Interview with prof. Adrian Lahoud Interviewer: Stefan Cristian Popa date: 10th of March 2015 place:Architectural Association, London
Introduction Hand-drawing and computer-aided drawing is an issue of actuality at the 'Ion Mincu' school of architecture in Bucharest. This interview has been designed for the specific audience of students and academic members of this institution. Despite a high level of computer aided design skills of the students of this University, the tradition of hand-drawing at 'Ion Mincu' is stronger than in other places. I have engaged professor Adrian Lahoud in a conversation on this topic. His research on drawing and scale as well as his interest in drawing as a didactic tool makes him an excellent interlocutor for this brief project. This interview comes within the wider context of the History and Critical Thinking Master Program led by prof. Marina Lathouri at the Architectural Association. It is through this Program that I realized the function of drawing as a thinking device, a tool designed to offer new ways of narrating and investigating architecture-related topics. During the discussion, Mr. Lahoud touches on this matter, offering his personal point of view. The aim of this interview is not to search for exact responses to urging questions, but rather to open up a number of problems and discussion topics related to the hand drawing and computer aided design not only within architecture as a profession, but also as an indispensable tool within the architectural formation. From them, a comprehensive palette of interpretations of hand-drawing in the contemporary context of architectural representation emerges. Prof. Dr. Adrian Lahoud is a highly dynamic academic member. His responsibilities are numerous split between three major Architecture schools. Currently is the Director of the Bartlett Prospective MArch in Urban Design at University College London. His work within the studio Master in 'Projective Cities' March at the Architectural Association has been internationally recognized. He also coordinates MA and a PhD supervisions at the Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths University. Sitting on chairs borrowed from the studio space where he runs veritable supervision marathons with his students form Projective Cities which respect him, Mr. Lahoud pro-actively engaged with the proposed topic adding clarity to the argument with his logic and authority with his strong voice.
Interview S.P: To start with, you were mentioning in your lectures that a drawing never exhausts the problem it relates to. In your own words, what it actually does, is to structure the problem in a way that it can be better understood. It is not a material solution but a way of keeping the problem alive. How does drawing help pose an architectural question? A.L: You can take the idea of the drawing and the posing of a problem in a number of ways. One aspect of the problem would be looking at the drawing in a very literal sense through its lines, through its organization, relation of spaces to each other etc. This is a way of resolving the functional distribution of spaces. The other aspect of it is implicit in the drawing: the histories, the conventions of the human organization, of sociality, of the way institutions function etc. For me it is actually those two themes. On the one hand the literal aspect of the project, and on the other hand there is the history that these different aspects such as the lines call upon and that requires not to see the lines but to see through them, to see those rules, those routines. Those lines are somehow supposed to be evoking, reinventing or reorganizing. So in terms of the idea of keeping the problem alive the important thing is thinking what kind of work the drawing is supposed to do, the way the drawing organizes things in the world and within an architectural project that would interact with all the parties which are interested or invested within the project, and how you can use something like a drawing to organize the conversations or the arguments that potentially would emerge out of trying to get this project through. This is what I mean by trying to keep the problem alive. Think about the drawing not only as something that must exist in this frictionless space where it is produced. Actually, you should think about the drawing almost as catalysing an argument. In consequence, you start thinking about the drawing much more in series, as opposed to one final perfect exemplification of a project. S.P: This is a beautiful idea and of course it shows how drawing has to be looked at in the academic space. How students have to be shown how to draw, not the final drawing, the beautiful drawing, but the progressive study drawing which enables you to think through it. A.L: And already in two minutes we have described three ways of looking at drawings. I think that's interesting because whether it's the drawing a literal description of a space, a drawing as the history of what the spaces mean, have meant or can mean, and third in terms of what job the
drawing is supposed to do once it enters into the world. And you see that it is somehow within the abstraction of the drawing that these multiple possibilities can start to emerge. This is what is really fascinating about it. It is in the architect's interest to make that extremely clear and to make a drawing almost impossible to misinterpret. But then of course the ambiguity in the drawing is precisely what is important about it as well. A very mature understanding of how you deploy drawing or different aspects of the same drawing, the same project, how you represent them is then needed. It is really fundamental in architecture, that's really key. S.P: Going deeper in this idea of representation through drawing, you were mentioning in your lectures that a specific viewer is involved in every kind of drawing. It can be presupposed as in the case of axonometrics, the infinite observer, or exist as in the case of perspective where the position of the viewer