Sketching

Sketching

Sketches may be sacrosanct in architecture but I never managed to see them like that. Sketching may be a great way to externalise design ideas and one can learn a lot from correlating these ideas to the sketches but in the end they remain a temporary product, an intermediate state in the production of a building design. So, I fully concur with interest or even fascination in sketching but I also refuse to revere them more than the design or the building.

For years I'd been working on the automated recognition of drawings (something that deserves far more attention than it's given) and every time I presented some part of that work, there was someone who pointed out that of course these recognition approaches did not apply to sketches. Without much thought I agreed with such remarks, until one peaceful summer afternoon in the garden, when I was doodling on a piece of paper. Suddenly, the inquisitive researcher in me finally woke up and asked the obvious question: it is so? Are sketches that different from drawings?

I've spent some time on that question and the brief answer is that from a representational point of view there may be fewer differences and more similarities than assumed. Sketches are fuzzier and compound but at the paradigmatic level (the level of symbols and primitives), they often come close to drawings. I just hope that I'll be able to test this hypothesis at a large scale in the future.

The moral of the story is not about sketching or representation; it's about insisting on questioning established prejudices and conventions. It may seem silly, fractious and obstinate at times but if done with real curiosity and interest in learning, it can be a source of great pleasure to the researcher. Why do research for anything less?

The recurring fascination with generative systems

The recurring fascination with generative systems 

Soon after I had entered the area that used to be called CAAD (Computer-Aided Architectural Design), I realised it was motivated by two quite distinct and actually conflicting ambitions: to computerise drawing and to automate design. The design automators were in power back then, leading the area with creeds like "intelligent design versus stupid drawing". I didn't agree; I have always been fond of drawing and fascinated by visual representations in general.

Still, when the democratisation of computing meant that computerised drawing became commonplace and hence dominant, I was less than pleased for the basic reason that much in computerised drawing was not about new, intelligent representations but about producing the same old stuff on paper, only seemingly more efficiently (people think that efficiency is merely the ability to change easily the content of digital documents). What followed is what one can see in architectural education and practice today: an overemphasis on visualisation, combining poorly readable line drawings with lavishly rendered perspectives, meaningless or jittery walkthroughs and often no time to study all those images for the benefit of the design.

The funny thing is that design automation persists and is resurrected by every other generation of students and your researchers, who somehow inherit or more frequently rediscover the appeal of the same techniques for generating patterns one can pass off as schematic designs. Among them, those relating to space allocation never fail to come up: one makes a list of rooms, determines some clustering of these rooms, uses some elementary way of arranging them in a floor plan, usually without the benefit of architectural knowledge (e.g. spatial typology), makes some manual adjustments to make the layout look less like the product of a child playing the architect, and calls it a design. It's amazing how easily people believe in the same old, tired techniques. It could make one believe that they have some inherent power but I suspect that they're simply easy enough to be rediscovered again and again. That they lead to nothing and are forgotten for a generation or so is a truer indication of their power.