The office dispersed a year ago and we have been designing at a distance ever since. Online we employ awkward drawing tools offered through primitive digital formats, like Blu Ray PDF, Adobe Power Point, Microsoft Teams, Cisco WebEx, Go To Meeting and Zoom. However much our language has evolved in descriptive efficacy and detail over the last year, we are daily reminded of the limitations of words and the imperative of drawings in advancing design. All words, even specialized ones, are selective, general in meaning and ambiguous in practice and as inadequate as they are for our purposes, were this not true, we would sadly enjoy neither wit nor poetry.
As animate beings, we evolved to perceive the world by moving through it, employing not only our eyes and brains but also our feet and head. As we do so, we mostly keep track of what does not change -- the height, width, depth, shapes and substances of surfaces and objects. We gauge their sizes relative to and separation from each other and from us as they and we move around by calibrating invariant relationships among their invariant aspects. This is how we avoid trees and cliffs and why sometimes we “take a step back” to “size things up”. We perceive by comparing, we crunch the math. We know these invariant relationships most simply as ratios and ratios of ratios (proportions) but the math is complex, the scientists and mathematicians have yet to fully (and may never) describe it.
Compared to the natural environment, a building is a simplified environment. Compared to a building, a drawing is simpler still. The information available in a drawing that describes an environment (natural or built) is always more limited than what is available in the environment itself. Drawings like all images (and words) are selective, general in meaning and ambiguous in practice and were this not true, we would enjoy neither a history nor a future of art.
Drawings we use to design and describe a building are mostly “line” drawings (no color, textures or shading). In descending order of information contained (or in ascending order of “abstraction”), there are three-dimensional views: perspective, isometric and axonometric (3-d parallel line projection); and two-dimensional views: section, elevation (horizontal parallel line projection) and plan (vertical parallel line projection). To design and describe a building, perspectives and plans are the most widely used drawings and they are at opposite poles of abstraction. A perspective is a picture and a plan is a map, the former suggests how a building design might look, the latter conveys how it is laid out. But we would no sooner rely only on how a design looks from one or even a few perspective views than we would on its lay out alone. Every drawing is differently selective and complimentary in the information it offers.
Sections and elevations (horizontal parallel line projections) are neither and both a picture and a map. Think of them as perspective views from a distance (hence the parallel lines). Like a perspective, they map aspects of the building that we see but like a plan, only in one-to-one relationship and only those that are invariant. Even though we never really see these aspects directly as mapped (or at all), they are with training and imagination effective tools with which to predict how a building is laid out and what it will look like. The key is the training and the imagination. Just as words are necessarily selective and useful only if we can write and read them, so we must learn to make and make use of parallel line projections. It is a skill.
But is it a necessary one? Has electronic, parametric three-dimensional modeling rendered the two-dimensional drawing, the parallel line projection, obsolete? Could a building be designed without them? Our digital tools these days are Rhino and Revit through which within an imaginary isotropic environment we “model” a design in three dimensions. We can apparently move around and through it as we make it. The illusion on our two-dimensional screens is so powerful we convince ourselves we have worked everything out, even built the building before it is built, and why not then just hand over the model to the builder? And yet not once in the decade or more over which we have employed these tools have we ever worked out or described a building with three dimensional views alone. A three-dimensional model (viewed on a two-dimensional display) provides too much and not enough information.
When instead we show aspects of a design in two-dimensional parallel line projection—not just plans but also sections and elevations-- we momentarily set aside extraneous three-dimensional information to then assess in manageable tranches large order of magnitude relationships which in their accumulation will result in the experience of the building. It is otherwise too hard to assess things dispassionately, from a distance, to see around corners and through walls—all of which are obligatory when designing, not just perceiving an environment. But because these drawings omit information, they are also ambiguous and insufficient on their own. We therefore toggle in our heads between three dimensional and two-dimensional views both of which it turns out are indispensable.