can be geometrically determined. What becomes of the drawing when there is no subject involved? A.L: That's a good question. I think there has been a very interesting shift in the past seven or eight years in architecture back to the axonometric drawing. You see it in lots of different places. First of all, one of the important things is that in the period leading to the shift back to the axonometric drawing we saw many new forms of representations emerging out of various kinds of software and digital technologies. My reading of it, impossible to verify, is that there was a purity in which suddenly computer made it extremely easy to quickly produce things that seemed complicated. In fact you can think one generation, maybe even more than one generation, was really invested in the production of novelty where novelty simply meant something that has never been seen before. There are many ways to produce that. At a certain point the discipline like architectural education became a little bit tired of that overproduction of that formally baroque architecture. In the background of going back to something like axonometric was of course the intention to reassure some degree of objectivity, to get a certain clarity, through drawing. Being a scaled drawing, a measured drawing, not depending on a single subject, the axonometric drawing describes objects in a way that perspective simply can't. The question is what that offers and whether we read that shift back to the axonometrics purely as a reaction or can we find evidence of an attempt to rethink axonometrics and oblique forms of representation in new ways? So on the one hand yes you can say it is an understandable response to try to reconstitute a more reasoned if not objective way of thinking about architecture. But on the other hand there is also a kind of satisfaction with those kind of drawings which I find problematic as well. S.P: I find this very rich. I started studying architecture under the aura of hand-drawing back in Bucharest at the Institute of Architecture 'Ion Mincu', where for the first two years of studies we hardly used the computer. In order to be accepted to the University of Architecture, students still have to pass a hand-drawing exam. I guess we wanted to use the skills we acquired in the preparation for this exam. This is why hand-drawing projected itself on our work in the first two years. Thinking back at this moment and following on the idea of hand drawing and technology, I realize that hand drawing is slowly, if not irreversibly already has been, replaced by technology. When we design, we no longer work on the representation itself, the view or the plan of that what we design, but on something that serves as a source for every possible representation as is the case of BIM - Building Information Modelling. In your view, how does this shift transform architecture? A.L: We are loosing a lot by putting students directly into the software right from the beginning and not teaching them how to draw. Because what is interesting in drawing, beyond what you can represent with it, is what it does to you. And how it shapes your mind and the way that you think about things. Again, there have been lots of arguments made around hand-drawing and the fact that it has a fixed scalar relationship to you and the body. This is one of the big claims that have been made about the importance of drawing which is probably important. I believe there is also something else in the repetitiveness of the action, something similar to the action of meditation, that
architects are loosing. Having said that on the one hand, at the moment, there is a strong split between hand-drawing and the computer. On the other hand though, this is also a historical split that won't exist in ten years. The reason for this is that we have underestimated how powerful artefacts like a piece of paper and a pencil can be. What is the efficiency of something like CAD or any of these kind of things? Obviously the possibility to make multiple revisions, possibility to share information with people etc. There is no reason why in ten years time you could be drawing in a very traditional way on a drawing board while what you're producing is digital information. I think maybe we are in the stone age of interfaces. The potential in the future is enormous for bringing those two things back together and I think that what we try to do is rediscover the richness in that interface by reinventing it in a way that makes new things possible rather than simply say we should do it because it was better in the olden days. This is also another argument. I imagine it is not going to be that far away when we're going to be drawing on a A1 piece of paper, when the piece of paper is both the screen and a hand-drawing base of some form. In fact, you can already get an A4 version of something like that which is truly just sheets of paper. There is a pressure sensitive table underneath. Those things I think are not that far away... S.P: I remember back in Bucharest there is this exam called 'sketch' three times each semester when students are given a subject, a problem to solve architecturally and represent graphically on the limited format of an A2. There is full liberty within the extension of the enunciate to think, develop and draw the proposal in the eight hour time-frame. Many think it is complicated. Actually it was a lot of fun. In Paris they have this form of exam but they are allowed to use computer. You can really see the difference in the production of solutions. A computer generated 'sketch' lacks this subtlety, this deepness of thought that you gain by simply referencing yourself to the scale of the drawing you are producing.... A.L: Can I jump in? Because I think one of the things that are really interesting is that when you draw something by hand, you make a different investment. I think you have to think about what you are drawing more carefully when it is going to require another investment of time to erase it and to redraw it and to make the