But, the basic elements has been pretty much defined of what we can compound from nature, wood, stone, concrete, glass, metal, even plastic. These has propelled the building industry into the future, and it is still moving on its own pace with new compound chemical to form lighter, stronger and more durable material. Thanks to the pioneer builders and developer, architects can continuously experiment new methods to put a building together.
While the technology has brought us the physical material, it also has helped the architect to envision the design in a very different approach; more of a industrial approach at the beginning with computer aided drafting, then more of a visualization with three-dimensional modeling programs, then information modeling came across that spin into algorithm modeling with artificial intelligent.
All these approach and methods are possible due to computer which is a product at the dawn of information age; I would argue the digital age. Let's call this a "tool", just like a tool that helps the way of our practice. It assists us on drawings to communicate with client, it helps to communicate with contractors of what to build. But this 'tool' still serving a single purpose, that is to 'communicate'. At the end of the day, if it is not on the computer monitor, it is still on ink and paper. Which this brings some interesting thinking, so we have advanced so much that we still being very 'analog'?
There is room for debate on that topic, but I rather see it from a different angle. If it is to 'communicate', what is the most fundamental way of it? The purest way that spontaneously respond to your thoughts.......drawings......drawings by hand.....drawings that may not make any sense to others but yourself. The very first step of 'communication' between your thoughts and the physical world. I would argue this probably the purist form of design for an architect with culmination on science and art. I don't think I have all the answer to that purity, but Michael Grave might hold some valuable suggestion.
Trans-Post from New York Times Sunday Review The Opinion Pages
Title: Architecture and the Lost Art of Drawing
By MICHAEL GRAVES
Published: September 1, 2012
Princeton, N.J.
A freehand sketch of the south facade of the Denver Central Library, which the writer designed.
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?
The computer, of course. With its tremendous ability to organize and present data, the computer is transforming every aspect of how architects work, from sketching their first impressions of an idea to creating complex construction documents for contractors. For centuries, the noun “digit” (from the Latin “digitus”) has been defined as “finger,” but now its adjectival form, “digital,” relates to data. Are our hands becoming obsolete as creative tools? Are they being replaced by machines? And where does that leave the architectural creative process?
Michael Graves & Associates
A drafted drawing of the south facade of the Denver Central Library.
Today architects typically use computer-aided design software with names like AutoCAD and Revit, a tool for “building information modeling.” Buildings are no longer just designed visually and spatially; they are “computed” via interconnected databases.
Arcadian Garden Plan Diagram and Parti Sketch for the Plocek House, 1977
My referential sketches sometimes became the inspiration for architectural projects, as well as a way to communicate to my colleagues in the office, and even to my students. I drew a partial plan of a garden in Rome to emphasize the way that the form and axes of the adjacent building shape the space of the garden. On the same page is a plan diagram for the Plocek House, which similarly engaged the landscape in an axial manner.
Credit: Michael Graves
I’ve been practicing architecture since 1964, and my office is not immune. Like most architects, we routinely use these and other software programs, especially for construction documents, but also for developing designs and making presentations. There’s nothing inherently problematic about that, as long as it’s not just that.
Santi Nome di Maria, Rome, 1961
As a young architect in the early 1960s, I won the Rome Prize and spent two years at the American Academy in Rome. Before I went, I had created drawings only in my studio, but in Italy I developed an urgent desire to record what I saw throughout the cities and countryside. I experimented with various drawing methods based on what would best express the subject matter. For example, I made large, elaborate ink and wash drawings of important Baroque churches such as Santi Nome di Maria in Rome.
Credit: Michael Graves
Architecture cannot divorce itself from drawing, no matter how impressive the technology gets. Drawings are not just end products: they are part of the thought process of architectural design. Drawings express the interaction of our minds, eyes and hands. This last statement is absolutely crucial to the difference between those who draw to conceptualize architecture and those who use the computer.
Federal Chair, 1977
My design practice is not limited to architecture but also engages interiors and product design. I therefore am always looking at the composition of furniture and objects as references. I was intrigued by an American federal period chair that I saw in a friend’s home in Providence, R.I., particularly by how the flat surfaces of the edges contrasted with the curvilinear forms of the arms, legs and back. I wanted to remember that tension, which spoke to how the chair was fabricated as well as to its aesthetic character.
Credit: Michael Graves
Of course, in some sense drawing can’t be dead: there is a vast market for the original work of respected architects. I have had several one-man shows in galleries and museums in New York and elsewhere, and my drawings can be found in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art and the Cooper-Hewitt.
Sconce Studies, Undated
The second type of drawing that I have identified is the “preparatory study.” These drawings typically involve iterative studies that lead to a final design. I might, for example, draw several options for how the glass shade of a lighting sconce would be supported on a metal bracket, and how the bracket might be attached to a wall, drawing them in profile so that I could study the proportions.
Credit: Michael Graves
But can the value of drawings be simply that of a collector’s artifact or a pretty picture? No. I have a real purpose in making each drawing, either to remember something or to study something. Each one is part of a process and not an end in itself. I’m personally fascinated not just by what architects choose to draw but also by what they choose not to draw.
Temples of Juno and Neptune, Paestum, 1961
I always drew with a purpose, documenting what I wanted to study or remember. The Magna Graecia town of Paestum, Italy, contains two famous Greek temples that most architects draw in perspective to capture their picturesque character. Instead, I drew the Temple of Juno frontally, in elevation, which allowed me to study the proportions of the columns and the spaces between them.
