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 - box & aidiom

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 version of artificial intelligence- an AI-powered image generator, GenAI in short. Crafted from silicon, and trained on terabytes of web crawl data from across the internet, GenAI received the gifts of wisdom, beauty, kindness, peace, generosity, and health from Alphabet and the other tech giants. Or so it was thought. But GenAI was also taught lying and trickery as evidenced in social media, such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Yet the tech giants decided that GenAI carried gifts for the humans. Humans, moreover, were created to be curious, and couldn’t stay away from GenAI and the urge to apply it to everyday life. But horrible things then flew out of GenAI, 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 GenAI was hope. Ever since, humans have been able to hold onto this hope in order to survive the wickedness that GenAI had let out. Note: In Greek mythology, Pandora’s box was a large jar carried by Pandora who forgot the warning that the jar contained all manner of misery and evil. She opened the jar, from which the evils flew out over the earth. Hope alone remained inside. Pandora still serves as a cautionary tale about the complexities of human nature, the consequences, and responsibility of curiosity, the inevitability of suffering, and the importance of hope.