Drawing a design

Blueprints are the instruction manual for assembling a building and they are mostly made up of drawings. Drawings following standardised parameters ¹ allowing for codes to be understood, thus preventing the risk of misunderstanding, to the extent possible.  The blueprints are not always enough. That is why the documentation attached is so extensive.

This type of technical-architectural drawing has barely evolved over the last century, although the tools to generate blueprints have evolved. But if we stop and think, actually, we have done nothing more than to generate digital reproductions of conventional tools. CAD software, with Autocad in the lead,² allows us to use computers to do what we used to do by hand. But they have not served to change the representation codes. We have changed the tool, but not the product.

The same holds for the text (even e-mail is nothing more than an evolution of letters written on paper under seal). The speed differs,³ but not the product as such.

The advent of BIM applications ⁴ has not substantially changed this. While there is a significant leap forward in the degree of monitoring the documents generated, and particularly their tracking and revision, when we transfer things over to paper, the previously mentioned standards are still used.

Only purely parametrical applications like Grasshopper ⁵ are beginning to point towards a true paradigm change in producing/generating/revising.

In its relationship with new technology,⁶ architecture has not gone beyond the sheerly speculative. The architecture produced, formally speaking, is just as enslaved to applications used (often very clumsily) to generate it. But the production of documents in architecture has been the same as it would have been for any other type of building. Very sophisticated buildings that still have floor plans, elevations, sections and building details. And the architect association’s stamp of approval.

From a nostalgic and romantic standpoint, it is usually said that we were better and more thoughtfully educated when we did hand drawing and then used fountain pens and other pre-digital paraphernalia to transfer the drawing over to ink. What is certainly true is that no one has ever taught me to think as I drew. (Perhaps I did learn this outside the School, when I learned to paint) just as no one ever taught me to think as I use a computer. And you can!

Unfortunately, and although we criticise those clients who think that the design comes out by itself by pressing the “d” key, we are at fault for thinking that because we use one software programme or another, we already know how to do whatever with our computers.

What is true is that we produce architecture with tools that could enable us to generate much more complete, productive information, though not necessarily more extensive, and in very little time if we actually implanted digital tools (we can call them work-padTM). Paper would disappear and access to all of the documents would come out of the Project Manager’s mailbox to be placed in all of the workers’ pockets.

This will require specialised training of both those producing the documents and their readers. But it will finally lead to a change and a step forward.

And to savings in paper.

Text translated by Beth Gelb