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Tools
of the Imagination: Drawing Tools and Technologies from
the Eighteenth Century to the Present, edited
by Susan Piedmont-Palladino.
Notions of tools as extensions of the hand
have been usurped by contemporary conditions of "abstract
machines" that absorb both human and instrument into
larger functional systems.
This quote by Paul Emmons on his
essay "The Lead Pencil: Lever of the Architect's Imagination"
sums up much of 2005's "Tools of the Imagination"
exhibition at the National Building Museum and its accompanying
book, in which the essay is included. Finely crafted and
sculpted instruments that exhibit their use and fit for
the human hand -- used for drawing, shading, constructing
perspectives, even erasing -- give way to computer interfaces
and the disconnect between hand and result. In each phase
of the architectural process, from design sketches to construction
documents, the computer has replaced pencils, pens, markers,
and the like as the tool for realizing designs. Certainly,
architects still use graphite and ink to express concepts
and ideas, but in just about all cases these are translated
into zeros and ones at some point. While the book's contributors
lament this replacement (why else would this exhibition
and book happen?), the presence of the computer is seen
as but another tool, not as a hindrance to design. But as
the next generation of software (BIM, or Building
Information Modeling) slowly replaces today's computer-aided
drafting (CAD) programs, the distance between hand and design
will become even more distant. It's apparent from William
J. Mitchell's conclusion ("the code of an elegantly
construction graphics algorithm has an austere, functional
beauty that can take your breath away") that these
tools of the not-too-distant future will find acceptance
by architects, only to be reminisced about in the distant
future.
Tools of the Imagination
offers the reader wonderful illustrations of these now archaic
tools (some I was using in architectural school a little
over ten years ago!) and the drawings they produce. Many
of the tools cry out to be held and used, a quality lacking
in images of computer screens. In addition to the aforementioned
essays by Emmons and Mitchell, David V. Thompson and Phillip
G. Bernstein give insight into the past and future of the
architect's tools, respectively. Unfortunately the essays
and the rest of the text in the book are laid out in a way
that seems to try to progress beyond the antiquity of some
of the tools, the lines of white text on a silver background
become unreadable in certain lighting conditions. Perhaps
this fault can be fixed in the future when a new edition
is necessary, when today's CAD is reminisced about just
like the compass, the T-square, and electric eraser are
today.
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