Sketchup at AA
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@mitcorb said:
@jbacus:
I am not sure if your quote from van Gogh is your comment or your signature line?That's my sig- looks like my post is waiting for moderation, too. Here's what I said:
@jbacus said:
Hi Sam,
Glad to see you’re using SketchUp and 3D Warehouse at the AA, and I think you’ll find some interesting and surprising results if you keep at it. Never mind the tutting… they wouldn’t be doing that if you weren’t onto something interesting.
We designed SketchUp to democratize the world of 3D modeling and to make it accessible to the broadest possible range of “designers.” It is by definition an anti-elitist design tool. It is cheap (even free) where other tools are abusively expensive. It is quick to learn where other tools require enormous commitments of time. It naturally produces unpolished representations that invite discussion among stakeholders on a team rather than slick renderings that hold clients at arm’s length. It invites “expertise” no more or less than any other tool, but doesn’t require it. SketchUp is designed to be as powerful as a pencil and a roll of tracing paper. And as weak.
I think the models you see in 3D Warehouse are evidence that our attempt at democratization is working. An astonishingly broad range of work is visible there- from the loftiest of mathematical theories to the humblest of amateur skateparks. SketchUp is used regularly by over a million unique users a week now. Most of whom, as is true of the general population of people in the world, aren’t architectural theoreticians.
I do think you’re wrong if you assume that the populist positioning for our product comes from a position of naiveté, tempting though that may be. Many of us on actually came from very theoretical backgrounds in architecture. I was a student of John Hejduk’s at Cooper Union (the AA across the pond) in the early ’90s and I well understand the issues you are raising. Given the choice, we just chose a populist path for our product over something more exotic.
I hope your research goes well. Or at least that it leads you in an interesting direction. I welcome further discussion on this subject if that’s useful to you– my email address is appended below. And I’ll keep an eye on your blog, too.
john
.BTW, the “…basic, dumb, utterly devoid of expression” rendering style is just a default. And, frankly, you could have chosen a different one when you started SketchUp for the first time. You really should look into customizing your template before you read too much into the “SketchUp sublime.”
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I rate your response eloquent and enlightening, sir. Even though many have surmised what you have said here about Sketchup, and even though somewhere it has been published before, your stating it leaves no doubt. And I thank you for this.
I do note that frustrated users have often given the program a verbal drubbing before. And this particular individual's comments on his blog? have moved you to respond.
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This is what I wrote (not too good in English)@unknownuser said:
Saurus says:
Your comment is awaiting moderation.
November 23, 2010 at 9:49 amHi to all.
Thank you John Bacus for that.
To author: What do you think about pencil? There is a BIG difference between my 5 years old boy drawings and drawings of Edgar Degas, but yet, with the same tool. Thank God it was not overpriced.
SketchUp is a pencil for drawing in 3D space. -
Well put John!
It's also refreshing to see that SketchUp sticks to its principles by offering non-elitist software for the common man. That's a very humanist approach. Well done!
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Guys,
I'd like to tell you a little story about the early days of SketchUp back in the @Last days when they used to have beers all-round after selling a copy of SketchUp.
In the early days SketchUp was 'discovered' by people not happy with their current 3D app. When they found SketchUp their initial reaction was. 'Hey!, this is a nice toy!' but after 'playing' with SketchUp they quickly realised it was far more than a toy and EXACTLY what they were looking for, an easy yo use tool for 3D model creation.
Naturally the @Last Guys, Brad, Joe & Co wanted to push sales and bring SketchUp to the notice of more but their advertising budget was not that of Google's. In order to achieve this aim they came up with what looked of the surface to be a great idea! They offered a referral deal of $100 a pop to existing customers! All a user had to do was 'tell a friend / colleague about SketchUp' and give him / her a Promo Code and when the sale was made they were $100 up!
The promotion was not a great success! These days one might be surprised as to why this great deal would not work. The reason was because most that had discovered the virtually unknown SketchUp wished to keep it 'under there hat' as their 'secret weapon'!
I remember having one guy on the old @Last Forums asking how he could remove 'SketchUp' from the top of the workspace! He definitely was not a person that wished to share knowledge only show how 'expert' he was!
Fortunately there was a solid core of SketchUp adopters that thought spreading the good news was the right things to do and here we are today!
