As a life update.. for those that are interested.. or follow.. Boston is great. Work is really, really busy. I am just going 115% every day.. all day. I love it. We are now deep into CD's and the amount of things that are swirling in my head about the building make me ill at times. Its hard to keep it all straight and sometimes I feel a little overwhelmed. But I wouldn't change anything.
I was home over the last weekend and I went back through some of my old projects and I have got some good ideas for a furniture design I'm considering, I need to find someone with some experience to find out how I could get some prototypes made.. or how...
My friends from Germany arrive Wednesday evening... I am really excited to have them in town and it will be a nice break. We have some adventure planned and will be a fun time showing them around.
Here is the deep stuff....
Note: The first part of this post was started around 3 months ago
Recently Nate stopped by the office in Boston on his way up to the 603. One of the first stops was the 17-20” Wacom tablet I call a computer screen. “They let you touch this?” was his reaction (and to be honest mine as well when I was told which desks I could use.) A few days later in discussion about my blog he suggested I do an entry entirely on the tablet. The idea grew in my head and I after thinking about it for a few days I came up with a good direction to take my thoughts.
Now, the tablet is pretty awesome. I remember back in High school I think I saw a small tablet pad once a computer store. I probably wasn’t even sure what it was used for, but I knew it was cool, and I wanted one.
As I write this I’m having another flash back which is eerily familiar…
It’s of an old ITT Tech television commercial. I feel like this particular one aired from the late 80’s/90’s. It opened with these two guys in a large architecture office. I’m not sure if they were friends… or siblings or what… but either way. One was showing the other around and the younger of the two was completely enamored with the CAD drafting stations. The old school ones where this Ouija board looking mouse that clicked the tools on this huge pad. They show some screen shot of some poor intern hard a work drafting up some mindless detail in a building, but with some funky back ground music that makes it seem like the best job known to man. Yeah, that made me want architecture…
So flash forward to this last week, the similar situation is playing out in Behnisch studio East as I show Nate around.
Now… I must boast a little bit about the glory that is the Wacom screen. Outside it just being plain sweet (as any 20” touch screen would be) anything that involves Adobe programs is amazing. Say, cutting out silhouettes in photoshop actually approaches being enjoyable. Between key commands and the pen marking up pdf’s and doing little corrections is a breeze. I’ve notice that I save a lot of paper just going over the pdf’s on screen than having to print them out to check line weights. Though actually drafting and making corrections in AutoCad is not the best use, there’s just too much going on with the mouse to make the pen work well….. perhaps its only downfall.
Here we enter my current train of thought……
So that bit was written while I was still bright eyed and bushy-tailed about the Wacom tablet. And yes, it is pretty awesome, but sadly I ‘ve seemingly not been using it to the best of its ability. I’ve been spending more and more time in AutoCad and Revit as we get deeper into CD’s with he UB Law building. But the beginning serves as a nice segway into the current state of technology in the architectural practice.
There is always something new, faster, better on the Horizon that promises to be the savior of the professional office, weather it is a Mayline, AutoCad, Revit, or some yet unthought-of system. As anyone knows, this progress comes with a fair amount of skepticism. I had a little experience with Revit while in school, making my odd models for my thesis study, but actually getting into the program (and I haven’t even really done that) is an entirely new experience.
With hand drafting, or even CAD, drawings are still pieces of information that exist to themselves. Plans, elevations, sections all relate to one another and form the concept of the building, but they all exist as separate pieces of the puzzle.
One cannot assume that one will inform the other. They are unique.
However, with something like Revit, where one doesn’t make a drawing, but makes a building, these drawings all exist at once. There is no consideration in drawing a section, it can simply exist within the project. This is not to say that people don’t, or wont consider the section, but the very manner in which the basic quantification of architecture is made has been changed.
This of course can be said with any media or method of drawing. Drawing a section doesn’t necessarily imply an understanding of volume or presence. Lines on a page, if drawn by pencil or autocad are still just lines. Leaving a reader to extrapolate their meaning. But it seems to easy in Revit, to say, have a section and say that it has been “drawn”… because drawing something implies that it has been considered, studied or discussed. Which might not be the case at all.
Which then one might have to go back to the more “primitive” tool of CAD to flush out the detail or the information that one hopes to convey.
Well…. These are my thoughts for an Saturday morning….
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