Credit: Michael Graves
For decades I have argued that architectural drawing can be divided into three types, which I call the “referential sketch,” the “preparatory study” and the “definitive drawing.” The definitive drawing, the final and most developed of the three, is almost universally produced on the computer nowadays, and that is appropriate. But what about the other two? What is their value in the creative process? What can they teach us?
Via Appia, Undated
Since my paralysis nine years ago, I travel less frequently than I used to. I still draw – and also paint – all the time. I am particularly fond of creating drawings of remembered places. Many of the ink drawings in my sketchbooks depict buildings arranged within landscape; their relative positions on the page imply where they might exist in linear space.
Credit: Michael Graves
The referential sketch serves as a visual diary, a record of an architect’s discovery. It can be as simple as a shorthand notation of a design concept or can describe details of a larger composition. It might not even be a drawing that relates to a building or any time in history. It’s not likely to represent “reality,” but rather to capture an idea.
The Temple of Minerva Medica, 2009
The 18th century Italian architect Piranesi drew buildings in a didactic manner to show his contemporaries the Roman method of building as it was revealed in the ruins throughout the city. I, too, became fascinated with methods of Roman construction and also with the romantic spaces that ruins provide as they are washed with light.
Credit: Michael Graves
These sketches are thus inherently fragmentary and selective. When I draw something, I remember it. The drawing is a reminder of the idea that caused me to record it in the first place. That visceral connection, that thought process, cannot be replicated by a computer.
St. Peter’s, Rome, 1962
In addition to large ink drawings, I made quick sketches in pencil on creamy clay-coated paper. Here, at St. Peter’s in Rome, I continued to explore my interest in how paired columns create a frame for the view beyond. In this drawing, the foreground of the columns and the background of the church establish a middle ground, focusing our attention on the fountain.
Credit: Michael Graves
The second type of drawing, the preparatory study, is typically part of a progression of drawings that elaborate a design. Like the referential sketch, it may not reflect a linear process. (I find computer-aided design much more linear.) I personally like to draw on translucent yellow tracing paper, which allows me to layer one drawing on top of another, building on what I’ve drawn before and, again, creating a personal, emotional connection with the work.
Tuscan Landscape, 2011
My thoughts and recollections of Tuscan landscapes are inspired by my sketchbooks, and I make painting after painting of this theme. Like the modern Italian painter Morandi with his compositions of bottles, I habitually juxtapose buildings that originally would not have been seen together in order to achieve new compositions.
Credit: Michael Graves
With both of these types of drawings, there is a certain joy in their creation, which comes from the interaction between the mind and the hand. Our physical and mental interactions with drawings are formative acts. In a handmade drawing, whether on an electronic tablet or on paper, there are intonations, traces of intentions and speculation. This is not unlike the way a musician might intone a note or how a riff in jazz would be understood subliminally and put a smile on your face.
I find this quite different from today’s “parametric design,” which allows the computer to generate form from a set of instructions, sometimes resulting in so-called blob architecture. The designs are complex and interesting in their own way, but they lack the emotional content of a design derived from hand.
Domus Augustana, 1961
Rome, of course, is full of ruins, which I find fascinating for two reasons. First, the eroded surfaces reveal how the buildings were constructed. Second, the remains lead to speculation about the original form of the buildings. In my 1961 drawing of the Domus Augustana, I was trying to convey both what currently existed and what the original architecture might have been like.
Credit: Michael Graves
Years ago I was sitting in a rather boring faculty meeting at Princeton. To pass the time, I pulled out my pad to start drawing a plan, probably of some building I was designing. An equally bored colleague was watching me, amused. I came to a point of indecision and passed the pad to him. He added a few lines and passed it back.
Pirro Ligorio’s Roma Antica, 1977
Referential sketches for me serve as a kind of visual diary, whether they became associated with an architectural project or not. My sketch of a 1561 drawing by Pirro Ligorio of antique Rome records archetypal geometric forms as a paradigm for architectural compositions.
Credit: Michael Graves
The game was on. Back and forth we went, drawing five lines each, then four and so on.
While we didn’t speak, we were engaged in a dialogue over this plan and we understood each other perfectly. I suppose that you could have a debate like that with words, but it would have been entirely different. Our game was not about winners or losers, but about a shared language. We had a genuine love for making this drawing. There was an insistence, by the act of drawing, that the composition would stay open, that the speculation would stay “wet” in the sense of a painting. Our plan was without scale and we could as easily have been drawing a domestic building as a portion of a city. It was the act of drawing that allowed us to speculate.
Lequeu Tower, 1977
When I returned from Italy, I joined the faculty of the School of Architecture at Princeton University, where I taught for 39 years, always encouraging my students to view drawing as an essential part of conceptualizing architecture. I identified three types of drawings: the “referential sketch,” the “preparatory study” and the “definitive drawing.” The referential sketch records something that I want to remember, such as the stacked composition of this tower by the French neo-classical architect Jean-Jacques Lequeu, which I recorded from a book.
Credit: Michael Graves
As I work with my computer-savvy students and staff today, I notice that something is lost when they draw only on the computer. It is analogous to hearing the words of a novel read aloud, when reading them on paper allows us to daydream a little, to make associations beyond the literal sentences on the page. Similarly, drawing by hand stimulates the imagination and allows us to speculate about ideas, a good sign that we’re truly alive.