paperless problem
by Chad Smith
This study attempts to unravel some of the currents of thought in paperless studios, with the purpose of creating a larger body of knowledge about paperless studios.
The significant problems of computer-only design center not on whether work designed on computers is or is not architecture; instead, the central issue is the representational status of computer images. These ideas are not inherently manifest in architectural education, and are currently not a central topic for architecture thought in general, despite a rapid acceptance of digital tools in schools and practice alike. What I intend to demonstrate here is that our acceptance of this multifarious medium--without intense analysis and discussion--has detrimental consequences for architectural thinking/making. Most seriously affected is work on cities, where biases in computer representation can cause us to reproduce mistakes of the past and present.
This essay traces only one interpretation of digital representation; it bears two assumptions. First, that digital media in no way supersede traditional architectural media--drawings and models. Rather, digital production is merely a parallel activity which sometimes partially mimics more familiar techniques. This means that digital media have the potential to be antagonistic to or complicit with urban intentions latent in the biases of older media. Second, that the use of computers in architecture studios is in some part intended to produce a work of architecture: something with material consequences in the world of built artifacts.
An important concept in undergraduate drawing exercises is that of the scale of landscape. Topography becomes a terrain for architectural concepts. The question for students is, how can the ground be treated as something artificial, something created by both natural and human processes? Something urban? When exploring these ideas through pen and paper, the focus is that of limits; the limits of the page are negotiated simultaneously with those of the landscape ideas. The fields and the physicality of the drawing surface become a third field of negotiation for the intentions examined. This operation happens simultaneously, in that the limits of the page continually oppose (or are unconsciously complicit with) the limits of the fields to be drawn. The dilemma echoes the juxtaposition of scales inherent in drawing landscape; the scale of the human body is relatively minor compared to that of a large garden or golf course, yet body-scaled dimensioning of the land has very important effects. Plan and section--of the same scale--are opposed in this instance. And any drawing of them encompasses not only the scale of the drawing, but also the design intent, as well as that of the page they are placed upon. Scales of drawing, artifact represented, and artifact of the representation merge and are simultaneously negotiated.
Digital investigation of this sort is more difficult, because the issue of defining limits is different. Modelling programs do not begin with the problem of the limits of the page; indeed, the 'space' of the digital model is that of infinite expanse. Computer models must be conceived of and constructed as discreet objects in space/time, regardless of their scale. No matter what form of expanse is being made--thimble or continent--the elements are always constructed as discrete objects in digital space. This is not to say that the final representation cannot display the same characteristic ambiguity of limits that conventional drawings do; careful cropping can manifest identical results. The point is that the ambiguity of limits is not inscribed into the design process itself; typically, digital representation ultimately comes after digital construction. Where conventional drawing techniques combine design and representation in the same duration, digital techniques separate the two. Admittedly, the latter process can be modified to a process of constant, rapid switching between the two modes. However, the split remains, and biases design. Because of this, intervention into fields, landscapes, or zones of activity must struggle against digital tools' tendencies toward discreet objects. We are biased against field thinking, because it is not inscribed within a digital making process.
The city can be the subject of this operation as much as large expanses of rural or semi-developed areas; this kind of urban model is the subject of many contemporary architects. However, because digital fields are constructed as real objects, their status must be determined and represented appropriately, either as diagrams of building activity (themselves not intended to become material) or as real models of the world of built artifacts. Without this important distinction, the project has the potential to masquerade as an urban field when it is really a hyperdense object. The consequences are parallel to Fifties and Sixties plinth building: because the fields are constructed as real objects, these fields replace the reality they model. City-scaled discrete object replaces an urban landscape.
Evidence of the consequences of this distinction (between what is represented and what is representation) can be found in Walter Benjamin's essay "Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," where a similar case is made about photography as an artistic medium. "Earlier much futile thought had been devoted to the question of whether photography is an art. The primary question--whether the very invention of photography had not transformed the entire nature of art--was not raised." For Benjamin, the study of photography should be about how to see photographs; the study of how photographs represent their subjects will reveal the potential problems and biases the medium contains. He states that close examination of these biases have real and direct social effects. While Benjamin's critique is primarily directed at Fascism, Susan Sontag's book On Photography extends it to that of all socio-political forms. In this light, development of our cities can be connected to characteristics inherent within a representational tool.