Reflections of an Apostate CAD TeacherAuthor(s): Garry StevensSource: Journal of Architectural Education (1984-), Vol. 51, No. 1 (Sep., 1997), pp. 78-80Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd. on behalf of the Association of Collegiate Schools ofArchitecture, Inc.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1425528 .

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op arch Reflections of an Apostate CAD Teacher

GARRY STEVENS, University of Sydney, Australia

WHEN I STARTED TEACHING AND RESEARCHING COMPUTER-AIDED

architectural design fifteen years ago, I was convinced that CAD would transform practice: It would provide a powerful array of

exciting computer tools that would allow firms to produce better

designs faster and cheaper. I was wrong. CAD tools other than drafting programs are

nonexistent outside a few very large firms, and CAD (that's computer-aided drafting) programs have not improved produc- tivity. It might come as a surprise to the reader to learn that there is no evidence that computers have increased the productivity of any industry in which they have been deployed, a phenomenon so well known to economists that it has a name, the Solow paradox: "Computers are everywhere but in the productivity figures."'

This does not startle the student of the history of technology. Technological innovations typically take decades to reach levels of cost and sophistication sufficient to create productivity improvements: Twenty to fifty years from introduction is typical.2 I would be surprised if architectural computing's history were much different. Apart from general anecdotal evidence that computing can be fatal to a firm's profitability, such evidence as we do have suggests that any possible time savings is consumed by the constant revisions and printings that managers feel able to demand.3 The

implementation of all of the other tasks that CAD could facilitate, such as integration of CAD databases with other applications, has

proved so difficult that it has been abandoned in practice. Getting the

computer to work properly just producing drawings is difficult

enough. Technologists never have much to say about implementation difficulties, discounting them as trivial, the fault of naive users, or soluble with the next generation of hardware or software (and, of course, more money). Yet as all architects know only too well, getting any computer system or program of any sophistication up and

running, and keeping it that way, is a major task. Much of the touted productivity gains have been eaten up by

the machines' extremely rapid depreciation, an economic calamity that the industry has succeeded in portraying as the social virtue of

technological progress. The industry takes prides in the fact that a CAD system costing $200,000 in 1985 could now be bought for

perhaps one-tenth that amount. I wonder if the architecture firms that watched their machines turn into expensive junk virtually before their eyes are so happy?

In a decade or two, perhaps, CAD programs will provide the

productivity gains the vendors say they do-but not now. Then

why are CAD systems bought? One reason is coercion. Facilities

managers and building owners have found more use for CAD

drawings than architects have, and many clients now require CAD-

generated drawings, thus forcing firms into purchases they would not otherwise have made.4 CAD use has always been much higher in the very large firms that the magazines like to write about. This

points us, I think, to the real forces behind the introduction of CAD. In other industries, computers have been used not to increase productivity, but to increase organizational control, and I believe that the same considerations have propelled the computerization of the larger architecture firms (such motives are irrelevant in one- or

two-person firms).5 CAD systems allow a firm to monitor a project better and to monitor the architect's output more closely.

It also seems to me that CAD systems alter the architect's

relationship to his or her product, the drawing: CAD systems depersonalize the drawing process. This depersonalization must

explain, in part, the low status accorded to those using CAD systems. That such is the case is affirmed by the efforts of some firms to ameliorate this low status by ensuring that everyone in the firm uses CAD at some point.6 They have not had much success. I

suspect that the proportion of architects over forty who have sat in front of a keyboard is minimal, not because they are old-fashioned

technophobes, but because they are in middle or upper management. It is worth recalling that the introduction of

typewriters ninety years ago did not lead executives to type their own correspondence, but instead introduced a low-status caste of

people (typists) who did it for them. We have recently seen the disappearance of the occupation at

the bottom of the architectural ladder: the manual drafter with no architectural education. Now the people at the bottom are the CAD

operators, probably about half of whom are qualified architects. I

speculate that this is the profession's reaction to the massive increase in the graduate production of the schools over the past few decades.7 Such an increase always generates changes in the economic and social situation of an occupation, as the increasing supply of a

qualification threatens the rarity and hence value of the

qualification held by existing members.8 I think that what we are

seeing is the absorption of most newcomers into an architectural underclass of CAD operators, the creation of which is protecting the older members from a general downclassing.

The talented, I am sure, will still rise to the top, and their stay in front of the screens will be short, while the oversupply of

graduates will be diverted to the operation of the machines. The

downclassing of a segment of the occupation is disguised by the common title of architect held by all, but we may expect to see a rise

Journal ofArchitectural Education, pp. 78-80

? 1997 ACSA, Inc.

September 1997 JAE 51/1 78

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in discontentment in the profession as the trick is revealed for the

sleight of hand that it is. New career ladders are developing in architectural firms, in

which a hardening of the division of labor between CAD operators and others is relegating some to a path that will never lead to

management levels. The profession will have to cope with these

increasingly diverse and divergent career paths. The stratification of the profession into large and small firms through the first half of this century began the process, and computing is accelerating it. I

speculate that what is at present a unitary profession will come to resemble more the profession as it exists in several European countries, where there is a clear distinction, in title and in function, between types of architects, based on the sort of work they do and the sort of client they do it for. This will probably happen faster than the schools can react to it, given the natural inertia of the education system. An architecture degree in the United States might become what it is in Italy, a form of liberal arts education. No doubt we will also gradually see the creation of new degree forms that will institutionalize the streaming that is occurring in practice.

