Book Review: Tools of the Imagination

Tools of the Imagination: Drawing Tools and Technologies from the Eighteenth Century to the Present edited by Susan Piedmont-Palladino, published by Princeton Architectural Press, 2006. (Amazon)

Notions of tools as extensions of the hand have been usurped by contemporary conditions of "abstract machines" that absorb both human and instrument into larger functional systems.

This quote by Paul Emmons in his essay, "The Lead Pencil: Lever of the Architect's Imagination," sums up much of 2005's Tools of the Imagination exhibition at the National Building Museum and its accompanying book, in which the essay is included. Finely crafted and sculpted instruments that exhibit their use and fit for the human hand — used for drawing, shading, constructing perspectives, even erasing — give way to computer interfaces and the disconnect between hand and result. In each phase of the architectural process, from design sketches to construction documents, the computer has replaced pencils, pens, markers, and the like as the tool for realizing designs. Certainly, architects still use graphite and ink to express concepts and ideas, but in just about all cases these are translated into zeros and ones at some point. 

While the book's contributors lament this replacement (why else would this exhibition and book happen?), the presence of the computer is seen as but another tool, not as a hindrance to design. But as the next generation of software (BIM, or Building Information Modeling) slowly replaces today's computer-aided drafting (CAD) programs, the distance between hand and design will become even more distant. It's apparent from William J. Mitchell's conclusion ("the code of an elegantly construction graphics algorithm has an austere, functional beauty that can take your breath away") that these tools of the not-too-distant future will find acceptance by architects, only to be reminisced about in the distant future.

Tools of the Imagination offers the reader wonderful illustrations of these now archaic tools (some I was using in architectural school a little over ten years ago!) and the drawings they produce. Many of the tools cry out to be held and used, a quality lacking in images of computer screens. In addition to the aforementioned essays by Emmons and Mitchell, David V. Thompson and Phillip G. Bernstein give insight into the past and future of the architect's tools, respectively. Unfortunately the essays and the rest of the text in the book are laid out in a way that seems to try to progress beyond the antiquity of some of the tools; the lines of white text on a silver background become unreadable in certain lighting conditions. Perhaps this fault can be fixed in the future when a new edition is necessary, when today's CAD is reminisced about just like the compass, the T-square, and electric eraser are today.