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Comment by bhasi | Hacker News Reader

Just realized that architects had to actually draw their designs before computers. This is obviously true, but I haven't had to think about this until now.

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The realization sets in that the whole culture war of the abstract on the ornamental, migtht boil down to avoiding having to draw till your hands fell off.

Drawing by hand is still often a simple thing that might work.

If you just need one drawing of something unique it is probably still fastest. But nobody needs one drawing of something unique. You often want to take your drawing and program some CNC (3d printer...) to build parts and CAD/CAM can do that much quicker. You often want more than one copy of the drawing reduced/enlarged. You often want to give different views to different people which CAD will just do with a few clicks. You often want to run analysis for various things (do the beams work, will the pipes carry the needed water...). Many more things modern CAD can just do and more things are being added - you just need to learn to use a computer.

The best way to start a design is with one drawing of something unique.

When I start I don’t know if its beams or walls or trusses or tensile fabric. I don’t know where the water comes from. I don’t know where it goes because I don’t know the shapes of things. Don’t know the form of the whole.

Sometimes computers are appropriate to the work. Sometimes they are not. I started learning CAD in 1989. My understanding of the work is different now.

Recommend checking out Taliesin West, if you're ever near Scottsdale. You'll get to see where he and his students did a lot of the draft work for his architecture and see some of the drafts too.

Fun story, Wright despised the electrification of the rural US, and threatened to abandon the property when poles were erected nearby, considering them unsightly.

He also illegally logged land on someone else's property to give himself a river view at Taliesen the First.

And removed a load bearing wall from his sister's house and didn't replace it.

He's not my favorite architect by a long way. And I find the idea of him being in charge of a mile tall building to be horrifying.

I much prefer Gaudi - even more outrageous, and his roofs didn't leak. He didn't have access to modern engineering, but all his buildings were well built.

> and his roofs didn't leak.

People kissing his ass and he can’t even make a fucking roof work.

This is another in a long line of things my father and I disagree about. (It was his idea to take the tour)

Gaudi pioneered a lot of interesting physical modelling techniques to check his designs, e.g., he was the first to use inverted space-hanging models for domes and vaults (although his predecessors had used them for arches).

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