Cinemetrics: Architectural Drawing Today (Paperback)

~ Brian McGrath (Author), Jean Gardner (Author)
Key Phrases: cybernetic architect, privileged poses, signaletic matter, Raybould House, Early Spring, New York (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Review

"[The book] reminds us that architecture is experienced not only in exquisite moments...but also in time and memory".The Journal of Architectural Education May 2008 --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Product Description

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.?

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Product Details

• Paperback: 272 pages
• Publisher: Wiley (June 15, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0470026715
• ISBN-13: 978-0470026717
• Product Dimensions: 10.9 x 8.5 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #911,995 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Cinemetrics: Escaping the CAD Prison, October 21, 2007

By	John Young "Cryptome" (New York, NY) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars 'Cinemetrics', The Humanization of Digital Architectural Modeling, October 10, 2008

By	Jose A. De jesus "Assistant Professor, Founda... (New York, NY) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.