Shout out to my son Jason!

My son Jason is just finishing today his first year of graduate school in architecture at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago. In honor of that I'd like to publish here a text he wrote for a writing prize sponsored by the Art Institute of Chicago:

The Work of Architecture in the Age of Digital Reproduction
[Schiff Foundation Fellowship for Critical Architectural Writing]
By Jason Miskowiec

Step into the world of the modern architecture student and you will realize that he or she has a difficult time drawing a true line on a Mayline or even being imaginative sketching in a Moleskin. More than likely he or she cannot spell Vitruvius or explain why the work of Richard Meier looks like that of Le Corbusier. Students will be versed in building information management software and three-dimensional computer modeling but not be knowledgeable of the legacy that has come before them. What has invaded the mind of the 21st century architecture student isn’t the delicacies of literature and history or the understanding of the senses, but rather the computer and its family of ideals. The array of programs meant to streamline thought and creativity into quick, efficient, and digitally visceral design has changed architectural education’s focus and shifted the priorities of today’s student.

A whole set of tools are available that create the illusion and simulacrum of imagination and creativity. While capable of awe-inspiring imagery, they shallowly represent the state of the contemporary student in the field of architecture. The computer and its relentless and expansive software have driven creative minds into a digital consciousness that dominates today’s economy and industry. The digital process represents not only a more efficient means of production, but also a substitution at times for what used to be done with a pencil and paper; efficient at times, but intellectually lacking at others. The twenty-first century designer is dangerously close to one that doesn’t understand the dimension of a brick, the joinery of lumber or the casting of concrete. His or her reality is based on the abstract matrix of digital fabrication. Although these programs have opened up a descriptive language of form and geometry, the overall concept of these models are hardly ever in intellectual control. At the heart of meaningful artistic work and experience is the relationship established by creator and creation. The consciousness of the digital world is an invented realm, philosophically based on an infinite grid of Cartesian coordinates and little else. The base for human creation is the projection of the mind and its subsequent sensory experiences. Digital design has in actuality hindered human creation and replaced it with digital simulationT
They favor the spectacular image over the logic of construction.

Programs such as 3DS Max and Revit fake the valuable sensory qualities created by touch and memory. In his book The Thinking Hand, Juhani Pallasmaa refers to the architect’s hand as a bridge to its creation. Architecture and design imagined on the computer is reduced into a video game-like solution to vital issues that require understandings of the fundamental concepts of architecture such as humanism, scale and materiality. Although one could argue that computer-rendered imagery has expanded our ability to visualize space, it lacks the utility and soundness in real design and architecture. What inherently digital design processes lack is the understanding and feel of the designer. The geometry and freedom of drawing with pen and paper finds itself in the cognitive, the imagination and the abstract mode of thinking absent in the digital realm. In neglecting the hands-on approach, today’s modern architecture student’s designing processes is in a virtual digital war upon the legacy and sensory qualities of design.

Tools come from the development and refinement of purposeful thinking. Tools have accompanied the existence of humankind as we have learned to mediate the relations between problems and solutions. The tool of a sculptor like the tool of an architect is an extension of his or her thought and conscious. As Pallasmaa states, “A painter paints by means of the unconscious intentionality of the mind rather than the brush as a physical object.”

What a tool crafts becomes the articulation of a vision. The tool in any work helps to articulate the language of the discipline, such as architecture. The tool is also meant to be in direct dialogue with the user. As the paintbrush is to a painter, the hand becomes the greatest asset to the architect. Pallasmaa has found in his research that the hand itself acts at times with its own impulses. Thus the process of transcribing an idea from the brain of the inventor to the wall of an exhibit lies in the edges and boundaries created by the tool itself. The power of design lies within the blood and muscle of very hand we use, while the computer foreshortens these very instincts. The tools of the modern architect that have been realigned with the computer don’t explore the limits of thought, but rather the efficiency of production. Because the computer and the digital exist in a boundless realm, ideas become a derivative of that limitless Cartesian Grid. In trading the lead holder for a computer mouse, current architecture students have aligned their set of tools to placate the demands of the marketplace they will enter, but in many ways have lost the ability, or at least facility, to imagine. They will enter the field with the skills that strip them of their imaginative, personal approach to design. Although that may be sufficient for many young architects, the legacy of this century’s designers should not rest on the aspirations of the digital world.

The architect is a designer of the built environment and the mediator of many professions. An architect is a psychologist, an anthropologist, a historian, an inventor and a construction worker. The task of all architects is to translate ideas and ideals, culture and knowledge into shelter. The architect is the maker of both internal and external conditions. If the values and process of thought of the next generation of architects and architecture students are rooted in the digital-design programs, then the tactility and sensitivity of design will be lost. If we abandon our senses, our most valuable assets as students of the physical environment, then our ability to connect, feel, humanize, and thus design appropriately will be irreversibly damaged.

“Sustainability,” or the Green Movement, makes up part of this generation’s revolution. Sustainability will and already has informed education. The intersection at which digitally-driven design and industry-driven products meet ideas of sustainability is often problematic. The blob-a-tecture arising out from digital fabrications is alien to the notion of efficiency and conservation of energy. Architectural products have undergone substantial growth due to developed technologies over the last centuries. However as a consequence of modern design, innovative building materials married to digital concepts often lose sight of the ultimate purpose of creating an ecological-aware design. Preciously harvested titanium and highly engineered paneling has seen itself, for example, make its way into some of the more highly touted architecture of our day without a real examination of the implication such approaches have on the environment. Lost in the translation of these ideas is the essence of architectural expression as well. Forms are forced, energy is spent, and the computer as a design counter-part to the dialogue of this process is responsible, at times, for turning the buildable reality into something rather disenchanting.

Experimental and digital architecture in many ways have broadened the possibilities of design. The market and appreciation for the monumental has historically always been part of architectural design. The Gothic era saw masonry reach incredible heights thought unattainable then. Today’s architecture possesses the same yearning for the grandiose but sometimes in an unhealthy and unrealistic way. The digital age satisfies the thirst for the new and innovative form, compromising as a result logical and approachable design. Students placate their own thirst for imagery and facile creativity with programs such as Rhinoceros and Grasshopper, but fail to realize the dynamics of programming space and thus, by aligning themselves with the impulses of the computer program, fail to consider the real needs of the human client. The process of design within these programs dangerously avoids issues of scale and human sensitivity. Although the computer is not the sole promoter of monumentally unrealistic design, it has tremendously impacted the philosophy of the digitally saturated world in which we live.

Architecture can be a tool to evaluate culture. Fundamentally it rises from the need for shelter and protection from the natural environment. It becomes more than that as it examines and manifests the values of the people that inhabit it. Technology, computers and everything else that is the post-industrial world have allowed an infinite amount of information to become available. Any child with a computer is an equal to the businessman with his laptop, as both have access to infinite sets of information. Modern man is incessantly connected to the Internet and looking for technology to ameliorate his quality of life. In a sense, that which has supposedly made information more accessible has made life cloudy, abstract and lost. Contemporary design has inherited the same set of problems. The reality of today’s market thrives on speed and efficiency. Although the digital world has made design faster, infinitely more complex problems have emerged from it. Computer technology provides an infinite amount of information accessible to nearly anyone, but how is it being used? Architecture historically has been built on the relationship of design and craft, conceptualized by the human mind and manifested by the human hand.