Return of analogue design tools

The pandemic put constraints and limitations on in-person studio and workshop activites. But UK's top-rated architecture schools, The Bartlett and The Architectural Association, AA, at their respective end-of-year exhibition 2023, demonstrated a strong return to studio-based working and the use of analogue tools, such as freehand drawing, collaging, and physical modelling. At the Bartlett, the summer show incorporated a diverse range of student physical models, hand drawings and installations encouraging a thoughtful dialogue between students and visitors about the future of architecture and its part to play in shaping the world we live in. Similarly, the AA Projects Review expressed the variety of ways that the AA units and programmes explore physical objects. As part of the projects created by the students, they represented a year of physical experimentation across the school, and exploited a vast range of techniques and materials. Models within these projects were the result of a hands-on, iterative process that uncovers new methods of exploring the built environment. Thinking, doing and making in anlogue modes in architecture schools, then, have returned in a significant way, which is not to say that the use and power of digital tools have diminished but rather that analogue and digital tools and outcomes complement each other. Indeed, in addressing the many challenges to architects today - environmental, socio-cultural or economic, the students of both schools displayed skillful and imaginative use of both analogue and digital tools to materialise, fabricate and communicate their designs. Both shows are on view online.

Pandora's box

According to Silicon Valley mythology, Alphabet, the giant of Big Tech, and owner of Google, got so angry when TikTok, the video hosting service stole a march on Google-owned YouTube and gifted it to mankind. And so, Alphabet decided humans needed to be punished for this. Alphabet commanded Google, its search engine arm, to create a new chatbot using generative artificial intelligence, GAI. Crafted from silicon, GAI received the gifts of wisdom, beauty, kindness, peace, generosity, and health from Alphabet and the other tech giants. Or so it was thought. But GAI was also taught lying and trickery as evidenced in social media, such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Yet the tech giants decided that GAI carried gifts for the humans. Humans, moreover, were created to be curious, and couldn’t stay away from GAI and the urge to apply it to everyday life. But horrible things then flew out of GAI, including greed, envy, hatred, pain, disease, hunger, poverty, war, and death. All of life’s miseries had been let out into the world. The last thing remaining inside GAI was hope. Ever since, humans have been able to hold onto this hope in order to survive the wickedness that GAI had let out. Moral sense: “Pandora’s box”, originally an artefact in Greek mythology, now means anything that is best left untouched, for fear of what might come out of it.