There's a scene in Kubricks "2001: A Space Odyssey", where Dr. Haywood Floyd is asleep aboard his starliner to the Moon. His ballpoint pen briefly escapes his shirt pocket, and we see the pen floating in space, until the flight attendant picks it back up. In some film circles, the scene symbolizes humanity's loss of control of their tools in space, a corollary to the opening scene of the human ape inventing the first tool. I wonder if architects have hit that moment already.
This scene hits close to home, not only because Kubrick used a pen to symbolize man's loss of control over tools. Over the past few decades, architecture has had to adapt to waves and waves of technological changes, from the days of the drafting mayline in the 19th century, to some strange "ray-tracing copy machine" in the 1970's, to AutoCAD and then to BIM. Along the way, the profession has transformed from interpreting and understanding construction symbols to building and maintaining digital simulations. This means that not only do architects have to know how to construct physical buildings, they have to learn to construction digital models of increasing complexity. Over time, I think we have started to lose control of the tools of the trade, ceding them to excel-sheet-wielding developers, or code-wielding programmers, discussing things we can hardly understand.
In order to thrive in the post-pandemic world, architects have to step up and start regaining control. At the bare minimum, we need to understand the basis of how our systems operate, before it's too late. The loss of understanding does not only influence the digital sphere, but the physical products we ultimately make and deliver. The medium is the message. Understanding architecture is understanding construction, but it is also understanding the tools of construction. If it happens to be the computer, then we are all computer scientists now.
This scene hits close to home, not only because Kubrick used a pen to symbolize man's loss of control over tools. Over the past few decades, architecture has had to adapt to waves and waves of technological changes, from the days of the drafting mayline in the 19th century, to some strange "ray-tracing copy machine" in the 1970's, to AutoCAD and then to BIM. Along the way, the profession has transformed from interpreting and understanding construction symbols to building and maintaining digital simulations. This means that not only do architects have to know how to construct physical buildings, they have to learn to construction digital models of increasing complexity. Over time, I think we have started to lose control of the tools of the trade, ceding them to excel-sheet-wielding developers, or code-wielding programmers, discussing things we can hardly understand.
In order to thrive in the post-pandemic world, architects have to step up and start regaining control. At the bare minimum, we need to understand the basis of how our systems operate, before it's too late. The loss of understanding does not only influence the digital sphere, but the physical products we ultimately make and deliver. The medium is the message. Understanding architecture is understanding construction, but it is also understanding the tools of construction. If it happens to be the computer, then we are all computer scientists now.
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