LIVE. WORK. SKETCH.
As someone who hasn’t been out of school all that long (only about 9 years) and teaches Autocad and hand drafting at a local community college, I’d like to revisit WHY sketching and hand drafting are still so very important to our profession and why these skills should not be cast aside in favor of greater exposure to digital modeling and design. I came across an article in the Yale Daily News that talks about just this subject.
The above article talks about the Yale School of Architecture and a recent symposium they held title “Is Hand Drawing Dead?” The symposium, as you can imagine, drew massive attention and debate on both sides of the aisle. Architectural education has, for so very long, been centered around a foundation of drawing as both a technical skill and artistic expression. My own architectural education began with hand drafting, day one, class one. And, even though we always had access to the latest digital technology and even a rendering farm, hand drafting and sketching were skills we all used regularly.
The consensus of the article is that both professor and student agree that hand drawing and sketching will always be necessary pieces in an architects tool box. But I’m more interested in what you all have to say. Is hand drafting and sketching going the way of the do-do bird? Are these skills even necessary in a modern architectural education? Is the future of our profession really all about the latest and greatest modeling/rendering/BIM tools?
What say you?