3 ms·

My crackpot theory: This is in part due to CAD: * Colors other than gray don't look nice in CAD and aren't the default. * It's super easy to just stack a bunc

by mglz 3y ago

My crackpot theory: This is in part due to CAD: * Colors other than gray don't look nice in CAD and aren't the default. * It's super easy to just stack a bunch of rectangles (looking at you, architects...) * You can chamfer and fillet but that's the end of what most people do. More complex shapes are hard to due due to the clunky spline tools. Hence elaborate ornaments are left out.

somewhereoutth 3y ago
Not such a crackpot theory in my opinion - the tools we use to communicate design surely will influence what we design.
jareklupinski 3y ago
that makes sense in the era of blueprints, where you had to draw literally everything from scratch every time, human pride would necessitate taking the time to add flourishes or small details to every page, just to keep the talent who is producing them from losing their minds look at old bibles, full of small details that are ultimately useless for the message being conveyed, but still announce the presence of a poor soul doomed to reproduce these glyphs for eternity nowadays... you can just open an old drawing, hit copy-paste, and be down by the pub at 11am.... not a bad deal for the drawer, but for the people looking up on the sidewalk...
esperent 3y ago
I think this is valid, but it's only one part of the equation - and I would guess it's the smaller part. The other side is manufacturing. In an era of mass production, making things like buildings look unique is expensive. If your building is made from rectangles, lines, and few curves, you can use off the shelf panels to build it. Order them from a factory, have a truck deliver them, stick them together with cement and bolts. On the other hand, even if you do pay someone for the extra time to create beautiful, unique, complex designs in a CAD program (which is not that hard), actually making those parts is extremely expensive so they will get rejected by most architectural and construction firms. Perhaps as we come into the era of 3d printing, more complex structures will come back into vogue again. It will be kind of ironic if 99% of all futuristic cities depicted in scifi, all clean lines, spires, and cylinders turns out to be wrong and the skyscraper of the future looks more like the Sagrada Familia, but built in six months instead of three centuries. (Although personally I'm hoping the future looks like forested garden cities.)

by mglz 3y ago

somewhereoutth 3y ago

Not such a crackpot theory in my opinion - the tools we use to communicate design surely will influence what we design.

jareklupinski 3y ago

that makes sense in the era of blueprints, where you had to draw literally everything from scratch every time, human pride would necessitate taking the time to add flourishes or small details to every page, just to keep the talent who is producing them from losing their minds look at old bibles, full of small details that are ultimately useless for the message being conveyed, but still announce the presence of a poor soul doomed to reproduce these glyphs for eternity nowadays... you can just open an old drawing, hit copy-paste, and be down by the pub at 11am.... not a bad deal for the drawer, but for the people looking up on the sidewalk...

esperent 3y ago

I think this is valid, but it's only one part of the equation - and I would guess it's the smaller part. The other side is manufacturing. In an era of mass production, making things like buildings look unique is expensive. If your building is made from rectangles, lines, and few curves, you can use off the shelf panels to build it. Order them from a factory, have a truck deliver them, stick them together with cement and bolts. On the other hand, even if you do pay someone for the extra time to create beautiful, unique, complex designs in a CAD program (which is not that hard), actually making those parts is extremely expensive so they will get rejected by most architectural and construction firms. Perhaps as we come into the era of 3d printing, more complex structures will come back into vogue again. It will be kind of ironic if 99% of all futuristic cities depicted in scifi, all clean lines, spires, and cylinders turns out to be wrong and the skyscraper of the future looks more like the Sagrada Familia, but built in six months instead of three centuries. (Although personally I'm hoping the future looks like forested garden cities.)