Drawing: The Motive Force of Architecture (Architectural Design Primer) by Cook Peter

Author:Cook, Peter [Cook, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9781118700594
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2014-05-27T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 7

Drawing and Technics

The tradition of the architects’ ‘technical drawing’ lies historically at a watershed. The smartest and fastest builders are increasingly passing their instructions directly from the predictive computer stage to the fabrication point. A set of parametric intentions can be linked directly to cutters, modellers, printers, evacuators or even patches of space that can have material induced into them. Perhaps it will be a long time before the designer stops making jottings, scribbles, rough layouts or cartoons of the procedure and the profile of things, but the conscious formalisation of drawn instructions is probably on the wane.

Against this lies that accumulated fascination of architects themselves – and not a few architectural supporters – with the physical inspiration of technology: that magic of bits and pieces, of things that do things. ‘Action’ was an inspiration for many great projects of the 20th century, leading to those gyrating solids and onwards to the notion of time as a tectonic element. The machine led to the device, to the gadget, and to a manner of thinking by which the hinge becomes far more expressive than the door.

We are now past the heyday of ‘High-Tech’ architecture, which has matured into a form of international vernacular for the upmarket corporate building. More often we seem to be demanding of technically loaded buildings that they remain discrete about it. In a world where the actual point of control is in a tiny chip in a hidden circuit, there is something sweet but quaint about our continued desire to celebrate the working part or the constructed technique. Yet within this paradox lies a delightful stream of architectural investigation, architectural expression and, of course, architectural invention.

Neil Denari, Floating Illuminator, 1992. Ink/airbrush on Mylar, 76.2 × 101.6 cm.

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