Stop drawing! Let computers drive you!

Image CC-by Jared Tarbell ¹

This is the story of a perfect crime, that manifests itself in all of the current ‘operationality in the world’, in our ways of realising dreams, fantasy or utopia and transcribing them numerically, and turning them into information, meaning making them virtual in the most general definition of the term.²

Because 70% of your have turned in designs drawn completely by hand, and you know what it means to shift over to working with machines.

Because despite the fact that you like to draw, you like to use digital tools better, although you refuse to take the step.

Because your filiation with 256 colours means that although you have the universe within reach, you still mostly work with CAD, which is nearly the same as drawing by hand.

Because when we ask you for the breakdown of your working time, i.e. designs, between thinking and (re)presenting, you say you behave like a perfect Gaussian curve. Although we all know that the curve should be insanely shifted to the right.

Because although you are true control freaks and a grey nuance in the competition panels drives you crazy, you are able to believe your buildings will not fall down because a computer programme draws the green lines for you.

Because, despite the fact that the 70% of you that turned in projects fully drawn by hand already knows what the wandering in the desert is like when learning how to use software that developed the concept of a FATAL ERROR, you are lazy enough not to learn to use programmes that could improve your productivity to an unthinkable extent.

Stop drawing!

Because drawing fossilises. Drawing, that stain on a paper, is permanent and irrefutable enough to be legally binding, while what is digital is ethereal, electric and evanescent.

And, while we’re at it, why not learn to think beyond digital?

Why not think from an information standpoint?

Information is information, not matter or energy. No materialism which does not admit this can survive in the present day.³

In the 1970s, architects like Friedman, Alexander and Negroponte –each in their own way– attempted to use information tools to boost design processes in architecture.

Now, forty years on, after these attempts, unfairly dubbed utopian, our digital tools have us straightjacketed using iconic thinking where we need to represent the reality we are designning.⁴

These systems, as they are tied to the visual –just like drawing- have less potential than the symbolic thought that lied behind the Sketchpad, the first CAD system in history… back in 1963.⁵

The easy answer, blasting these tools for the self-proclaimed formalist gurus’ undue appropriation of terms like parametricism,⁶ dooming it to be considered a fad, is similar in its short-sightedness to the express prohibition that many of us suffered from in our Schools of Architecture when we wanted to use CAD.

So as not to turn this into an advertisement, I won’t mention brands. But the versatility, enhanced control and operativity enabled by these computer systems when producing, monitoring and managing the building processes is of such significance that the fact that this power is not used in the initial phases of the design, the most creative phases that we truly enjoy, seems to me to be a tremendous waste.

Text translated by Beth Gelb