![]() ![]() To do this, their eyes and hands had to be trained. In the old days, prospective architects had to start by learning to use a pen, analyzing structure, proportion, cubature, light and shade to break down the world into its component parts and reassemble them on the paper. To put it bluntly, architects who rely solely on the design skills of their computers are neglecting what was once one of their profession’s core skills since time immemorial: the connection of eye, head, and hand to create sketches, drawings, designs and plans. ![]() Their impressive perfection is artificial and deceptive, their precision a challenge to the viewer’s imagination. The resulting photorealistic printout gives form to an idea that has not really even taken shape in the architect’s own mind.Īnyone looking for soul in a building or interior design will not find it in these colorful animated digital images. Sometimes, poor-quality rendering ends up provoking a protracted legal dispute: was the balcony supposed to be made of reinforced concrete, or just brightly painted steel? Like it or not, the computer is a handy desktop tool, a creativity machine that translates the most outlandish fantasies into physically realizable, fully costed designs that can be altered at a click of a mouse. Often, the client is disappointed because a detail bears no resemblance to the initial plan. And even before the ground is broken, a virtual idea has already acquired the authority of a tangible reality that serves as the benchmark during the construction process. Would any architect today think of presenting a client with a building detail drawn in Indian ink, or a perspective in pencil?Ĭlients often expect designers to produce pixel-perfect images right from the beginning of the design process, looking not unlike photographs at first glance. It would appear to be a relic of the past – but does that mean that computer-generated images are the future? Thanks to modern design and display software, the intention of this book may seem quaintly anachronistic. Here, I want to examine the relevance of this anecdote to architectural beauty, and discuss whether drawing by hand, a skill fast disappearing from everyday practice, is one worth preserving. Save this picture! Courtesy of DOM Publishersīut that is precisely what you would expect of a computer. The accumulated data had created not superhuman beauty, but a statistically correct average. But what the computer eventually spat out was a picture of an ordinary face, neither beautiful nor ugly, devoid of both life and character. The resulting information, they believed, could be used to generate a face that would be recognized by any human being as possessing absolute beauty. ![]() ![]() The scientists input countless photos of faces from all over the world, each described by survey respondents as particularly beautiful, into a powerful computer. They used state-of-the-art, totally impartial computer technology and a huge dataset to establish once and for all why particular faces are perceived as beautiful, and whether beauty exists independently of ethnic, social and cultural background in other words, whether it can be calculated mathematically. What is beauty? A few years ago, a group of international researchers sought to unravel the mysteries of human beauty. With our industry's technological advances, "the designing architect is not simultaneously the drawing architect." Meuser's manual aims to help architects develop and hone their technical drawing skills as the "practical basis and form of communication for architects, artists, and engineers." Read on for ten freehand drawing exercises that tackle issues ranging from proportion and order to perspective and space. The following excerpt was originally published in Natascha Meuser's Construction and Design Manual: Architecture Drawings (DOM Publishers). ![]()
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