MICHAEL GRAVES: Architecture and the Lost Art of Drawing – NYTimes.com

By MICHAEL GRAVES

Princeton, N.J.

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?

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.

vía Architecture and the Lost Art of Drawing – NYTimes.com.

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Mi comentario: este artículo, y más aún, las ilustraciones que le acompañan, son una auténtica «delicatessen» para disfrutar el domingo.

Me siento totalmente identificado con los planteamientos del Profesor Graves porque precisamente, un enfoque similar, fue el que apliqué durante más de 10 años de carrera como investigador docente universitario: mi paradoja, en el área de diseño arquitectónico asistido por ordenador (CAAD)

A muchos de mis antiguos estudiantes les resultaba muy extraño que en las primeras clases de la asignatura DAAC no tocaran un ordenador, y el tiempo se dedicara a conversar y hacer bocetos en papel (que oportunamente aprendían a digitalizar) Luego, ya de lleno en el ordenador, se sorprendían con los resultados obtenidos al tener, de entrada, claras sus ideas.

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