Tom -- Many thanks for the interesting info and observations. Like I say, I think we're stalling a bit over the question of where the computers enter into the equation. How computers are used and what their impact is depends on the art form, and may depend on the individual project.

A book, for instance, despite all the computers around these days, is still an ink-on-paper thing. Maybe that's a closer comparison to architecture. Yet it's likely been written in a word processor and laid out (if not actually designed) in a page-layout program. It's been conceptualized (by the editor if not the author) in terms of currently-existing categories within databases. Perhaps it's been sold via Amazon.

The introduction of computers into the book-making and book-consuming process has thus had many, many different consequences, not all of them having directly to do with "making" the book in a computer, although that may or may not play a role too. But they're important consequences. And, in a general sense -- I've blogged about this elsewhere -- books are evolving in the direction of looking very Website-like these days. The standard book nowadays is becoming a very visual, nonlinear thing. The presence of computers in the process doesn't fully explain this development. But the development itself would never have happened without the computers.

Another example is the impact of computer-editing systems on live-action movies. They don't just enable you to cut-cut-cut real fast, although they do that too. They also have many other impacts. For one, thanks to computers, the balance of power in the filmmaking process has shifted, with more power winding up in the hands of producers and less in the hands of directors and editors. The producer can now order up many different cuts of the same scene or passage; he can throw a half a dozen editors at a projects. The old creative-editor role does still get played, but things generally have shifted. So the movies that we might go see now at the mall theater are much more the product of producers than similar movies were a decade ago. (And of course the tech also means that skies can be brightened, backgrounds can now be thrown out of focus, etc.) And as all this happens, audience's tastes adapt and evolve -- and then producers go chasing after those new tastes and interests. The films aren't made in the computer, though they're finished in the computer. But even so, thanks to the computer, their very nature has changed.

To pick a simple example from architecture: as I understand it (pls correct if I'm wrong), most presentations are now of CAD renderings. Most images in the architecture press of plans and proposals are computer images these days. This has an impact on what people expect of architecture. People start getting used to CAD imagery, and to CAD-y visual qualities -- featurelessness, unreal light, lots of semi-transparency. They start thinking of those qualities as aspects of architecture. The nature of the presentation (CAD imagery) starts to affect the kind of thing people are looking for. They start to look forward to buildings that look like CAD renderings of buildings.

And as that taste grows and evolves, styles of buildings start to adapt to it. Thanks to a certain way of rendering imagery, we grow used to certain visual qualities (which weren't always considered desirable), and so aren't surprised when real buildings themselves start to have some of the qualities of these renderings.

I'd be very curious to hear about how the computers have affected the in-house architecture process, by the way. For instance, in the movie biz, they've taken power away from traditional creators and put it back into the hands of producers; in magazines, they've taken power from writers and put it in the hands of editors and designers. Has there been any rejiggering of authority/power lines in architecture offices?

I'm puzzled that a few people seem to see the Time Warner building as traditional modernism, btw. Maybe it's the fault of my photo. Modernism, sure, glass-curtain walls, sure -- the building's obviously taking off from there. But good lord: it's also full of acute angles, and features multiple facets, shimmery materials, mucho translucency, glassy areas roped together with cables, iridescent spot lighting ... -- it's modernism tweaked, twirled, souped-up and made twinkly. Walking through or around it isn't like strolling through the Seagram bldg, which is a rather serene, static experience. It's much more whirly and dynamic and "entertaining" (in a bad way) -- like watching a TV computer graphic. Maybe there's a big gap in my education, but I didn't notice buildings having this kind of effect, or being designed or expected to have this kind of effect, until the last ten years.

Posted by: Michael Blowhard on July 9, 2004 1:40 PM

Michael

Time Warner is a retro building in my opinion regardless of acute angles, facets, etc. This is really nothing new. See this Mies project from the 20's

http://caad.arch.ethz.ch/teaching/nds/ws96/script/object/img-object/mies-skyscraper-s.jpg

I think that one of the things that is confusing here is what the role of "design" is in architecture. The actual schematic design of a building is maybe 10% of a project and is the aspect that is least influenced by the computer. Everything else is totally influenced by the computer, but these phases have a limited correspondance with other creative fields.

I'm not saying that cad imagery and the possibilities of computers in design don't impact taste, but I just don't think that it is happening in the way that you suggest in your post. Souped up modernism is exactly what you say it is - souped up modernism. That is to say updated old stuff. Like a classical airport or a gothic convention center. Deconstruction is not a result of cad either because it is an 80's movement that came about pre-computer. Static vs dynamic is an old game and has little to do with computers.

