Digital Sketching

Computer-Aided Conceptual Design

John Bacus

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781119640769
• eBook ISBN: 9781119640790
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture Design

Learn to apply new digital design technologies at your own firm with this practical and insightful resource

Digital Sketching: Computer-Aided Conceptual Design delivers a comprehensive and insightful examination of how architects and other design professionals can best use digital design technology to become better designers. Celebrated professional, professor, and author John Bacus provides readers with practical and timely information on emerging digital design technologies and their effect on professional practice.

By focusing on the big picture, this rigorous survey of conceptual design technology offers professionals realistic strategies for reclaiming time for design in the ever increasing speed of project delivery. This book helps architects (and others like them) learn to use digital sketching techniques to be better designers, right from the project's very first sketch.

As part of the groundbreaking Practical Revolutions series of books, Digital Sketching furthers the conversation of the practical deployment of emerging technologies in the building industries. This book provides readers with the information they need to evaluate digital design technology and decide whether or not to adopt and integrate it into their own processes. Readers will receive:

• An accelerated and accessible introduction to a highly technical topic
• Practical and applicable guidance on how to adapt a firm's business to adopt new technology without losing the benefit of existing intuition, skill, and experience
• Real world implementations of specific techniques in the form of illuminating case studies that include results and lessons learned

Perfect for professional architectural designers, Digital Sketching also belongs on the bookshelves of interior designers, landscape architects, urban planners, contractors, and specialty fabricators of every kind. A disciplined sketching practice, especially through the digital methods discussed in this book, is a transformational benefit to anyone who designs and builds for a living.

Chapter 1
Sketching for Conceptual Design

Introduction

Good design is easy to recognize but difficult to describe. When it is missing, you immediately notice even if you can't say precisely why. Design has consistently defied all attempts at logical rationalization since before the Enlightenment, though, not for lack of trying by generations of design theorists. We observe in the world examples of effective design every day, but the rules and standards that led to that design's realization are notoriously tricky to decode.

Armed with a rigorous knowledge of building science that has been informed by thousands of years of historical precedent, architects can engage in a uniquely iterative process of design and reflection that produces constructible, functional, and at the same time, inspiring, and delightful buildings. The good ones can do it on demand, skillfully dropping themselves into a flow state where sketches pour out in a flood of work. Once in that state, they can reflect-in-action with consideration for hundreds of individual requirements, including unstated but inferred ones and all their various opportunistic affordances. By accommodating both objective reality and ethereal poetics, architects can bring a rigor of thought to any set of inputs, framing and reframing the original problem as necessary and iterating collaboratively until a path forward has been reached.

Creative Rigor in Design

The design work of a professional architect is rigorous, in-depth, and (to outsiders, anyway) more than a little mysterious. Building construction projects are notoriously complex, with little opportunity to rehearse solutions before committing fully to them in construction. Once construction has begun, the cost of making changes to the design can be astronomical. Every detail must be considered before construction begins.

Architects are trained to start sketching from very little concrete information, perhaps only a brief list of requirements, a site, and some local building codes and ordinances. The project may have exciting opportunities that are evident or at least implied by the available information, but it may also include unrealistic expectations and hidden, self-contradictory dependencies. It might be challenging to make many formal propositions about the building at first, but architects are trained to dive right in regardless. In time, through a process of sketching, reflection, and reframing of the problem, they know how to figure it out. As professionals, architects are great at just “winging it,” figuring out both the real issues (including unstated requirements that only later become evident) and their ideal solutions.

Some architects, particularly those who fancy themselves a bit closer to art than science, may actively resist any external attempt to rationalize their process. Design, to them, is a mystical art open only to those properly initiated. In truth, they may not really know how they do what they do, though few of them will readily admit this. But there's nothing to be afraid of if you are one of these kinds of designers. The magic of your work is not diminished because you can't rationalize it for others. Most designers, even the most rational of them, cannot describe how they do what they do or how they know what they know about the design. The intuitive leaps you make while working are not diminished because you can't entirely explain how you reached them. Your ability to make those leaps, correctly and effectively, is what defines you as a designer.

If they are honest with themselves, all designers have trouble describing how they reach the conclusions they reach while designing. They may talk about how individual decisions simply “feel” better than others, how one design direction is inherently better than another one because of where it leads the design next in its evolution. When pressed, they may be able to post-rationalize their past right decisions, even citing evidence and prior art to lend a sense of rigor to their overall design process. Skillful action almost seems defined by the fact that the professionals who engage in it know much more than they can say. And they can act based on more than they know, as well. This seems contradictory, irrational; perhaps even to the most rationally minded, it may seem irresponsible. If you can't say how you know something to be accurate, how can it be?

It happens as well outside of the design professions that the most skilled professionals, even among medical doctors, lawyers, and business managers, are actually at their best and most productive when they are working in ways they can least describe to others. A lawyer making an impassioned plea on behalf of a client in front of a jury, while certainly well prepared and rehearsed, may improvise new arguments on the spot as they watch the faces of their jurors. A trader on Wall Street may “feel the pull” of a barely visible market dynamic. Expert accountants can see through a wall of numbers in a spreadsheet and make accurate conclusions about the health of the organization it represents or the opportunities ahead of it in the market. Even baseball players “know” intuitively what they need to do to win a game … though they have no way to explain how they will pull it off. None of this makes any rational sense; we think of it as the “art” in their practice and (rightly) respect it deeply.

