Architects and CAD: a love-hate relationship

Not so long ago, a well-equipped architect might have had the following items on his drawing board: A T-square or parallel rule; a couple of plastic drafting triangles; some templates for drawing circles, door swings, and the like; and a container bristling with an array of mechanical pencils.

A really up-to-the-minute practitioner might even boast an electric erasing machine, to help fix all the errors that inevitably cropped up as hand-drawn plans wound their way to completion.

Today, every one of these items is utterly obsolete, right down to the pencils -- all swept away by the advent of computer-aided drafting, or CAD. CAD produces invariably flawless lines, along with perfect lettering in any font or size.

As for erasing, it's now done quickly and spotlessly by tapping the Delete key. Hence, the drafting skills so diligently practiced by architects of my generation now rank roughly on par with the making of stovepipe hats.

If you're expecting a lament over the loss of the good old days, however, you won't find it here. Computers have been an indisputable advance over the tedium of hand drafting, speeding the work and improving its quality by making changes and corrections so much easier.

In the past, even minor revisions to a set of hand-drawn plans could involve hours of painstaking erasing and redrafting. With CAD, they may take only minutes. So dramatic is this shift from hand drafting to CAD that my own recollections of toiling at the drafting board -- hands, arms and elbows smudged in graphite, and clothes dusted in eraser crumbs -- now seem downright Dickensian.

Yet while CAD has revolutionized the production end of architectural practice, it has done surprisingly little to further the architect's creativity. Instead, the computer has introduced a subtle yet unmistakable pressure on architects to design within its own parameters. ...CONTINUED

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