The impact of cad on architectural DESIGN can be seen in buildings with complex curves, blob buildings, and buildings with ecs systems who's performance is predicted by computer simulation. Maybe the time warner center used building simulations, but I don't think that it was the decisive factor in the design like you would find in a building like Foster's london city hall.

By the way, I did a quick search for presentation renderings of the time warner center and actually most of the ones I found are done with watercolor

http://www.hotel-technology.com/projects/new_york/images/1s_exterior_monyc_1200.jpg

http://www.apollorealestate.com/images/150_timewarner.jpg

remember, renderings are always a lie designed to sell the client and the public on the design that has already been executed. Once these images are created, the design becomes basically set in stone. Architectural design is mostly done through abstract graphic conventions that most people can't understand easily. When it becomes a picture, it becomes real for the average person. Final presenation drawings are mostly outsourced to specialists that do whatever the architect says in the most efficient way. Because of this set up, renderings are neutral in the style of the building because the person who creates them are not the person who designed the building or even belong to the same company (typically).

Cad has changed a lot of things in the office - for instance, building materials manufacturers can provide cad details for their projects that you can just paste into your documents thereby locking in the use of their products. Data sharing is alot easier, for example you can have three offices in three time zones eight hours apart and email your work on to the next one at the end of the day so a firm can work on a project 24 hours a day. You can also outsource all your cad jockey duties to india or something.

It seems to me that the impact of computers on architecture is more like the impact of computers on the design of manufacturing products like cars or airplanes than graphic design or illustration. It vastly increases efficiency, makes it easier to predict performance, and opens up more formal possibilities. This will change taste to some degree, but with some exceptions the changes are kind of behind the scenes.

Posted by: tom on July 9, 2004 3:21 PM

As an illustrator of sorts and a computer animator of sorts, I'm rather surprised at the pictures of CAD architecture provided by Michael— Are architects really so inept at using CAD that they can't put textures on their buildings or take the time to extrude a few more polygons for things like moldings and other decorative touches? Or is the banality of using only computer prefabricated geometric shapes intentional?
I'm aware it takes a very, very long time to model complex shapes in 3D software (I've spent about 40 hours doing a simple window), but there are a variety of hacks that can be used if your idea is only a mock-up, as is the case in architecture. Maybe it's the software that's partly to blame here.

There is of course, a sort of look that goes to designing with computers. One of my fellow students observed that in our projects, the use of the GLOW was almost ubiquitous. The computer is very good with simple lighting, and making things glow is a flashy way of making them look good without needing to spend a lot of time on their underlying structure. Lighting effects tend to overwhelm structural defects and, generally speaking, look good. The fact that the computer handles 99% of lighting calculation just makes it easy to use. (This isn't the case in 2D, but the glow is a similar phenomenon there, for different reasons.)

As for Pixar, I find them very entertaining, but at the same time I'm jaded with the Pixar formula. Maybe it's just my own experience with 3D animation, but Pixar uses the same sort of comic mode and Disney-lite look in just about every movie. I do wish they would be a little bit more experimental, as one of the primary commercially successful outlets for computer animation to date, repeating the same thing over and over is creating an expectation for that sort of thing in the public mind. I know I've been party to it, virtually all my early work was Pixar-style until I made a conscious effort to get away from it.

Jleavitt— Thank goodness I'm not the only person who seems to feel this way. I always consider people who wear sunglasses to be arrogant, impersonal and/or rude.

As for writing, it partly gets done on the computer, partly off. My opinions range on whether I think better at the computer or away from it, it varies. One thing is for sure, the computer holds hundreds of pages of ideas and data that would be hell to sort through otherwise. Though I would prefer to write first drafts completely computer free I often find myself tied to the computer for need of the information it holds. The immersiveness of using headphones while using the computer is a good writing tool at times too, though, in the right mood.

Posted by: . on July 9, 2004 7:23 PM

In Web design, the standards/languages, which you can view as tools, completely define the look of most sites.

Posted by: Rob Asumendi on July 10, 2004 1:25 AM

Tom -- Try as we may to disagree, I suspect we're going to wind up about 90% on the same page: computers get into the art-making process, and then the process changes, and then so does the product, and then people's tastes adapt, and then the process responds to changing tastes, etc etc. And then people get used to thinking about the product in new terms ... Computer-age cars, to use your example, look (and feel) strikingly different than pre-computer-age cars, whether or not the designs were sketched on a napkin or worked out in some fancy program.

