A "digital imperative" is defining our age. Most members of contemporary culture feel the need to digitize their skills and knowledge.
Although the lag between the tools of architectural design and digital technologies is narrowing, we still find ourselves primarily in "analog mode," still using manual techniques similar those of the beginning of the century. This year, the Paperless Studio will address the challenging conversion from analog to digital modes of design.
Advances in electronic design and communication are already reshaping the economics of architectural design and practice. Unfortunately, most schools of architecture have been content just to dabble in digital, unable or unwilling to face the attendant financial, logistical, and pedagogical uncertainties of conversion. Their reluctance is understandable: the most bewildering challenge facing design pedagogy today is how to accomplish the inevitable conversion from analog to digital modes within an academic design culture.
Any solution must reconsider the very nature of the student's traditional, physical homebase in design studio, and this is a daunting challenge for any school. But the risk of not changing is great. Consider a familiar but ominous example from consumer electronics. In the space of a few years, the digital CD -- with its durability, clarity, instant access, and programmability -- routed an entrenched, high-quality analog technology, the 33 rpm LP.
Like the LP, the analog modes of architectural production -- yellow trace, lead, Maylines, vellum, clay, chipboard, basswood models, etc. -- are becoming obsolete. To be sure, they are intuitive, cheap, analogous to construction and comfortably familiar to students and faculty alike. Digital design technologies are taking over because, as a starting point, they replicate traditional media. Digital tools such as scanning, image processing, solid modeling, computer-aided design and drafting, raytracing, animation, and the corresponding output and telecommunications options of video, web sites, CD-ROM, multimedia and rapidprototyping emulate and enhance the traditional modes. A few years ago, digital systems were unfamiliar, counter-intuitive, difficult and expensive, and they were often accused of removing us from the essence of architecture, from the creative act of design, or worse, of driving the design process.
It is true that most early digital systems are poor challengers to refined, late analog systems. But hardware and software improvements are allowing digital systems to emulate the continuous, more intuitive and sensuous processes of an analog system. For example, computer graphics presentations have progressed rapidly from text screens to bit maps to smooth grey scale to 8-bit and 24 bit color, and now even have the ability to mimic the subtle effects of watercolor.
Moreover, the strength of digital systems in processing streams of information becomes a decisive factor as information itself is delivered in digital format, and that information can be massaged to quickly provide data that previously were slow and difficult to obtain. Improvements occur as quickly as the hardware economics permit. Just as standard applications such as word processing and spreadsheets reached maturity several years ago, so we are now seeing a sudden maturation of digital design and presentation software -- combined with dramatic hardware price reductions even as processor speeds continued to increase. These comprehensive, powerful and intuitive systems permit a design to be sketched, developed, drafted, rendered, and animated in "realtime." The digital design is then printed, presented on-screen or projected, sent around the world over the Internet, and even fabricated by a numerically-controlled rapid-prototyping machine, without ever existing on paper.
Last spring, Dean Tschumi asked us to propose an integration of digital technologies into the School. We proposed a seamless electronic infrastructure with a complete suite of state-of-the-art digital design and presentation tools. We faced two different but intertwined design problems -- the creation of a virtual design environment (software, interfaces, networking, archives, etc.) and the physical studio (location, layout, furniture, equipment, cabling, etc.)
The electronic configuration of the Paperless Studio was derived from experiments conducted by the Digital Design Lab (DDL), a GSAP research group concerned with electronic environments, both real and virtual. In the spring 1994 semester, in 206 Fayerweather, the DDL assembled an early prototype of the Paperless Studio, an electronic design environment which bore more resemblance to a special effects film studio than to a traditional architectural studio. Advanced equipment was granted from Silicon Graphics Inc (SGI). Columbia's Center for Telecommunications Research provided addition SGI hardware and video capability. Software was granted from a variety of leading vendors, included Alias and Softimage (best known for modeling and animating the dinosaurs of Jurassic Park).
This environment was tested by students and faculty in both real and virtual design projects. The design of the Gateway Lab, a state-of-the-art multimedia (real) space for Columbia's School of Engineering, used the latest modeling, rendering, animation and video presentation techniques, while several DDL projects dealt with the delivery of (virtual) spatial experiences through online and multimedia systems.
We saw that we needed to reverse the traditional studio arrangement of individual drafting tables and remote, shared computer labs. In the Paperless Studio, the computer workstation is the individual homebase, while manual production tools are kept outside in adjacent communal workshop areas. The 7th floor of Avery was recommended for a Paperless Studio precisely because the physical layout -- loft space with adjacent "exterior" balconies -- lends itself to this kind of programmatic separation.
The Paperless Studio configuration uses hardware "clusters" -- Silicon Graphics (SGI) workstations will be networked to Macintoshes on adjacent desks. Our experience has been that the Macs were best suited for tasks such as image processing, scanning, editing, word processing, Mosaic programming, drafting, while the SGIs were preferred for rendering, animation and video production. There was no clear winner in terms of the optimal design environment.
Each student in the Paperless Studio will have a machine dedicated to his or her sole use, but files can be transferred over the network to other machines as required for special shared or computation-intensive tasks. Indeed, learning the protocols of telecommunications and multi-user situations is a valuable part of the experience of the Paperless Studio, where electronic library resources, online databases, and global Internet access will be delivered digitally to each student's desk.
A successful Paperless Studio must be flexible enough to accommodate emerging digital technologies. Over the next few semesters, we hope to introduce some of the advanced methods and hardware which we will be evaluating in the Digital Design Lab, such as stereo-lithography 3D output, videoconferencing to remote sites, Virtual Reality goggles for stereo vision, advanced 3D multimedia tools and digital HDTV. Decisions on future directions must await the results from the first semester of the Paperless Studio experiment. Only then can many important questions be answered: Will students' unfamiliarity with digital tools cause them to resort to manual methods during a Charrette? How does the introduction of film and animation techniques change students' understanding of their own designs? Will digital methods supplant, or rather, co-exist with analog production modes?
The "digital imperative" to switch from analog to digital mode will manifest itself this year at the Architect School in the form of the Paperless Studio. Projecting ahead, we envision the inevitable and ubiquitous presence of advanced digital design and communication technologies. Architecture students will routinely use the best of new technologies within an information-rich and fully networked, multimedia environment.
--Eden Muir and Rory O'Neill, 1994