Meaning
The quality without a name
The meaning of objects
The meaning of music
A creature of bones, not words
The shape of the sentence
To build a folly
- ââDesigned to be ruinsââ
- ââFolliesââ
- ââThermal aediculaeââ
Let the meaning choose the word
Taboo your words
The arbitrariness of the sign
- ââGods of the Wordââ
The eye does not see
The utter nothingness of being
Whereof one cannot speak
Not knowing quite what they mean
Things cannot be other than as they are
50 reds
No words to describe
That is not it at all
A soft and fitful luster
Reference and Is-ness
The demand of a new word
Apparency
Fish and water
The word invents itself
AI-art isnât art
The Future Is Not Only Useless, Itâs Expensive
The Gifted Listener: Composer Aaron Copland on Honing Your Talent for Listening to Music
On 'The Master and His Emissary'
A brief foray into vectorial semantics
The way an oyster does
The primacy of interpretation over sensation
The body image
Meaningness
Back to the Drawing Board
- ââYou can almost tell which software they were designed inââ
- ââConversational drawingââ
- ââThe effort heuristicââ
- ââTablets have caught upââ
You can almost tell which software they were designed in
Tatiana von Preussen, cofounder of London practice vPPR Architects, says that certain software comes with constraints that encourage a particular style:
âSomething Iâve noticed with new buildings is that you can almost tell which software they were designed in. For instance, if you take Revit, itâs very hard to freely create non-orthogonal, non-linear geometries, and itâs very easy to create repetitive elements, so it lends itself to a particular way of building.â
Conversational drawing
A skilled draughtsman guides design conversations by selecting and emphasizing details in a way that computer programmes cannot. Ron Slade, author of Sketching for Engineers and Architects and a structural director at WSP in London, calls it âconversational drawingâ. He notes how botany field guides are always based on detailed drawings rather than photographs â as much for what they leave out as for what they show. âExtraneous material that might exist in a photograph is eliminated. It may be important to pick out and illustrate particular areas and leave other parts in sketchy or broad outline.â
- ââWhy Sketch?ââ
The effort heuristic
Psychologists have noted that people tend to place greater artistic value on images when they can see the work that has gone into them â a tendency known as the âeffort heuristicâ. They are also more likely to connect emotionally with the work if they can detect the human hand, says Goldsmithsâ Chamberlain. âThereâs an argument that if we see a brush stroke, we almost recreate it, and thatâs part of the connection we feel with the artist â you can feel the intention.â
Perhaps to capitalize on this, some architects now show presentation drawings that look hand-drawn but are actually generated entirely by computer. âItâs totally fake,â says Brillhart. âThey just take a computer image into Photoshop and put filters over it to make it look like itâs drawn by hand. Itâs kind of amusing â instead of just sitting down and drawing for an hour, they spend eight hours making it look like a hand drawing.â
Tablets have caught up
But in the past couple of years, Brennan believes that tablets have caught up, with apps such as Appleâs ProCreate and Morpholioâs Trace becoming far more responsive to the userâs marks. âTablets didnât used to have that immediate response, from brain to eye to hand to pen to paper. A half-second delay has a huge impact on how you think â it causes you to stumble. But now that lagâs gone, itâs almost the same as drawing with pen on paper. You donât need to engage with the airbrushes or other features â just use it in its purest form.â The stylus, too, far more convincingly apes a manual pen: âYouâre able to tune it to almost replicate your favourite pen â and it doesnât run out of ink.
Chetwood is an iPad devotee, using it to produce fantastical urban artworks as well as architecture. Far from hindering the drawing process, he believes tablets will give rise to a new era of creative drawing. âA lot of people say technology and computers are taking away the true art of drawing. Thatâs rubbish, it releases sketching. You can move so much quicker and change things much more quickly, and it keeps a record of what youâre doing. The control is just brilliant.â The polished glass surface is the only flaw, but textured acetates applied to the screen can make it feel more like paper.
- ââPlatformsââ