Although still only in my (late) thirties I was among the last architects to qualify without undergoing training in computer-aided design (CAD). When I started out, architects’ offices were still cluttered with drawing boards and trolleys full of different-gauge pens, ink, scales, set-squares, even razor blades, which we used to erase mistakes on tracing paper. A decade later the drafting boards were turning up in skips and the plan chests were in antique shops, as quaint and obsolete as washstands. Like the machinery of the industrial revolution, computers were supposed to strip away the drudgery, leaving architects free to soar, to spend their time sketching on napkins during long lunches. Instead, architects’ offices became satanic mills of banks of frazzled youngsters gazing at screens.
I’m overstating the case to make a point - computers have become an indispensable part of the construction process, whether for homes, offices or more ambitious projects, and we won’t see the back of them until something better comes along. But in my opinion they have created a dangerous fissure between the brain and the hand which, far from leading to a utopian world of clinical perfection in the messy building process, is leading to an insidious and serious diminution of quality and thought in architecture.
The techno-geek propaganda can seem convincing. Look what can be achieved, they say. They will point to Frank Gehry’s Bilbao Guggenheim, the complex, billowing planes of which could only be implemented by a computerised program developed for the aeronautical industry. Gehry’s odd, sculptural forms (actually always first modelled in cardboard; Gehry doesn’t use computers) have become so totemic that the software developed by his office to facilitate their construction is now promoted as a product in its own right. Part of the problem, it seems to me, is that these complex geometries are being designed because computers allow them to be built. The order is all wrong.
I don’t say this from the point of view of an extreme architectural conservative or from any kind of Luddism. Norman Foster’s 30 St Mary Axe, the wonderful Gherkin, is a fantastic building, the extremely complex, curving glazing elements of which would not have been viable without computers. On the other hand, a visit to the current Modernism show at the V&A immediately highlights Bruno Taut’s expressionist 1914 glass pavilion, with a dome that bears a more than familial resemblance to Foster’s structure and which was achieved with the “primitive” technologies of nearly a century ago. Builders may be reluctant to innovate but they can when pushed.
There are cases where an architect has a vision and computers prove the best way to realise it. A number of architects, notably two London-based practices, Foreign Office Architects and Zaha Hadid, and also New Yorkers Reiser + Umemoto do use complex programs to create stunningly innovative structures. Foreign Office’s Yokohama international port terminal and Zaha Hadid’s Phaeno Science Center in Wolfsburg are among the most original structures, using processing power to create complex planes that undulate, twist and fold to melt interior into exterior space and smash traditional barriers between landscape and building.
But other architects are merely creating complex shapes because they can. Computers are also being allowed to design facades. If you see a complex elevation in which the windows seem randomly placed in bands across a facade, the de facto corporate elevational treatment of today, those patterns are likely to be generated by machines. Eighty years after the advent of modernism, architects remain uneasy about complex facades and pattern, so they leave it to the computer, as if that rationalises a playful measure of randomness.
It’s easy for architects to be seduced by complex facades or the imagery of amorphous containers, shinily reflective undulating space-age surfaces and the idea of breaking free of the box. But it is leading to poor buildings. I recently sat in on a “crit”, part of an architectural student’s education in which the victims present and defend their work to a panel of tutors and external critics. I was astonished at the students’ primitive conceptions of space and form. After seeing their weirdly abstracted spaces I had to advise them to think of a place they had been in and enjoyed, a cafe, a club, a square, a street, a kitchen during a party, and picture what made it successful. They seemed to have no idea how to conceive a space. How could they possibly propose one to be built? I suspect that computers are having a detrimental effect on young architects. No longer able to conceive beyond the screen, they are also unable to sketch, to convey by hand what they are thinking of.
Computers may be efficient at processing complex data, but they are far from efficient in the creative process. Sketching is not only practical but essential. It is the quickest, most accessible way to find out if a space, a vista, a progression can work and also to communicate it to others. It is the fundamental link between brain and hand transferred direct on to paper without interference by binary codes. It is a direct process, and it is the most human way of generating ideas. Once students begin to ignore the sketch and mediate their designs through data, the most basic developmental tool is lost. Cyber space replaces real space, and the envisioning of architecture will increasingly ensure that real environments resemble nothing except other artificial environments - malls, theme parks, huge hotels and supermarkets rolled out in cloning programs - safe, easily reproducible, easily surveyed virtual space impinging on the real world.
A good analogy to the potential effects of too much reliance on design programs is the writer sitting with his laptop. Computers make the process of writing, erasing, cutting and pasting and so on, very much easier than it was on a typewriter, but what would happen if writers allowed the processor to write parts of their novels? The idea seems repellent. Yet that is what architects are in danger of allowing. William J. Mitchell, dean of architecture and planning at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has called humans “Monkeys 2.0”. Well, those apocryphal monkeys may eventually produce Shakespeare’s plays, but a computer will more likely come up with Dan Brown.
Computers are here to stay in the construction process and, just as it was impossible to envisage the impact they would have on drawing even two decades ago, it is hard to see where they may take architecture as they become more powerful and as people become increasingly unable to interact with the world without them. Mitchell wrote in 1995: “We are all cyborgs now,” umbilically linked to our keyboards and mice. But, if we want to live in a world that looks as if it has been conceived and designed by humans, architects will need to pick up their pencils again and start drawing on napkins over long lunches.
Edwin Heathcote is the FT’s architecture critic.
