Front Page > World > Article Title/Fixture Title

Front Page > Entertainment

Email | Print | Subscribe

Click-2-Listen

advertisement

Architecture's dying art

Deborah K. Dietsch
July 28, 2007

Paul's Cathedral dome (left) is shown in David Macaulay's "Building Big," with Mr. Macaulay's exploded view of the dome lifting the exterior to show building construction. Commerzbank Frankfurt's Atrium (top) was created to bring more nature inside the modern skyscraper. Steven Holl's 1999 early watercolor shows a landscape with lenses (above middle), and Steven Holl Architect's axonometric shows fusion of lenses and landscapes (above).

---

The first retrospective devoted to the work of architect-turned-illustrator David Macaulay, on view at the National Building Museum through Jan. 21, may be the last of its kind. The types of artistic, handmade sketches created by the 60-year-old Mr. Macaulay are becoming obsolete as a younger generation of architects increasingly relies on the computer to draw and design.

The shift from pen, pencil and paper to keyboard, mouse and screen began in the early 1990s when computer-aided drafting, known as CAD, became an affordable, efficient tool for churning out construction drawings. Today, CAD is a fixture of architecture firms and schools, where students learn to design on the screen rather than at the drafting board or in sketchbooks.

"I graduated from the University of Maryland's architecture school in 1989, and there were two computers in the building," recalls Eric Jenkins, an associate professor of architecture at Catholic University who taught drawing workshops at the National Building Museum earlier this month. "The next year, they had added two dozen computers. Most students today find comfort in the computer because of its speed and finished look."

The replacement of the hand-drawn sketch with digital images has meant a loss of architecture's most basic creative skill: doodling as a way of pondering space. "You learn to discover through drawing," says Bethesda architect Mark McInturff, who teaches architectural design at the University of Maryland. "A computer wants to make a shape or a box. It can't be fluid."

Sketching, unlike computing, forces you to slow down and really look. This sense of discovery is captured clearly in Mr. Macaulay's gee-whiz dissections of domes, minarets, bridges and entire cities. His confident but imperfect line work helps humanize these big, rational structures and convince us they aren't so complicated after all. Much of the liveliness of these ink drawings would be lost if they had been sanitized on the computer.

Hand sketching is an important tool for representing the world not only as it is, but as it could be. This imaginative "taking a line for a walk," as painter Paul Klee described his creative process, provides the freedom to explore a design concept in an imprecise, nonlinear way. It allows for mistakes, erasures, embellishments, a kind of visual brainstorming, which just becomes a mere memory on the computer.

"When I draw and paint, I connect the subjective and the objective," says New York architect Steven Holl, whose lanternlike addition to the Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City, Mo., opened in June. "It's a way of open thinking and free-feeling, and it's unpredictable. In order to get closer to a dreamlike subjectivity, I like to make these little drawings and paintings at dawn, before breakfast."

Baby boomers like Mr. Holl may be the last generation to lay down their ideas on paper extensively and with regularity. Once considered an essential part of an architect's education, sketching and drawing now are often considered optional or merely personal — like keeping a private journal. The decline of musing on paper is particularly disturbing considering its pivotal role in shaping architecture's most influential ideas, including some that never made it off the page.

Click-2-Listen

Front Page > Entertainment