construction again. You have to train and it requires a certain discipline to do it well because if you make a mistake you have a lot of work to do to fix it. On a computer, because the information is always stored, it is very easy to revise things and this is what makes it really useful on one level. The interesting thing about tools is what they do your imagination as much as what they enable you to do as a designer. Using the computer in order to draw requires a different kind of mental discipline, but you're invested differently, and you don't have to think as much. You can test things out more. So then therefore maybe each process becomes important in it's own way, developing different criteria of judgement, that are more collective. I assume that the decision making process starts to shift once the decision becomes easier rather than harder. S.P: You said that modern technologies enable us to represent much more complex things than what we were able to do by hand. Maybe this is another sphere of discussion we don't have the time to touch upon. But could you briefly comment on the plan in the terms proposed by Frank Gehry's new building in Paris for example? In this specific case there is no plan, it is not relevant... A.L: It is a plan but it is more arbitrary, right? Because the plan is, especially in the case of that building, enormously conventional. The shell is obviously very elaborate. I think this is interesting if you think of the plan in a traditional way, as the thing architects use to organise, and of the section as how we design experience for example. Not working in plan and section and looking at an object from the outside a lot, also lends itself towards thinking more about envelopes instead of organization or disposition of spaces to each other. I think that is also partially at a risk as well. We are not fully aware of the way tools condition the kinds of architecture that you produce. I think that when you are making a drawing by hand, there is a certain economy of description that you have to take into consideration. For example the documentation of buildings is so complex today, that the
number of drawings that need to be produced to represent that complexity into detail, is very high. A lot of that was enshrined in a set of principles, of basic details. As for now I think there is especially with software tools like BIM, everything becomes document. I don't know whether it is good or bad, but definitely it is a major transformation. S.P: Summing up the previous questions and pushing these ideas a little bit further, I would be interested to know how the problem-project paradigm adapts in the new situation produced by the replacement of traditional representation methods by the new information model design. What becomes of the role of the drawing in this new conditions? A.L: As architects, we should mobilise any tools that are at our disposal. Ultimately, because the project is not to defend drawing versus technology or vice versa, the question is why one practices architecture. If you stay focus on that, then, depending on your disposition, you would be happy to pick up any tool and see if it can do something for you. There is always going to be an incredibly important role for drawing. I can't imagine architecture without drawing. I can imagine the kinds of drawings changing, I can imagine the way we can make drawings change, but architecture without drawing is inconceivable. And to get back to the question of the problem and the project I think most likely architects are going to have to get better at working across different bodies of knowledge than they have been in the past. I say that very carefully because I think that there is a risk that architects become interested in anything else but architecture. S.P: How did the responsibilities of the architect evolve under these circumstances? A.L: I think what architecture has done in the past 15 or 20 years is in fact relinquish a whole set of responsibilities to different forms of expertise like technical, legal or financial. How you start to reconstruct spaces of autonomy and ownership from all those different practices is absolutely critical. Unfortunately in this case someone like Frank Gehry is a really bad model because we are witnessing such an exceptional moment within the history of architecture, that his work doesn't really offer us any way forward in terms of everyday practice. That is really a shame because in a way those kinds of projects have so captured the attention and energy of architecture students for so long. And architects have lost sight of the core of the profession which is to really take control of the shape of human life in cities. Instead it has been handed over to the market and that's been a total tragedy. Architects spend their time exploring computer codes and all these kinds of analogues for how they think organization should be implemented, how they think cities take form etc. And they have forgotten to look at the material that is right in front of them. S.P: What would be the philosophy that would enable us to counter-attack this invasion of new objects consequences of this accelerated production of architecture facilitated by the new technologies? A.L: We have to be profoundly interested in more typical and conventional things. Not to reproduce them but to change them. Not to simply hand them over to the market and also not to pretend it is beneath us because it is not artistically creative. S.P: Modesty? A.L: It can be very immodest actually. To change something that is constituted as a norm is far more difficult than to make an extremely beautiful building. Because there are so many other things that need to shift, that need to come along. So it is an immodest ambition because it is not to change the exception but to change the rule. And that's very hard to do. In order to achieve that, we need to have a much better account of what architecture can do. That's also what we are missing. A decent account of what the purpose of architecture is.