NYTimes.com: 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?
11 comments:
The art of drawing is starting to get lost in the modern age. We have all of these resources and instruments to make work faster and easier. Our generation has grown accustomed to instant gratification. And why shouldn't we, we grew up with those feelings? We were little when the computers were still being updated and now we have some incredible technology. There wasn't a point where we had to work at something technical for a long period of time in order to get good.
What comes out of drawing, however, as with anything that makes one develop their skills, is the learning process. Part of the experience of drawing is realization, maybe a mistake. Anything process that is less likely to occur on a computer. There is a reason that we have been drawing for so long and a reson that it is graphics that create a common language. Sometimes, things that are computer generated create this distance, emotionally, from the final product. The work was just another file or just another document and it looses meaning. I really dont know what would happen if drawing was phased out. Especially when it is something that is phase out of architecture, where drawing is pivotal to the art.
For me, I have this slightly irrational, mostly a joke, and a tiny bit true fear that technology will eventually be our ruin. I know this is incredibly melodramatic, but on a much smaller scale, this article kind of proves my point. As a society today we grow more and more dependent on computers and all that they can do for us. I agree with the author when he says, 'As I work with my computer-savvy students and staff today, I notice that something is lost when they draw only on the computer'. Personally I have very close to no talent when it comes to drawing something in an artistic way, so I do depend on programs like CAD to help convey what I am trying to do. But I think it is important for architects, artists, designers etc. to have the skills that can let their imagination run free, I am not saying that there are not people who do not glean that from a computer, but it is different. The story that is told of the sketching game back and forth, is so great because, these 2 adults can just let themselves go and DRAW. There is also something incredibly poetic about being able to take a drawing pad and go sit anywhere and create something. As people our brain is still the fastest computer out there, we can reason, feel, analyze, and create all within a fraction of a second. I think that that is the most important thing,and that is something that we will never be able to program into a computer. I hope the Art of Drawing is not dead, because I think that we would lose so much.
My biggest take away from this article was the artist's amdission that he is "personally fascinated not just by what architects choose to draw but also by what they choose not to draw". The absense of things in art is so powerful, and we must really take this into consideration when looking at a computer-rendered image. Do we see the smuge marks, the indentations from lines drawn and then erased when a drafting is printed out and mounted? Absolutely not. In a drawing, there is so much process, so much active thinking occuring on the page that you can easily lose when going straight from internal conception of a piece/building/etc to rendered model or blueprints.
Some of my favorite work from artists are their sketchbooks, in which they are not aiming to produce anything particularly astonishing, but rather trying to put their ideas to page as best they can. Erroneous lines, thick, black "finalized" marks atop thinner, less committal ones make for a beautiful layering of thoughts.
A year ago, i would agree whole heartedly with this article, and still would to this day. I hadn't drafted before coming here, and I felt like autocad was not just an attack on everything I was learning. I also, like sonia, have this immense fear that computers are going to take over the world, and undermine all that artistic feets that have been created years before. I fear that art, with hands is dying (knock on wood!) Despite all of this though, I can't imagine a world that would totally dismiss an artform that has survived so long. There once was a time when artists painted with oil paint, and to this day so many people still use oils as a mediums of choice! There also was a time when no one made art with technology, classical drawing and painting was in the majority, and other forms of art practice were in the minority. In thinking this, I just hope that hand drafting will live on- even though it is not the most popular medium of choice. Even though autocad and computer programs seem so freaky- I think its important to not be afraid of a technology that can help us, we just have to pay some respect to the old artforms as time marches on.
I strongly agree with everything this article said. I think that a final computerized draft is defiantly warranted and at times even essential but hand drawing especially in the beginning stages of a work is just as essential. In so many fields of art it is vital that the art be seen in different forms and mediums before the final product can be realized. There is also something so personal and emotional about a drawing that you just cannot get with technology. I think that applies to many areas of our lives these days. Our relationships with other people stem from reading short electronic messages as a posed to speaking face to face. Its the same as the difference between turing the well loved pages of a book in you hand and swiping a screen to see the next paragraph, its just really not the same and we are slowly loosing the connections we had with so many of the things around us. Art and other people getting the worst of it. I will really hate to see how little real connections we have left in the future.
