Licensed Architect. Professor. The hacker ethos isn't just for circuits and code. Co-Founder of design studio Xover0 [0] [1]
[0] http://Xover0.com
[1] where we use computational tools to implement sophisticated geometries for advanced fabrication while still creating high-quality heirloom sterling silver jewelry.
Victor Papanek's Design for the Real World [0] is a foundational text in the area of Appropriate Technology (cited here by others).
Essential reading alongside the Illich (also linked by others), Pye's Nature and Art of Workmanship [1], and Winner's "Do Artifacts Have Politics?" [2] for those interested in.... Let's call it an ecology OF technology?
And also the Papanek was probably the book that felt most like a forbidden text in undergraduate architecture school...
Absolutely, if they're not asking for your information, as they were when I visited the site. The Wayback Machine snapshot here [0] shows a site identical to the one I visited.
Who runs this site? There doesn't appear to be any information on this. A whois search returns nothing illuminating.
So... is it part of the parable they're trying to tell that they're seeing who will go against the exact sort of advice they're giving? Or does this -just happen to be- the kind of shady data gathering that they're warning against?
to quote the site itself, "We spent a generation teaching people the first rule of the internet: never give out your real identity to strangers."
I distinctly remember seeing an exhibition of this work in Los Angeles in the early aughts. For the life of me I can't remember where. The photos were shot with a macro lens and blown up so that each specimen was ... 12" square? maybe bigger?
Even then there were dozens upon dozens of them on display. It was mind bending.
If you're just learning about the Wallpaper Groups from this and feel like you've seen them before, it is probably from the work of MC Escher [0].
If you want a great recent survey, an episode of (the inimitable and now restarted) In Our Time from last month goes into the friendship / mutual influence of Escher and Coxeter. [1]
I run workshops about the use of modular systems in facilitating non-expert participation in architecture. One I did (at the CAAD Futures Conference in 2023) was with Zometool. It was a blast and really successful.
In preparation I also got to interview the late great Steve Baer, inventor of the Zome (among many other things - seriously look him up, he's one of the most brilliant people of the past 100 years imo). It was a huge honor.
The book chapter the organizers were supposed to do about the conference workshops never materialized (hrmph), but I've done other little collaborative build projects since, so one day I'll document them all together.
I have come to modal editors after decades of modeless, I enjoy them - but respect, understand, and appreciate Tesler's efforts, and I always enjoy reading about them.
Our use case for After Effects was video stabilization. We have had good luck with Blender for this. I've also noticed that the old simple motion graphics I used to do - title overlays, etc - Blender can do easily. As for more intensive motion graphics, I can't speak too much to that.
As for any After Effects-style NLE capabilities - DaVinci Resolve knocks those out of the park. You'll also probably hear a lot of people singing the praises of Natron for NLE and Motion Graphics, and from our experience with that it seemed like the learning curve was non-trivial, but anything AE (and some aspects of Premiere Pro) could do, it could match... Good luck!
Unfortunately it looks like BricsCAD has gone the SaaS way, but they are an extremely mature alternative to classic AutoCAD 2d and 3d [0]
Additionally, Rhino has always been a good drafting tool [1] but my understanding in the current WIP (which if I'm guessing will probably be released as 9.0, within the next 6-12 months) is making a huge push to include better drafting tools. McNeel, the developer, has no plans to go to a subscription model.
It's absolutely very important for students to understand what standard they'll be held to in industry. But few architects need an intricate understanding of the real publication-facing aspects of the programs. In our case, using these tools is pretty much always in support of getting the output of 3d modeling / BIM tools / photography of physical models into presentable shape. Going away from Adobe might be unwise were I teaching graphic design students, but for these students, those more sophisticated, domain-specific expertises are a lot less essential.
No, the concepts are the same. The button you push is incidental.
For example, the GNU Image Manipulation Program now has non-destructive workflows and adjustment layers - and can easily easily be configured with photoshop-like keybinds anyway.
That's not to mention free-to-use tools like Affinity.
The things an architecture student needs it for are:
Photo adjustment:
Lightroom -> Darktable
Photo retouching:
Photoshop -> Affinity Pixel or Gnu Image Manipulation Program
Vector drawing (which for us is mostly processing from 3d modeling programs):
Illustrator -> Affinity Vector or Inkscape
Board and Book Layout
InDesign -> Affinity Layout or Scribus or VivaDesigner
Plus, for motion graphics and video processing, my partner and I have had great luck replacing AfterEffects and Premiere with Blender and DaVinci Resolve, respectively.
And ... believe it or not, I've had excellent luck with LibreOffice Draw as a PDF editor, so anything they would have needed Acrobat Pro for is covered by that (and / or PDF SAM).
The real "sticky wicket" is Revit. Autodesk has been a FAR more abusive company for FAR longer, but it's what we're stuck with - although the emergence of the BIM Workbench (Building Information Modeling) with the release of FreeCAD 1.0 [0] and the continued development of BlenderBIM (oh, now called BonsaiBIM) [1] at least gives some hope.
Anyway, for the Adobe replacements, here's more [2] based on [3]
I have been an Adobe user since 1996. Starting with Photoshop 3. Then, using the rest of their programs since 1999.
Between this and the fact that they've just 1. Changed all the old accounts to "Adobe Creative Cloud Pro" 2. DOUBLED the monthly fee, now charging you for the AI features whether you want them or not, and 3. Removed any tiers that have full program access but no AI, I am walking away forever when my current month expires.
Not to mention, students now only get the old $19.99 membership for the first year.
I teach visualization and representation tools to architecture students. I had always taught them Adobe products before. Now I can't in good faith sign them up to have their expertise tied to using this program stack forever. So tomorrow I am giving them a lecture on free to use and FOSS versions of the same tools. And I'm going to teach the class from them in perpetuity. Congratulations, Adobe that's 50+ students a year who won't be using your products when they graduate.
Great article. Where my mind goes as a counterpoint that proves the point is the famous Bill Atkinson lore about -2000 lines of code[0].
As a practicing architect (of buildings) I had a special fondness of working on minimalist projects. Buildings are a complex problem space. You typically can't design out unnecessary complexity entirely. So you have to work backward from goals (the finished condition) to infrastructure (the building structure) to figure out how to make the end product look like almost nothing (Mies's "beinahe nichts").
That's all to say that "complexity impresses" as the article says, but the discerning understand that simplicity can be even more impressive.
It also puts me in the frame of mind of another famous one - Fred Brooks's "No Silver Bullet" [1] and the idea of essential vs. accidental complexity. Or as I like to think of it in a slightly more nuanced way - not necessarily "accidental" but at least "incidental."
Yeah, in retrospect that was always a little on the nose, wasn't it? A real 'my t-shirt is raising questions that I thought were answered by the shirt' kind of deal.
Bookmarked for constant reference.
As a designer, Japanese printmaking is a constant source of inspiration, and the effort that went into putting this together is pretty astounding. Thank you to the author for the hard work, and to the OP for surfacing it!
RIP Sheldon Brown. His enthusiasm for and ability with bicycles - and his clear and engaging way to communicate both to you - were a large part of getting me back into cycling as an adult.
Yeah, I get that. And I'm not saying the author is wrong, just commenting on that one often-commented-upon phenomenon. If text is being input to the field by copy-paste (from another browser tab) anyway, who's to say it's not (hypothetically) being copied and pasted from the word processor in which it's being written?
[0] http://Xover0.com
[1] where we use computational tools to implement sophisticated geometries for advanced fabrication while still creating high-quality heirloom sterling silver jewelry.