Since the Enlightenment, our culture has relentlessly applied the structures and norms of scientific, rational thought to all professional practice. “Ars sine Scientia nihil est.¹” wrote Jean Mignot, fourteenth-century architect of the Milan Cathedral. Without a basis in some kind of rational theory, the practice of any art is without worth. That theory must be logical, consistent, and reducible to first principles that are universal enough to provide a common foundation beneath all similar work. In professional practice, trained architects should be able to apply the theory to real-world situations and come up with logically consistent design results.

Contemporary architectural theory isn't consistent in the same way that the underpinning theories in physics or philosophy are. Where the traditional work of architects could be rationalized, that rationalization has often led to the identification of a new profession that specialized in just that more rational act. For example, Structural Engineering. Or Construction Management. Perhaps even Interior Design, with its increased dependency on premanufactured lighting and furnishings, could be thought of in this way. In time, as more and more of the rationalizable components of the traditional matrix of responsibilities of an architect have migrated to new professions, only the mysterious, intangible design work of the architect has remained behind.

Once everything that can be rationalized and specialized has been accounted for by others, it is tempting to assume everything of merit has been covered. What a heartless and cold world we would build for ourselves if this were, in fact, the final solution. The sum of all rational processes in architecture will not give you a complete design, not even close. It is intuitively obvious to people when the spaces in which they are living their lives do not delight them, even if they can't say why or how. They, of course, also know if some obvious box wasn't checked in the design if the roof leaks, the garage has collapsed, or the driveway washed out in the last storm. But it is easy to tell when the poetic concerns haven't been met, too. Few people will care that the roof doesn't leak, because they won't care about the building at all.

The problems faced by architects may be different from those faced by doctors or lawyers. They may be more ambiguous and less consistent. Every building inevitably presents a different set of problems, a different set of requirements, and a different set of opportunities. There are undoubtedly universal principles that apply. The building must provide light and air to its occupants, must protect them from weather, and must support them against the pull of gravity, for example. But there is little guidance for architects seeking to add truly delightful, life-changing space into the world. It is tough to rationalize this part of the work.

How Do You “Design”?

So how is it done? How does great design happen? It is certainly wrong to assume that design practice can in no way be defined. Even the purest of abstract expressionist painters acknowledge there is significant science underpinning their practice. The physics of light, the chemistry of pigment, and the biology of seeing all have roles to play; without them, there could be no poetry. They also know how to get themselves into the mental space where the work can happen. Maybe it is about waking up early or maybe staying up late. Or perhaps it is about just the right music on the stereo. Somehow, it is repeatable for them. And no matter what you think of architectural designers as professionals, anyone who has been trained through an architectural education intuitively “gets” the processes and practices that lead to being able to accomplish a great design. Design thinking is reproducible and persistently observable in human behavior. There must be some way to describe it.

Architects speak of their work as being part of their “professional practice,” and I think we can find the answer we're looking for in that language. There are norms and standards that all architects must know – from building codes that you must meet to pass inspection before occupancy to the universal principles of gravitation that you must know so you design buildings that won't fall on their occupant's heads. Architects have to become the people who can answer questions about the building that nobody has thought to ask yet, and they must be able to do so consistently, decisively, and (even) defensibly. The best architects have fully internalized these and many more physical and philosophical truths. But to work exclusively within their mandates is to be blocked before you've even begun.

I think the practice we refer to when speaking about architectural work is more akin to the practice of a professional musician. Like an architect, a professional musician must know some physics, some historical precedent for their chosen music, and many other things. They must (probably) memorize the music they plan to perform – or at least internalize it enough that they don't need to waste time in performance reminding themselves what notes to play next. They must do all of these things in preparation for their performance, and they must reinforce them and drive them into instinctual behavior through relentless repetition. They “practice” endlessly, obsessively, repeating the same themes over and over again, testing variations, exploring newly discovered nuance and expression. They learn their subject so profoundly that they “become” it, physically embodying the music they will soon perform in public.

Malcolm Gladwell claims you need 10,000 hours of practice before you can be any good at something new (Gladwell 2008). I think most professional architects would say that they are just beginning to get warmed up by then. John Hejduk, who was dean of the Cooper Union School of Architecture when I studied in there in the early 1990s, taught that few architects were able to accomplish works of any real merit before their 50th birthday. There is just too much to learn, too many experiences to be earned in the field, and too few opportunities to try something genuinely new. The knowledge of a professional architect mus...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Prologue
• Chapter 1: Sketching for Conceptual Design
• Chapter 2: The Elements of Design
• Chapter 3: Representations of Space
• Chapter 4: Sketching in 2D
• Chapter 5: Sketching in 3D
• Chapter 6: Sketching in Code
• Chapter 7: From Sketch to Production
• Chapter 8: Epilogue
• Appendix A: What Computer Should I Buy?
• Appendix B: Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) for Architects
• Appendix C: Sketching in Virtual Reality
• Bibliography
• Index
• End User License Agreement