To draw, or not to draw?

There has been a question that has plagued my peers ever since I stepped into architecture school that never quite seemed to escape conversations even in my career as a young architect. It was the question of why a lot of older architects are so married to pen and paper as to seemingly completely disregard digital tools.

In all my time pondering this, I could not seem to find a solid answer beyond "They are products of their time." That was until I came across an article from Tannu Sharma on arco único that questioned the very basis of whether architects must still draw. Having been written by a more experienced person with the same question as mine, it gave me some insight into some of the difficulties faced by an era of architects that were taught without the technology we hold today.

As a student, I was briefly taught digital drafting in my third semester of university, kick-starting the slow and clumsy transition from submitting hand-drafted sheets to digitized ones. My awkward sketched visualizations, the ones that always haunted me because I felt like a three-year old making stick figures alongside my Monet-esque classmates' sheets, improved significantly with software, and suddenly, what was going on in my head was now actually on paper, just the way I saw it.

However, I never quite understood the heaps of criticism about lineweights and smaller details that almost seemed irrelevant, especially when the digitization itself extended only to our architectural design studios. It wasn't until my fifth semester that a kindly professor took the time to explain the significance of all these things to us.

I still didn’t have the answer to my question though. There were always talks of how the mind-to-hand connection cannot possibly be replicated by digital means. How the sanctity of a sketch is diluted when it involves a mouse or a stylus. Beliefs that you cannot conceptualize on 3D softwares or arrange spaces in a 2D software the same way that you could on paper.

Enter my final year internship, where I heard the vexing statement that every intern hears.

"Forget everything you learned in college. It's useless here."

In my entire time there, I never touched a pencil or paper to draft anything. I did use butter sheets to draw up concepts, sketched things in notebooks, envisaged details on the backs of restaurant bills. That was when I realized that the problem was never with sketching, as I initially thought; it was with drawing.

There are many essential skills within drawing that involve your hands and a pen, like diagramming, conceptual sketching, even some level of technical sketching.

However, for a lot of people, even starting with the generation of millennials who watched technology fall into their hands as teenagers, there exists the ease and convenience of conveying ideas and storing them through digital sketching and drafting. We reside in a time where everyone walks around with a touchscreen in their pockets, giving us the most accessible and effective form of design communication.

So how do we address this discrepancy of old and traditional vs new and digital? Where are we failing to help students that struggle to understand these differences when they enter internships or begin their careers?

The transition from traditional to digital may be jarring for a generation of architects who have always been taught to draft that way even well into their career. That, however, doesn’t apply to the current generation of architects that hold a whole universe of technology within their palms.

I strongly believe that there needs to be an update in the approaches adopted by architectural colleges and an addressal of the on-ground working of an architectural firm. The changeover from university cannot seem so abrupt as to make them wonder whether all of what they were taught was obsolete.

Perhaps starting with an improved teaching and encouraging of digital practices would help. A lot of old methodologies remain relevant and will continue to do so, but maybe we must also consider that the future involves very proximate ideas like showing clients their projects in virtual reality spaces.

Even if the adage of "They are products of their time" continues to ring true, we must evolve and begin teaching the reasoning behind things like lineweights and fixing details rather than just forcing students to draw the same. There is where we generate finer architects and designers that enter the workplace with a much better understanding and appreciation of the technicalities of their profession.