Cinemetics is an exciting demonstration of a cinematically-inspired, cybernetically-based, architectural drawing system, which embeds architecture in relationships within the world at large. It is the first guidebook for architectural drawing with the computer based on an understanding of how digital drawing fundamentally differs from drawing with mechanical pencils on drafting boards. This book opens up new ways of seeing architecture as framing flowing matter, enabling a philosophy of 'newness'. Operationally, computers, based on cybernetic circuits, are radically transforming not only architectural drawing procedures but also the human sensory-motor schema. Thinking in circuits is replacing perspectival picturing with its illusion of self-sufficiency, making past assumptions about buildings as self-contained objects obsolete. The authors - fifteen-year collaborators in teaching architectural students - link illustrations and text to research in media studies, biology, ecology and philosophy.
Cinemetrics assumes that digital technologies are the everyday experience of today's media-saturated public. It takes you through a process of losing perspectival picture-making and generating space through cybernetic duration. Architectural drawing is reconceived as a multidimensional information system rather than static image-making. Aimed at students, teachers and professionals, this book provides a simple and accessible framework for learning how to position architecture within current life-supporting initiatives.
This is not a software book, but applied theory based in sensori-motor experience. Technical advice in architectural drawing, 3D modelling, animation and digital editing is offered. Pointers are provided for the accumulation of skills in architectural drawings. Presented are drawings that move literally and figuratively. Cinemetrics is a book that challenges readers intellectually and physically, as it requires you to turn the page and reorientate the reading of the book around the illustrations. Here drawings speak more eloquently than words about the projective experience of architecture.
Rezensionen / Stimmen
"By progressively positioning their architectural research on 'digital drawing' as contemporary cultural practice, Brian Mc Grath and Jean Gardner demonstrate not only a unique lateral intelligence but - to paraphrase George Lang's declaration that tradition is a conspiracy often used to keep the future from happening - ensure that the future is happening now. This daringly analytical book precisely and effectively delineates heretofore hidden systems of emergent relations between ideology, methodology, representation, and production."
-Sulan Kolatan, Max Fisher Visiting Professor at University of Michigan and Partner in KOL/MAC LLC, and William Mac Donald, Professor and Chair of Graduate Architecture and Urban Design at School of Architecture, Pratt Institute, and Partner in KOL/MAC LLC
"With this engaging, mind-expanding, and original guide to contemporary modalities of visualizing and representing architecture, the authors usher the not-yet-initiated into the digital design age."
-Joan Ockman, Director of the Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture, Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, Columbia University
"Cinemetrics extends the parameters of representation by drawing on aspects of media, film and video. This book is an addition to the lineage of expanding the pictorial field - the Nude Descending a Staircase meeting the battleship Potempkin. The digital drawing methodology produces an explosive shattering of architectural space and reflects the understanding of multiple vantage points and the simultaneity of events in the manner of postmodern literature and filmmakers such as Godard. These drawings have the power to communicate as seductively as the moving image how architecture, space, inhabitation, perception and experience unfold over time. The book offers new ways to analyze space and more importantly new ways of generating it."
-Mark Robbins, Dean and Professor, Syracuse University School of Architecture
"In a world of change, fluctuating points of view, duration and virtuality, it is vital for designers to reassess the representation of their work in new and non-orthogonal ways, This book addresses this most fundamental of design questions and explains various representational protocols for the designer at the cusp of the twenty-first century. A must have book."
-Professor Neil Spiller, Professor of Architecture and Digital Theory, Vice Dean, Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London
"A new generation of architects and designers has turned form the drafting table to computer drafting and design, seemingly seamlessly and without much turmoil. But, in reality, a whole new way of thinking about architecture has developed-the computer is changing way designers see the physical world. Cinemetrics: Architectural Drawing Today discusses the theory and practice of design in the digital age."
-Susan S Szenasy, Editor in Chief, Metropolis Magazine
"Five hundred years from now architects may look at Cinemetrics the way today's architects look at Alberti's On Painting-as a critical point of disciplinary redirection. In fact, if architecture is still being built 500 years from now it may well be a result of the cognitive shift McGrath and Gardner propose, asking us to 'lose perspective and find duration.' In the process of laying out a concrete set of design strategies, this book makes original connections between theory and ecology, science and art, technology and touch."
-Kim Tanzer, Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA) President 2007-08; Professor of Architect, University of Florida
"This is a serious and timely book that proposes new methods of representation for designers working in the digital age. The 'moving drawing system' celebrates the designer as a multidimensional thinker, a networked thinker, a flux conductor in search of new relationships and possibilities for cultural and environmental design. This book, with its stunning and sophisticated visual documentation, is destined to be an essential resource for the next generation of designers."
-Karen Van Lengen, Dean and Edward E Elson Professor of School of Architecture, University of Virginia
"The presentation of a drawing system based on a cinematic understanding of the dynamics of architectural space is admirably clear, and the system has the potential to generate new spaces."
-Michael Weinstock, Academic Head and Master of Technical Studies, Architectural Association School of Architecture
Brian McGrath is an architect and co-founder of urban-interface, which explores relationships between urban design, ecology and multi-media. McGrath teaches at Columbia and Parsons in New York City and Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok. He was a Senior Fulbright Scholar in Thailand in 1998/99 and is currently a co-investigator with the Baltimore Ecosystem Study and is a New School Faculty Fellow with the India China Institute.
Jean Gardner is Senior Faculty, Department of Architecture, Interior Design and Lighting, Parsons. Her course 'Issues and Practices in Architecture and Urbanism' received special recognition in the 2005 National AIA Ecological Literacy Initiative. Co-chair of the ACSA Task Force on Sustainable Design, she helped organise 'Sustainable Pedagogies and Practices', the 2003 ACSA/AIA Teachers' Seminar. With The Rockwell Group, she exhibited 'the Hall of Risk', 2002 Venice Biennale.
Autor*in
Associate Professor, Parsons The New School for Design
Senior Faculty, Parsons The New School for Design
INTRODUCTION LOSING PERSPECTIVE, FINDING DURATION.
What happens when architectural drawing leaves the drawing board and moves to the computer screen?
CHAPTER 1 FRAMING.
What happens when movements are not in space and images not in our brains?
CHAPTER 2 IMMOBILE CUTS.
How can we develop an architectural drawing system fro the intervals in matter-flux?
CHAPTER 3 SHOOTING.
What happens when we relate movement, not to privileged poses, but to any-instant-whatever?
CHAPTER 4 MOBILE SECTIONS.
How can we generate architectural spaces through drawing any-instant-whatever?
CHAPTER 5 ASSEMBLING.
What happens when the sensori-motor schema breaks down and perceptions no longer result in action?
CHAPTER 6 CYBERNETIC SEEDS.
How can we generate space as seeds of different worlds in the making?
POSTSCRIPT PROLOGUE TO WHAT IS POSSIBLE.
Keywords.
Bibliography.
Index.