Ugh. I am so sick of people referring to different things as "lost arts." That is such a useless attitude. Obviously drawing, as an art, is not lost. I can't think of a single kind of art that has been lost. Cave painting, maybe? Not so popular today - but over the course of my education even that has been brought up numerous times. Will technology be our downfall? Probably not. Will it replace art as we know it? No. It will, however, expand our mediums and diversify the types of art we are producing. Art has evolved with us as we've evolved as a species. We are in a a new phase that includes a lot of technological advantages - that is absolutely no reason to cry. Nothing is lost, only some things have been added.
There are many who would assume I would be the last to agree with April; to some degree, I do however. The use of computers does not mark the death of architecture (or in our case, design work of any kind) as an art form any more than our moving our of caves to live in houses meant the death of cave painting.
But that's not what the author meant, I think. Professor Graves is interested, I believe, with the emotional connection he himself feels with his work and the human connection he feels with his work and how he does it.
What Professor Graves leaves out of his argument is the hours and hours he spent learning and practicing to sketch in a useful way. These days, students believe they simply do not have the time to dedicate to practicing lineweight and lettering. AutoCAD is the faster and easier path to getting information on the page (or screen, as the case may be). But in skipping those disciplinary exercises, do they lose a level of connection to their work?
Like Graves, I have no interest in forcing some aura of romance onto our work by talking about a connection with the page or some other nonsense. The computer is arguably the most effective way of transmitting precise and explicit information. I do, however, believe there is a level of material cognition not possible in computer work. We exist in realspace and realtime; so does our work. The scenery we design, build, and paint; the lighting instruments we hang, focus, and light that scenery with; and the costumes we render and wear ALL exist tangibly alongside us. So do the pencils we draw and sketch these elements with. In the same way an email exchange cannot take the place of a face-to-face meeting the computer cannot ever completely replace the pencil and sketchpad as a tangible way for our brains to work. Even if it has replaced how we produce the final end result, so long as the ideas themselves are formulated and honed within out brains the Art of drawing cannot be truly dead.
Want to read more? Me too. But we'll have to wait for my thesis.
I agree with the author of this article and I am not alone. The creators of the CMU architecture curriculum also agree. It is designed with these ides in mind. For the first of the five years during studio the students do nothing but hand drawing, drafting, and model building. The Idea behind this is that you must first understand the principles of doing it by hand before you can understand how to do it on a computer. It is meant to help students find the balance between hand drawing and computers.
Personally, I feel that hand drawing is far from lost in both the architectural and theatrical industries.
As previous noted, it is still a foundation that is taught to at least provide students with an understanding of the time, various techniques/styles/skills, thought and consideration that needs to be conveyed in their work, even once they transition to a more digital format. Admittedly, most of the work I do these days is digital, however, I still sketch things out and do "napkin" drawings before I fully tackle a project and start working in AutoCAD.
I find it hard to believe that a convention such as this can be abandoned, lost or forgotten. However it can be ignored. I will agree that there is a push to stop teaching hand drafting in some circles, but why? What is there to gain from that, frankly I think it's just lazy to cut this element out of a curriculum.
I am totally excited about Jacob Rothermel‘s thesis. For my experience, I am a terrible hand drafts man. I was born with a shaky hand and poor eye. In recent years I have become moderate adept at AutoCad. This program has been a very effective way of getting my imagination onto the page. Drawing, on a computer or a canvas should be the outcome of an artist’s imagination. I do not think that architects should bemoan the death of drafting, then should lament the loss of imagination.
Artistically, hand-drawing is dying. More people are turning to computer animation, graphic design, digital photography, etc. It's kind of sad actually. Instead of mastering a skill, people move towards the faster and cleaner way to produce art. Architecturally, it is the same deal. I agree that the creative process and initial sketches are the some of the most interesting parts of the designs. I find hand-drawings more charming than computer generated ones, probably because hand-drawn lines are not just lines. They embrace the individuality of the artist that a computer cannot reproduce. True, the computer is a lot cleaner looking, but is it such a bad thing to master a skill so hand-drawn sketches are also clean-looking? People also use the computer to create sketches faster. The problem is, all of the sketches look the same. They look generic. Like anyone could create them. A hand-drawn piece has a life to it. It is unique. One of a kind. That's what makes them so special. Like a live-theatre production, they can only be created once. I would rather have quality than quantity.
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