Mike
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@jbacus said:
That's my sig- looks like my post is waiting for moderation, too. Here's what I said:
Nice post John (even if it reads a bit like a communist manifesto
)On a more serious note...John Hejduk? I'm so sorry for you. I once had to build a model of one of his houses (I think it was called House 10 or something). Lord knows why, when my fellow students were building models of building by Wright, Ando, etc. I had to build a model of a theoretical house...THEORETICAL - as in, NOT meant to be built! I ended up with a model that was 4' long (there was no scale to the drawings - did I mention it was theoretical? - so I had to assume a 3' door as measured off of a low res image and scale everything else from that which made the house about as long as a football field - literally it was about 300' long). Not only was it long, though, but the thing consisted mostly of one hallway with only a few attached rooms, none of which could be used for any traditional purpose. It was the most ridiculous thing you've ever seen and if I learned anything from the project it was that my teacher was a sadist.
-Brodie
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@jbacus said:
Hi Sam,
BTW, the “…basic, dumb, utterly devoid of expression” rendering style is just a default. And, frankly, you could have chosen a different one when you started SketchUp for the first time. You really should look into customizing your template before you read too much into the “SketchUp sublime.”
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@unknownuser said:
On a more serious note...John Hejduk? I'm so sorry for you. I once had to build a model of one of his houses (I think it was called House 10 or something).
I think Hejduk deserves a closer look than you're giving him. "House 10" was actually by Peter Eisenman, who also taught at Cooper Union. They were both part of a group of architects called the "New York Five."
john
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@jbacus said:
@unknownuser said:
On a more serious note...John Hejduk? I'm so sorry for you. I once had to build a model of one of his houses (I think it was called House 10 or something).
I think Hejduk deserves a closer look than you're giving him. "House 10" was actually by Peter Eisenman, who also taught at Cooper Union. They were both part of a group of architects called the "New York Five."
john
.Probably true. I'm probably more resentful with my professor than poor ol' Mr. Hejduk
Yeah, I'm familiar with Eisenman's House 10 (apparently folks from Cooper Union had a proclivity towards numbering their houses), I'd much rather have modeled that one! House 10 was at least what our teacher called it. I'm not even sure Hejduk thought to name it, or maybe it goes by another name. I had a heck of a time finding any info on it as I recall. I found one website back then that had any info at all and as I recall I was able to find it in Hejduk's Mask of Medusa book (amongst a litany of some really freaky sketches) which we had a copy of in our library (Lord, that things going for $600 on amazon).
-Brodie
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That Hejduk house illustrated above may have been called "Wall House".
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feel like I may have hijacked the thread.Well, it's not Wall House 2 that was actually built (a rarity for Hejduk) but it may have been Wall House 1 which was unbuilt (I couldn't find an image of it upon a cursory google search - which only furthers my belief that some wise soul has thought to scrub the internet of this atrocity).
-Brodie
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Hello everybody!
Looks like this guy didn't spend a full minute to even try SU. And as far as I know he could not only be a user of another software but someone from another software company as well (either way, what he did was tragic!!!). What he tried to do was to make us talk about it all day while he was was on his pityful corner trying to understand why he lacked of intuition and creativity.
SU is far from perfect and needs some addons as you all power users already posted on previous posts but it is the most intuitive program I have ever seen, till now.CAntonis
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@Brodie:
Maybe you know- in what year did they stop having the "piano shaped" rooms?Edit: sorry, couldn't resist. But you're right. I am aiding and abetting this hijack. I will refrain.
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Probably early 80's I guess. I think early on he was really modular, I'm not sure when he started tacking on the amorphous piano shapes. Wall House 2 was designed somewhere in the 70's and then by the late 80's he seems to have gone back to strong angulars. Off-hand, I'd guess the blobs were just a drug induced 70's phase, but I suspect Bacus, being a fan, may disagree
-Brodie
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@dale said:
Sam Jacob is a founding director of FAT, architect, writer and critic. He has most recently been the partner in charge of the Hoogvliet Heerlijkheid project in Holland a park, cultural centre and community facilities completed in October '08 and developed in collaboration with WiMBY! The project explores ideas of Pop, populism and participation which form the basis of an architectural approach intended to explore the role of architecture as communicative device, programmatic agglomeration and social condenser.
Dale, I swear I thought you were making this CV up just for laughs until I checked it myself. The names and the ideas just sound too odd to be real.
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I read the article and could not really understand it fully but I got the impression that he was being negative about sketchup without really knowing it. I know exactly the kind of argument that states that sketchup drawings are "ugly" and that the app is not for precision work because I have heard it a few times at my own school.
thus I decided to drop dear sam a note:
@unknownuser said:
I came across your text on sketchup just by chance and a number of reasons put in the mood to write to you.
firstly, i am an AA graduate myself, an ancient one at that since I got my diploma in 1980! secondly, I am a sketchup enthusiast, a daily user and a moderator in the main sketchup forum.
my comment to what you wrote is somewhat tangential. I just felt it could interest you to hear the opinion of a hardened user.
