Life contains many illustrations of highly improbable things happening. Here is just one, concerning the turkey. Every day for a thousand days (if it’s going to be a large bird for the table), the farmer feeds the turkey. What’s the turkey’s view of the future? It can only be one thing: food tomorrow. Rather like Pavlov’s dogs, the turkey knows that the appearance of the farmer signals the appearance of dinner. Yet a few days before Christmas, the friendly feeding hand instead wrings his neck. Gulp: past experience can be a treacherous guide to the future.
Another example is the death of drawing. In fine art circles, conceptual art killed drawing as a means of communicating abstract ideas. It’s now unusual to find art students who can draw fluently using pencil and paper, and who show off that work at their degree shows. In construction, the computer first speeded up the production of working drawings, using a method of layering similar to overlay drafting, then supplanted and killed off the drawing as the primary means of communicating the design of a building.
Who could have imagined that we would give up on drawing the buildings we design? It’s all part of a shift in the paradigm of how we represent the world. Before the 1980’s, we lived in a graphic age, where we mostly used a flat, two dimensional representation of things to communicate with. After the 1980’s, we moved into a 3D world, where things are modelled rather than drawn, and where the influence of computer games is all-pervasive. 
The first examples in the media were the video for Dire Straits “Money for Nothing”, and the Max Headroom show on Channel 4. After that, Atari became Sega became Playstation, and so it goes on. It all began with Evans & Sutherland, who built the first flight simulators, using high end computers to create a “virtual reality”. How that term has been overused in the succeeding 30 years…
We may still generate flat drawings by cutting through a sectional plane, or showing an orthogonal view of the building – but increasingly these are snapshots from a three dimensional model. It’s not that the computer has killed the ability to draw – you can use Freehand or Illustrator to generate pin-sharp ortho, axo, iso or perspective drawings for presentation purposes. If you like, you can use a CAD programme to do the same – but it’s more often a case that folk expect to see rendered images and walk-though animations rather than flat drawings. In that case, the building is modelled rather than drawn.
Steelwork fabricators create unwieldy models in Tekla or StruCAD, detailing everything down to nuts and washers. This is a benefit to them, and at times it helps us to relate all the parts of the Meccano kit together, too. However, my last few weeks have been spent battling with an outfit who resist generating dimensioned, orthogonal drawings at all! Instead, they hope that the model, with several thousand lengths of steel section rendered in Smarties colours, will be comprehensible. However, nothing short of a top-end quad processor PowerMac would be powerful enough to let you navigate smoothly, and as a result, querying dimensions takes forever. We still need the hardcopy 2D drawings.
The corollary of all this is that many architecture students don’t learn to draw with a pencil. Nor do they keep sketchbooks any more. Because architecture schools don’t introduce the idea, few will scribble, gradually becoming adept in representing the world using as few lines as possible. And that is the killer difference: the object of Colin McRae Rally or Tomb Raider is to represent a world in as much detail as possible, to maximise the number of polygons rendered in each frame. The object of architectural drawing is to represent the world with just as many lines as you need, but no more. If we suffer from information overload, well, that’s the reason why. Visual communication is, or should be, about reducing things to their essentials.
Likewise, architects used to letter using virtually the same hand. Similarly, all calligraphers letter italics in a similar way, and graffiti writers use a common visual language called Wildstyle with loops, swirls, recurves and arrowheads. My mentor used to say that architects’ lettering should be interchangeable, so that anyone can work on somebody else’s detail without the notes changing radically in style or legibility. It also looks better graphically if the text is of a piece, but I graduated in the late 1990’s, and since then I’ve witnessed architects’ handwriting degenerate into a G.P.’s scrawl on a scrip. From Plasprufe SA to Diamorphine BP, it’s not that far.
The fag packet sketch is also disappearing – and not just because we’re not allowed to smoke Benson & Hedges filters after lunch any more. The hand-drawn doodle has some latitude, you can suggest ideas and create wavering, doubtful lines. The computer model is absolute, because every point has a set of Cartesian co-ordinates, and each line joining the points is the expression of a mathematical equation.
The creative mind uses both sides of the brain, but the computer is a digital version of your right brain only. Computer draughting is deterministic. It encourages a systematic–rationalising response to something which could also be dealt with, in a freehand sketch, using the intuitive–emotional left brain. Before I’m accused of Luddism, I’ve used a Mac for almost 20 years now, and I appreciate that computers have improved many aspects of our lives – but I temper that with skepticism about the way we apply technology unthinkingly. The computer is killing our ability to communicate clearly. It allows us to send loads of information, so we do just that.
One final thought – when architects fall out of love with architecture, they can resort to sketching and watercolours. Alf Malocco, who was a partner with Parrs in Broughty Ferry until a few years ago, now has a flourishing career as a painter. Portraying cityscapes and countryside, his work is underlain by a series of sketchbook studies, and a “structure” of roughed-in pencil work. The technical knowledge of what things are, and how to draw them, came from architectural training and years of practice – in the end, what he draws uses a form of visual shorthand. It’s a real shame that many young architects have lost that aptitude.
In a couple of weeks’ time I will be writing about the influence of the military on our architecture, so rather than wish for peace on earth, I hope that (unlike the turkeys at the start of this piece) you had a happy Christmas – and that Saint Nick brought you a sketchbook and some Derwent pencils on the 25th.
