Cinemetrics - Architectural Drawing Today

This is the first textbook for architectural drawing with the computer that is based on understanding how digital drawing fundamentally differs from drawing with lead pencils on drafting boards. Cinemetrics: Architectural Drawing Today demonstrates a cinematically-inspired, cybernetically imaged, architectural drawing system for thinking about architecture as embedded in relationships within the world at large. It opens up the possibility of inventing new ways of building as framing flowing matter in order to live a philosophy of 'newness'. The authors, who have for fifteen years collaborated in teaching architectural students, link the architectural drawing text with research in the expanded field of architecture, which includes neurology, biology, ecology, physics, sustainability and philosophy. The book is written in an accessible and direct tone. Providing both an understanding of the visual perception behind drawing and practical exercises, it is set to become the key text book on the subject at both undergraduate and graduate level. It is highly illustrated with black and white diagrams and drawings.Praise for Cinemetrics 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: '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.' Joan Ockman, Director of the Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture, Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, Columbia University: '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.' Mark Robbins, Dean and Professor, Syracuse University School of Architecture '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.' Professor Neil Spiller, Professor of Architecture and Digital Theory, Vice Dean, Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London: '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.' Susan S Szenasy, Editor in Chief, Metropolis Magazine: '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. Kim Tanzer, Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA) President 2007-08; Professor of Architect, University of Florida '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.' Karen Van Lengen Dean and Edward E Elson Professor of School of Architecture, University of Virginia: '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.' Michael Weinstock, Academic Head and Master of Technical Studies, Architectural Association School of Architecture: '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.'