Wall Street Journal, April 29, 1996, pp. B1, B8.
Architects Fret as Computers Supplant Pencils
Nevertheless, many graduates may find their computer skills
valued even more than their drawing "Having a graduate who
can make a computer sing with the latest software catches
our attention," says Harold Adams, chairman of Baltimore's
RTKL Associates. "Having a good hand is important, but it's
not as high on our priority list as it was five to six
years ago."
By Mitchell Pacelle
[Photos] Hand drawing of Bridgeport Hospital in
Connecticut by architect Paul Stevenson Oles (above) and
a computer-generated image from Ferris Architects.
Young architects now spend far more time glued to computer
screens than hunched over drawing boards, and that worries
some leading architects, who believe that pencil and paper
are integral to architectural design.
No one denies that computers are an increasingly useful
tool, saving architects time in the labor-intensive process
of producing final drawings. Some pioneering architects
like Frank O. Gehry also are using computers to create
complex, futuristic buildings that can't be easily depicted
by old-fashioned tools.
But traditionalists worry that the ease of producing
flawless computer drawings can mislead young architects
about what is essential to good design and diminish their
drawing skills and understanding of spatial relations.
"I think it's a problem," says New York architect and
historian Robert A.M. Stern. who teaches at Columbia
University. "The real issue is, does [computer-assisted
design] take students away from the basics? I would say
yes." He adds, "Working out plans, elevations and
perspective sketches on pieces of paper gets the architect
into the fundamentals of the craft."
New Haven-based architect Cesar Pelli, whose designs
include New York's World Financial Center, says he is
concerned about the potential loss of drawing skills.
"Drawing is an element of expression and understanding," he
says. "If a person can't draw it by hand, then something is
missed."
The debate is in many ways "a generational discourse," says
William Pederson, lead designer at New York's Kohn Pederson
Fox. "We love drawing. It's one of the things my generation
feels is the soul of an architect." Still, he says, an
architect's job is to illustrate design concepts in a way
that is understandable to clients and builders. Whether
that is done with a pencil or a computer, he adds, is
irrelevant.
In any case, computers in recent years have become so
integrated into the design process that the question is no
longer whether to use them, but when it is still necessary
to rely on old-fashioned drawing.
Architects first began using computer-assisted design
software more than 10 years ago to prepare production
drawings, the voluminous final documents given to builders
that cover every detail of a building, eliminating many
hours of tedious drafting work.
As software has become more sophisticated, architects have
begun turning to computers earlier in the design process.
More firms are now using computer graphics in design
competitions and client presentations. Architects use
computer animation software to produce simulations that
allow clients to "walk through" or "fly over" proposed
buildings. And technology being developed at Massachusetts
Institute of Technology's architectural school would let
clients see how light shines into buildings at different
times of day.
Computers can't yet match an artist's ability to captule
the essence of a design, argues Paul Stevenson Oles, an
acclaimed architectural illustrator who works at Interface
Architects of Newton, Mass. Computer images have a
"hard-boiled" look and "tend to be simplified and
hard-edged," he says. But he adds that the computer offers
"powerful advantages" for rendering a building's
proportions precisely. "We need both," he maintains.
In the earliest stage of the design process, when a
building first takes shape in the mind of a design
architect, the computer has yet to play a central role.
Many architects insist that the computer will never replace
the sketchbook or cocktail napkin as the place for
designers to muse about building shapes. "Drawing by hand
is much freer than plotting something on the computer,"
explains Sheila Kennedy of Boston's Kennedy & Violich, an
associate professor at Harvard's Graduate School of Design.
Sketching is a quick way to take a look at a design idea
and determine whether something is amiss, she adds.
Yet some architects have begun to integrate the computer
into the sketching process. Scott Sarber, a 34-year-old
design architect at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill in Chicago,
says he shunned the computer for six years. Now he scans
early design sketches into the computer, prints them out
and then sketches over the printout.
Design architects who work up three-dimensional building
models in clay can now scan their models into a computer,
where the images can be rotated, tinkered with and viewed
from all angles. Additional gadgetry exists to produce
three-dimensional models from computer plottings. The
computer makes it possible to depict forms that would be
difficult to convert into production drawings -- "forms
that seemingly merge and morph into one another," says Ms.
Kennedy.
Perhaps no firm is more sophisticated at this than Frank O.
Gehry & Associates. Mr. Gehry, a Santa Monica, Calif.-based
architect, designs otherworldly buildings like the
Guggenheim Museum's Bilbao, Spain, satellite, a titanium
and stone structure now being built whose forms seem to
twist and melt into one another.
Among Mr. Gehry's other projects, an office building going
up in Prague will be covered with numerous irregularly
shaped, overlapping sheets of glass. His design for the
Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, a project
currently on hold, resembles a jumble of mutated boxes,
with walls that bend and twist. To measure and calibrate
all these irregular shapes, reduce them to drawings and
then expect materials fabricators and builders to work
backward from the documents "would make the whole process
absurdly expensive," explains James Glymph, a partner of
Mr. Gehry's who joined in 1989 to beef up the firm's
technical capabilities.
So the firm adapted a three-dimension digitizer used in
brain surgery to scan Mr. Gehry's models into the computer.
After the design is honed on the computer, the digital data
are sent directly to stone cutters, steel fabricators and
other craftsmen, who may produce materials through their
own computer processes.
"Each of these projects would not be possible without the
computer," Mr. Glymph says.
Even some fans of this powerful technology see a downside.
For an educator, "the scariest part" is that students can
"manipulate the software and get incredible 3-D images, but
they don't understand the building systems," says Julius
Gribou, head of the department of architecture at Texas A&M
University, one of the first programs to require all
architecture students to have laptop computers. "Loose,
creative, sketch drawing needs to be stronger."
Nevertheless, many graduates may find their computer skills
valued even more than their drawing "Having a graduate who
can make a computer sing with the latest software catches
our attention," says Harold Adams, chairman of Baltimore's
RTKL Associates. "Having a good hand is important, but it's
not as high on our priority list as it was five to six
years ago."
[End]
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