- the models people put in google earth do not represent the real power of sketchup. they are just skin deep models unrelated to design and construction. the view many people have of sketchup as being an app for amateurs is totally wrong. the fact that mateurs can use it for their own ends should obscure its enourmous value for architects.
- I use sketchup in class and in practice as design tool as it allows one to construct forms rather than to represent them (of course, the same could be said about many other apps).
- with sketchup I recovered the pleasure of drawing that I experimented in the old times of pencil and paper.
- some of the main points in favor of sketchup are its short learning curve, the enormous amount of resources to be found on the internet, and the fact that hardly a week goes by without a new plugin being created for it, most of them free.
- today you can model virtually anything with sketchup, thanks to some incredible plugins.
- my focus is design, not archviz. sketchup allows me to concentrate on that.
best regards.
being an AA graduate I can say it does not surprise me in the least to find such a criticism coming from there. it used to be an important place as far as architectural discussion is concerned. during my time there some of the tutors were, just to name a few, rem koolhaas, bernard tschumi, peter cook, zaha hadid, rodrigo perez de arce, among others of the same caliber. however, in the last two decades it became an inconsequential and snobbish place with very slim ties to reality, where simplicity is berated and complication is mixed up with complexity.
of course, for people who think like that sketchup is too simple, it lacks the glamour connected with more expensive and fashionable software.
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It's worth re-reading the original quotation.
I dont think he is being negative about Sketch-up...
@unknownuser said:
This has caused much snooty tutting from the massed Grasshopper and Maya ranks that make up majority of the school
The users of Maya and Grasshopper are negative towards it.
@unknownuser said:
These are on the whole amateur products
I wouldnt disagree with him that the bulk of the contents on the 3D warehouse are just that.
@unknownuser said:
And when we start to look closely, isn’t there some kind of strange sublime operating in the SketchUp landscape?
@unknownuser said:
What if we just looked into this landscape. What would we see? What would we learn?
Is this not the crux of the article...What can we learn, understand, gain from Sketchup? Is there a use for it beyond producing an image of a model we have crafted?
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just read the comments on the article.
if you havent already you should check back and see the second to last comment.
@unknownuser said:
Just to clarify, the post wasn’t a criticism of SketchUp in any way!
In fact, it’s a fantastic tool...
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bocomofo
You may be at the heart if the matter. Although there could be debate as to whether or not the article is ,or is not rapping the SketchUp knuckle, the tone , and dramatic overuse of metonymy and hyperbole (sorry , couldn't resist)....
What I mean is, the article says nothing, all the time insinuating that the writer has an almost Shakespeare like brilliance.It seems to be catchy at the old AA. Below is the abstract form a dissertation by one of it's students. (with apologies to Mr Shah for singling him out.) Sound familiar?
the full dissertation can be read at.. http://www.generativeart.com/on/cic/papers2005/30.MahnazShah.htm
The Modular: An Analysis into Generative Architecture
Mahnaz Shah
PhD Candidate, Architectural Association, School of Architecture London
Abstract
Le Corbusier’s city grids, domestic layouts and the Modular are generally considered to be expressive of the spatial innovations of the new sciences, thus providing an homogenous, quantitative, infinitely extensible continuum.
Jack H. Williamson [1986] reads this into the alleged ‘dematerialization’ of Le Corbusier’s interiors and christens it the ‘anti-object paradigm’. He considers this spatial development to be parallel to the loss of autonomous individuality under the new collectivist and determinist social and psychological sciences.
Andrew McNamara [1992] similarly reads Le Corbusier’s grid as an evidence of a desire to collapse all boundaries – natural, spatial, social and aesthetic – into an undifferentiated field. Le Corbusier is apparently committed to imposing this field at all levels, ‘to transform it into a broad social vision encompassing every aspect of life’.
According to Richards[2003]; although these readings maybe applicable to other modernists grids, they are not applicable to Le Corbusier.
This Paper proposes to challenge Richards[2003] assumptions and tries to prove that, through Le Corbusier’s final project; the Venice Hospital 1964-65, the Modular formulated a code that is capable of articulating dynamic, generative architecture.PS. Is this why it is called an "Abstract"
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Sounds like someone was having a bet with their buddies to see who could cram the most architectural buzzwords into their paper. My guess is that this guy won.
-Brodie
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