"." -- I had no idea you were an illustrator/animator. I bet you've got lots of interesting observations and stories about those fields. And yeah, I deliberately chose low-end CAD images just to emphasize the featurelessness thing. The Time Warner building's basically a bunch of strikingly-angled featureless planes and voids that's been dolled up with some eye-catching new materials, all of them about an eighth of an inch deep. I find being in and around it like being in a virtual-reality plan for a building more than like being in an actual building. And, hey, I wear sunglasses because I've got fair eyes and bright days hurt them. But boy do I also think I look cool in 'em.

Rob -- Thanks. Whenever I've looked over the shoulders of web designers I've always come away with the impression that they were basically making a lot of givens look snazzy, but that they were definitely taking the givens as givens. Neat website you run, by the way -- I just started poking around your place, and look forward to learning more.

Posted by: Michael Blowhard on July 10, 2004 11:57 AM

Okay, yes, CAD often does affect the design. Architecture students often don't hand draw anymore, and that's a mistake, because there's a hand/eye/intuition connection that is broken by the keyboard. This often comes through in proportion, which is also masked by the innacuracies of monitors. And at least as importantly, students today often never draw a facade -- they just look at things in plan and 3D. Obviously that leads to objects over streetscapes, always the Achilles heel of Modernism.

But that makes another point. CAD has not created the objectmania of Modernism, it's just facilitated it. And it hasn't created the technology obsession of the Time Warner building, it's just made it easier to draw.

Posted by: john massengale on July 10, 2004 9:25 PM

PS: I used ArchiCad.

PPS: Now you should get an architecture student who loves CAD to explain to us why were just Luddite old farts who don't know shit from shinola.

PPPS: It's an interesting fact that many Traditional architects use the internet better than many Supermodernists.

Posted by: john massengale on July 10, 2004 9:28 PM

I was thinking another way to look at this question of "instrumental reason" (Heidegger I think, someone correct me if I am misremembering that) is to move back a bit rather than forward. How were art forms changed by technology in the past. My own field of expertise is literature so I can speak a bit less hypothetically about that. The "technology" of writing drastically changed what was expressible compared to oral-only cultures. Time, space, relation, form...all of it (Walter Ong is the man here...ORALITY and LITERACY if interested).

In terms of something like pen and ink versus CAD is that this is something less fundamentally different that writing versus speaking. Drawing in CAD really is still a kind of drawing; the primary difference is the ability to routinize common functions and make emendations more quickly (these feel appropriate to the pen versus word-processing issue).

In short, it seems most of phenomena in this discussion expedite extant practices, rather than revolutionize the field of possibilities for them.

Posted by: skip26 on July 11, 2004 12:46 AM

Well, I wasn't gonna raise it -- no personal experience. But what I hear is that 1) the drawing skills of kids in architecture school are surprisingly bad and getting worse, and 2) the computers have something to do with it. But like I say, no direct personal experience here, and always eager to learn.

And what fun to meet other maniacs who've spent time with Michael Heim and Walter Ong. I'd add Richard Lanham and Jay David Bolter too, but with those four my particular bookshelf on the topic runs out. Wait: Marshall McLuhan, Glenn Gould....

I wonder too when we say that CAD "merely" makes certain things easier. I mean, couldn 't you say that about the printing press too? All it really did was make making copies of books easier than it was before. But it make the process soooo much easier that it still had quite a revolutionary impact. Tivos, too: people have been able to tape shows for later watching for a few decades. But Tivos make the process soooooo much easier that they seem to transform the viewer-TV relationship almost totally. As Tom and John have been kind enough to explain, computers introduced into the architecture process have impacts at lots of levels. They enable teams to collaborate in ways they couldn't before, for instance -- that's an impact. They make it possible to realize certain kinds of designs that probably would have been logistical nightmares before -- haven't I been told that Gehry's more extreme designs, although he works 'em out on napkins, couldn't be built without making great use of computers? They've contributed to the creation of certain kinds of materials, no doubt. And out of all this new styles and tastes seem to emerge.

Hey: computers and writing and reading. Didn't I just see an estimate that there are now more than 3 million blogs?

Posted by: Michael Blowhard on July 12, 2004 6:38 PM






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