Beaux Arts vs. SketchUp

I am sure you’ve heard of Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000 hour rule, but if not, check out his book Outliers. Basically, he believes that if you spend 10,000 hours practicing a task in the correct way you will become an expert. This ranges from selling widgets, playing the piano to even video games. I witnessed this by watching my teenage sons play seemingly 10,000 hours of video games. They got very good at it – too bad they couldn’t get college credit for it. I used to halfheartedly warn them if they couldn’t get into college they might end up flying drones for the military.

So what is the equivalent in architecture? 10,000 hour in Revit or 10,000 hours on shop drawings or 10,000 hours designing? Clearly spending time in a given software package will improve the user’s ability to master it. But what about design, one could argue that design is not all about software. Isn’t it about the ability to ‘see’ space and envision what it could be?

Working with Bob Venturi, who was trained in the Beaux Art tradition, it was always plan and section. Draw a plan, sketch a quick section and you understood the 3 dimensional space. No SketchUp and no 3-D computer program. 10,000 hours of plan and section and the 3-D muscle in your brain ‘saw’ the space. My architectural education was very similar to Bob’s, plan and section. The computer programs were years away. We had design studios for 5 years, 5 days a week, which is a little less than 4,000 hours (not counting all the endless nights). By the time I got out of school the 3-D muscle in my head was working fairly well and adding all the following years of practice of plans and section I would argue I can visualize a space with very little information beyond a plan.

Image by Betsill Workshop, captioned: “A Beaux Arts-esque study of the entry portico of a massive manor house. Our inspiration came from Lutyen’s Gledstone Hall in England. I drew the line drawing with pencil on vellum then copied it on to bond to render the shading with pencil and the background with AD marker.”

Image sourced on the Betsill Workshop Pinterest page.

But with today’s technology, who needs plan and section when we can work in 3-D software that shows us what any given space might look like almost instantly. Progress! Or is it? I trust my ability to look at a plan and know its 3-D implications instantly. I think in 3-D. But what of the young architecture student coming out of college today who hasn’t spent thousands of hours working in plan and section, who doesn’t have to develop a 3-D muscle in their head when the software does it for them.

Is the next generation of designers going to be better because they can iterate faster through software? Clearly one can come up with far more options with 3-D software that a parallel edge. The computer can allow designers to come up with far more complex geometries faster and easier. (Forgetting Antoni Gaudi for a moment.) However, can they think in 3-D or does one just rely on the computer? And, does it even matter?

Does an architect have a vision about what a space might be before they draw a line? How does inspiration work? Or does ‘form follow Rhino’? Does thinking in 3-D increase you appreciation of the built environment and does 10,000 hours in SketchUp result in the same appreciation? Does working in a 3-D computer program develop a different mental muscle?

What do you think? Has computer software decreased our ability to ‘think’ in 3-D or enhanced it?