Drawings have always been an important component of the work done by architects. Sketching out ideas on a scrap of paper or on the drafting board has long been one of the first steps necessary in transforming one’s ideas into material structures. In all of the design professions there exists a myth (in the Levi-Straussian sense) of a designer who sketches out an idea on a bar napkin or the back of an envelope, and that initial design leading to some sort of monumental new product. Even such mundane drawing practices are, in a sense, crucial for thinking through design problems. Drawing provides a means for an architect to externalize her ideas about a design in either its fine details or broad strokes, and to see them and manipulate them with an ease not afforded by mental imagery. Paul Laseau (2001) calls this process “graphic thinking”, which he characterizes as “a conversation with ourselves in which we communicate with sketches”, a way for architects as individuals to clarify any muddled thoughts bubbling up in their creativity.
Today however, sketching out ideas, drawing as a process, is not as emphasized in large-scale architecture firms as it once was, due in large part to the spread of computer technologies in architectural design. This is certainly not to say that sketching does not occur. It does, and it happens quite a bit - but the real currency of the architectural economy takes the form of computer-drafted plans, sections and elevations that are standardized in terms of how certain things are represented. Along with this change, the image of the lone architect sketching out design ideas in isolation, most clearly exemplified by popular photographs of Frank Lloyd Wright, has faded in favor of a more realistic image of teams of architects working as a group to come up with designs together.
Yet despite this shift in focus from individuals with pens and paper to teams with mice and monitors, graphic thinking, or using drawings to work through design problems, has not fallen by the wayside: it has instead taken on a new and more complex form than the “conversation with ourselves” described by Laseau and entered the world of interactive problem solving. It is important to note that computer-drafted architectural drawings are not just tools for communicating ideas to clients, or standardizing institutional forms of representation. They are often as rough as pen and paper sketches and, as is illustrated below, serve the same purpose as any bar napkin sketch penned by Wright or Mies.
In previous work (Murphy, 2001) I described an activity that I call “collaborative imagining” that underpins many of the interactions that occur between architects as they undergo the long process of designing a building. From this perspective, imagining things (in this case a large building and its large and small design elements) is not necessarily something that happens with mental imagery inside people’s heads (“I’m thinking of a door…”). Instead, the objects of thought, rather than being an ephemeral picture of a door are actually created and anchored in social space by and for everyone involved in the interaction. This is accomplished by combining lots of stuff together, most often for the architects talk, gestures, and drawings, to express and display an idea to the group, which is often evaluated, manipulated and changed by other participants in the interaction. Thus in the example below the architects are not only imagining a door in their heads when they talk about it: they demonstrate it with their gestures which are placed in a specific location on the plan to actively elaborate an aspect of the imagined structure not yet fully formed either in thought or on the plan.
For the duration of the design process architects are faced with dealing ultimately with things that are not there to sense directly: the focus of their work, the building, does not yet exist and they are left to deal only with representations of it that stand in for that ultimate goal. As I have been alluding to, the architects primarily deal with three modes of representation: talk, gestures, and graphic representations (drawings). I assert that “designing”, or getting the job of being an architect done, emerges at the intersection of these three modes, and emerges in interaction. Designing is, in the end, a thinking process heavily punctuated by problems that demand solving, and it is often in conversation and interaction in which this gets done. Gestures, and, crucially, how they relate to architectural drawings are not merely a part of talk among architects, but are partially constitutive of the activities in which design is accomplished. In this way gestures are not spurious or merely “communicative”, but are consequentially linked to accomplishing the design or, in effect, being an architect.
Space constraints permit me only to show one example. This team of architects was working on a large laboratory building for a college in the American Southwest. In the example given they are discussing the service yard area of the building, where the loading dock will be. Specifically they are interested in figuring out how the doors to this area will function and what the doors will look like. It is important to note that architectural drawings show a lot of information, but the types of information they reveal are quite limited (mostly to structural elements like shapes, measurements, and materials of particular features). This is why gestures are so important for interpreting the design as it emerges.
