towards an animated architecture against architectural animation

As architecture students, we all have experience with the seduction of the medium. I remember back in my undergraduate days, spending endless hours rendering a perspective, loosing alot of time and energy that could have been spent elsewhere. Not only that, but alot of the decisions made in the design process seemed to have been driven by what would look good on paper. I was an art major before being an architecture student, and one thing about art majors in egypt is that they heavily emphasize technique over substance in education. While looking at works by Picaso, Monet, Manet, cezane..etc, we were encouraged to look at the quality of the brush strokes and the use of color mixing techniques instead of the organization or spatial constructs of the painting. The latter was considered implicit I guess.
The thing about art is both the technical mastery and the spatial depth of a painting go hand in hand, like two sides of one coin, i.e. one cannot exist without the others. If you are painting a particular scene, you either focus on your line and shading qualities to achieve the depth needed, or focus on the depth needed that then dictates the technique used. One side of the coin maybe further developed than the other, but still both exist
I would argue that this is not the case in architecture representation. The message in this sort of representation is the ultimate goal. Maybe with actual hand drawings this idea of the double sided coin still existed, even with lavishly colored section drawings, the section cut line would still be powerful enough to communicate the message I suppose, although I would argue that certain Perspective drawings Ive seen, and sometimes drawn myself, tell nothing of the story other than "im a pretty building, look at me". It seems that animation is a very seductive and craftsome process that very easily distracts the student from the essence of the whole picture story, focusing instead with the technical craft of the animation, turning it into a work of visual artistry rather than a viable means of architectural representation.
But even then, after reading architectural representation and the perspective hinge, the "distance" becomes an important character in the stage setting, or as Gomez and Pelletier better articulated it "The distance made it possible for space itself to become an object of artistic representation". The inception of the Greek tragedy is a direct evolution of the ritual participations. Spectatorship was born through this transformation, and the act of participation has been redefined. In order for any art form to be successful, it should acquire engagement from its spectators. Any successful artform embodies such acts of engagement and evokes emotional reactions from the observor / spectator. It varies from one art form to another: engagement in portraits is through facial expressions, in landscapes through spatial depth within the foreground - middleground - background, in surrealist / cubist paintings through the nonsensical and odd representation of the figure, in music through the "soulfulness" and attitude of the notes, in movies through the composition of the frame, allowing the viewer to feel as being part of the actual movie.
It is thus important as architects to know, what is the message are we trying to communicate, and elaborate on that on our methods of representation. Whether its communicating to a client, fabricator/manufacturer, coworker, or ourselves, we need to have our drawings reflect what our ideas are and inform us of possibilities we have not thought of before.
An interesting notion brought up in the perspective hinge article is the idea that "architectural conception and realization usually assume a one-to-one correspondence between the represented idea and the final building." Kinda sheds light on the "form follows software" statement made in the first class. Going back to experiences in undergrad, I remember my first year when we had a project to design an addition to an existing Islamic house in older cairo.



Being brought up in an architects home, I always thought of the act of designing to involve the use of a pen and paper. I was blown away when I first saw the plan of the house I was going to use for my project. It just didnt make any geometrical sense to why the shapes of the spaces were the way they were, there were awkward angles, looong narrow corridors, an unending variety of wall thicknesses. My naivety led my to believe that the design was very haphazard, until I actually went to see the building myself. The introduction chapter of Beatrize Colomina's Modern Architecture as Mass Media talks about Le Corbusier's love with arab architecture, where the architecture doesnt seem to stem from any drawing but from the act of onsite design, where the architect/master mason engages all his senses in the act of building; extruding the spaces exactly to where he feels comfortable; building thicker walls in rooms thats require more noise isolation or protection of weather; understanding the issues of privacy, especially with women, in the realm of the house...etc. Even the amazing craftsmen ship of the mashrabeya window, is not a "designed" element per say. It is the solution to the problem of sheltering the interior from harsh sunlight using tiny little wooden leftover pieces, as wood was not an abundant resource in that part of the world, scraps from construction was used to build these windows that has become a symbol of islamic architecture.

The article talks a great deal about the represented idea in both gothic in terms of construction and renaissance in terms of idealized geometries and perspective drawings as methods of participant engagement. What about today's architecture? We can definitely see traces of autocad and other standerdised cad software in the american vernacular architecture of the 21st century. When I take a stroll in downtown washington DC (or in other words, run towards the chinatown metro station), all the buildings being errected there nowadays seem to have traces of the autocad offset command still aparent on their facades. Just vertical and horizontal lines placed upon the facade, looking less and less like the rhythmic lines produced in the renaissance architecture they are trying to emulate