spend time modeling finer and finer details. “The tools we have these days allow you to get into more detail than you are prepared to deal with if you're not careful,” he says. “So there's a seduction there. Students clearly understand that they need to invest time in their project. They don't always know the proper place to invest it.” Likewise, he says, they've been taught that computers are objective, and this translates into a belief that if they invest time in developing the model, they'll be able to hit a button and get objective answers. That's partly true, but not to the extent that students hope for. When they're struggling with a conceptual conundrum, they often resort to spinning the model without addressing the questions that move the design forward.

Another potential trap for young designers is knowing when to abandon an idea and start fresh. Computer modeling doesn't necessarily result in side-by-side comparisons of alternatives, the way that having two physical models or pieces of paper does. “We tend to open a file and develop a design in that file, and it's not always clear when we've essentially started an alternative,” Johnson says. “So people can have trouble structuring their decision making. When they've dropped a lot of time down the hole, the tendency is to keep manipulating rather than confront the possibility that starting over would be the best strategy.”

In the absence of clear answers about the best way to learn, the architecture school aims to help students develop flexible tools that enhance their design thinking rather than their productivity, since technology is a moving target. “One of the challenges of the digital age is not to try to replace one set of skills with a different set,” Johnson says. “The tricky bit is making room in our educational processes for students to acquire both.”