I would like to think that the schools sense the threat that CAD poses to the occupational integrity of architecture. Certainly, they have shown little enthusiasm for CAD training. Neither has the profession, for that matter, but the schools have been obliged to yield in face of demands from the accreditation panels. This has created a breach between the profession and the academics. Professional complaints about the quality of teaching are nothing new, but one charge that the profession could never make was that the teachers themselves lacked architectural competence, particularly since the schools insist that their faculty have an architecture degree or registration. The professional demand for CAD has brought to the fore the embarrassing fact that the architecture faculty teaching in the studios are devoid of experience in that technology, as witnessed by the hurried importation of CAD staff in the past decade. I would venture that fewer than one in ten studio instructors could be considered proficient in the skill. Most academics have overcome their discomfiture by reasoning that few

practicing architects of their age know much about CAD themselves, including those lecturing them from the accreditation panels. A few have affected to find computer-generated drawings abhorrent, and I know some who positively refuse to accept them for design submissions. It is one thing to suggest that a student refine his or her line weights or change the delicate tint of a wash. It is quite another to tell students how to use the rotate command.

These stresses must only be exacerbated by the incessant monetary demands the CAD labs make. CAD teaching requires more

than base-level computers, and moreover it needs a lot of them. More than a handful of computers requires staff to manage them. The cost implications are compounded by the extremely rapid depreciation of the machines. The CAD lab has an insatiable appetite for funds- funds that others might prefer to see being spent on studio staff.

I do not believe that the schools teach CAD well. Unlike manual drafting, which is taught by the studio teachers, CAD is usually relegated to technical staff. Learning a CAD program takes many hours, and the schools do not have (or will not make) the time in their teaching programs to let their students progress beyond an elementary level. I feel that the best place to learn CAD is in the office, where individuals can hone their skills for hours each week. Unfortunately, the profession has decided that it has no intention of providing this sort of training.

A little-discussed problem pervading all of computing is the sheer ephemerality of everything in it. When Tony Radford and I wrote our book on architectural computing ten years ago, we used a Hitachi Peach microcomputer and the HiWrite word processor.9 Neither of these exists any more. The disks on which we stored the text are useless, their information perfectly preserved but unreadable by any modern machine."1 I'm glad we kept paper copies.

It must surely be a worry to any architecture educator that the skills imparted by CAD teaching are so short-lived. An architect taking a midcareer break would find his manual drafting skills as useful as ever upon his return, but his CAD skills would be obsolete: another decade, another CAD program. It must also be of concern that the skills imparted are so often product-specific. Today, the profession insists on CAD teaching, and by this it usually means proficiency in a single product, AutoCAD (at least at the time of this writing). I am not at all sure that the schools should be dedicated to the service of a single product (or, for that matter, that firms should be so dependent on the fortunes of a single corporation).

When I started teaching computing, CAD was exciting. Now it has been ghettoized in the schools as a purely technical facet of the educational process. Beyond the CAD courses that the profession has cajoled academia into providing, many schools provide classes in the Internet and associated technologies. These courses have proved popular. Free Net access is always appealing, particularly the unfettered access it provides to illicit material. The Web is a graphically oriented medium, and the opportunity it affords for the creation of images in a novel environment can compete with the traditionally popular art classes. No doubt there are other attractions: Since information must be provided in fragments and presentation is as important as content, students do not have to suffer the intellectual taxation necessitated by the

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writing of, say, architectural history essays, which require extended and coherent argument.

The Web is now being used to hold virtual studios and to

implement distance education. I have shown previously that students'

personal experience of designers is a fundamental part of architectural education." I expect that those teaching the environmental sciences and structures will be vastly more enthusiastic about the prospect of

teaching students without actually having to meet them than, say, the historians and studio teachers will.

To date, I believe, the progress of computing in our field has been driven by the desires of those in the information-technology industries and their academic allies. We owe it to ourselves to

recapture our future and use computing to aid the profession, not

destroy it.

Notes

1. Stephen D. Oliner and David E. Sichel, "Computers and Output Growth Revisited," Brookings Papers on Economic Activity 24/2 (1994): 273-317; and D.H. Harris, ed., Organizational Linkages: Understanding the Productivity Paradox (Washington, DC: National Academy Press, 1994).

2. R.H. Franke, "Technological Revolution and Productivity Decline:

Computer Introduction in the Financial Industry," Technological Forecasting and Social Change 31/1 (1987): 143-54.

3. James R. Franklin, "Ruminations of a CAD Victim," Progressive Architecture (Apr. 1993): 59-60.

4. Ibid. 5. John Rule and Paul Attewell, "What Do Computers Do?" Social Problems

36/3 (1989): 225-41; and David F. Noble, "Automation Madness, or the Unautomatic History of Automation," in S.L. Goldman, ed., Science, Technology, and Social Progress (Bethlehem, PA: Lehigh University Press, 1989), pp. 65-92.

6. Michael McLaughlin, "There's No Such Thing as a CAD Operator," Progressive Architecture (Sept. 1995): 86-87.

7. See Robert Gutman, Architectural Practice: A Critical View (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Architectural Press, 1988) for the figures.

8. See Pierre Bourdieu, "The Field of Cultural Production, or: The Economic World Reversed," Poetics 12 (1983): 311-56; Pierre Bourdieu, Homo Academicus (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988); and Pierre Bourdieu and Loic J.D. Wacquant, An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).

9. Antony D. Radford and Garry Stevens, CAD Made Easy: A Comprehen- sive Guide for Architects and Designers (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1987).

10. It is for this reason that I contemplate with horror the prospect of

transforming the world's books into digital form. 11. Garry Stevens, "Struggle in the Studio," JAE49/2 (Nov. 1995): 105-21.

September 1997 JAE 51/1 80

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