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Cinemetrics: Architectural Drawing Today

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The architecture and urban planning professionals of the twenty first century have at their disposition, digital technologies for design never before available to the mind and practice of designers. The problem is how to bridge the traditional way of conceiving and representing space in two dimensions, and the three-dimensional representation and animation in digital virtual space.

'Cinemetrics' presents a successful theory to help the designer develop a concept to perceive, analyze, imagine, and construct form and space in time as'mater-flux'.

Using as models three masterful pieces of cinematography, Ozu's 'Early Spring', Goddard's 'Contempt', and Cassevetes' Faces, McGrath and Gardner explore, as a model, the imagination of the cinematographer as a vehicle to humanize the technological tool and elevate its potential as the ultimate drawing and design tool for the contemporary designer.

Computer Assisted Design (CAD) is now a vast prison for young designers, a tool for seniors to censor discourse and suppress creativity. The seniors don't know how to do CAD, crow about their inability and disparage those who do know CAD as contemptible "CAD operators."

What the narcissitic fogies do love, though, is stab their greasy fingers at the screen, yell do this or do that to the operator, then swoon at the capability of computers to generate glorious images to peddle inept design, even though computer-generated structures have evolved to appear to be the work of morticians out to make carcasses appear better dead than alive.

In delicious contrast to the moribund illusion of the design profession, what computers in the hands of the truly creative can do is what Brian McGrath and Jean Gardner wonderfully demonstrate in "Cinemetrics: Architectural Drawing Today."

They use cinemetrics to show bountifully diverse alternatives to the static monoclic rendering intended hypnotize the viewer with a command to sit there, shut up and admire this newborn-dead.

Cinemetrics invites engagement of participants in the forever difficult design process, to be never sure of a perfect outcome, to not settle for the easy-greasy solution lifted from the magazines, to refuse the irresponsible deception of the ghastly rendering so favored in property development brochures.

Realtors offer 360-degree walk-throughs for prospective buyers. None offer a chance to design the property to fit imagination.

With liberating cinemetrics the CAD shackles on those who produce construction documents, and in particular lying computer renderings, will be unlocked.

Design may then be freed to be as variable and exhilirating as computers are to those who know what's phony in the colored output.

Creative cinemetrics, not CAD manuals, and never ever CAD standards tailored to productivity.