On Drawing

Last weekend I stumbled on a drawing tube I had forgotten for about a decade. When I was accepted into architecture school I was sent a list of materials I would need for the various courses. I, like an over-eager and naive jackass, bought all of them. The smart kids showed up with a pencil, a set of squares, and a scale. And then they borrowed the rest from me whenever they needed it. "Hey Sean, can I borrow your adjustable curve?" Sure, I only paid $20 for that thing and haven't used it once. Anyway, a drawing tube was one of the items on that list and I used mine to store all my hand drawings from my first two years as an undergrad. After that I stopped hand drawing, except in sketchbooks, and did all my final drawings in CAD.

Looking back at that material from a large enough distance (large enough that I had forgotten most of the work and so could approach it without any feelings of possession or personal investment) I could see I learned a lot faster when I was hand drawing. The computer is a fantastic tool for grinding work out fast. It's also great if you are particularly skilled in some kind of image software or modelling software.  If you need photo quality images produced with a modelling software you happen to be expert with in a hurry the computer is indispensable. But it isn't a substitute for hand drawing. That I ever let it become a substitute has had an enormously detrimental effect on my skills as a designer.

This is something our industry should be more aware of. It's a truism that the most important tool for the most important person in any office is the telephone. The person in charge of any firm will spend almost no time drawing (compared to their subordinates), if they draw at all it will be by hand - quick sketches to show what they want drawn on a computer. Moving down the hierarchy means less time on the telephone, more time with a pen and a roll of paper until you get to the bottom - where paper is a luxury. The people on the bottom work on computers. The rarely use paper. I'm not writing this as a form of existential complaint (because my place in any firm would be mouse clicking and keyboard tapping). I'm writing it because the people at the bottom are at the bottom because they have so much to learn. Experience and expertise are what create the positions on the hierarchy (at least that's how it ought be and most typically is). The people at the bottom should be learning and, lucky for the industry, the way they learn is by cranking out drawings that have value to the firm that pays their salary. But mouse clicking and keyboard tapping is not an efficient way to learn. It is about the least efficient way to learn anything other than how to be really good at using the drawing software. Since a promotion will almost inevitably mean using the drawing software less, that seems kind of self defeating.

I used to think my experience in architecture school taught me I was likely going to be a better critic, thinker, or writer than an architect. I was in the top quarter of my class for the first three or four semesters and then I slipped down to the top half. I thought I had hit a plateau - caught up with the limits of some innate talent that couldn't be taught or measured except through experience. Now I think I just started learning a lot slower because I was relying so much on the computer. The down side of this is the realization I have to make up ground I didn't even know I'd lost. The upside is that since I started architecture school when I was 30 I think it is safe to say there isn't an age limit on learning. I start drawing by hand again, I start learning again. Or learning faster, catching up. This creates the paradoxical (or counter-intuitive) situation where I need to get a job where I will be sitting at a computer all day to have a place to learn from people with real expertise and getting that job will create an artificial barrier to learning because I will be working on a computer all day.

I suppose I could do a PhD in some combination of architecture and education where my position was "drawing facilitates learning" and I was my own test subject. And when I graduated I would still have people telling me they really like me but I need more experience in construction documentation. Ok, that last bit was existential complaint.