Vasco Pinheiro Architecture School of Lusófona University, Lisbon, Portugal 233
With respect to subjects related to project design, it would be important to
evaluate with the students the possibilities of actual new software programs, keep-
ing in mind not necessarily the increase in design and project productivity, but most
importantly, an improvement in the intrinsic qualities of the solutions.
For this reason, the subject project or project design should encompass, during
its introductory phase, the use and practice of the draft or manual drawing, as a
means necessary in the construction of the method. During a secondary phase, the
new technologies would be introduced as a means of configuring formal solutions
which in turn configure objects.
Similarly, the selection of computer tools should be made after knowledge of the
conception process’s different stages. New technologies should encourage rather than
substitute the powers of imagination – transformation of thought into image – which
occurs, in the first moments, in the complex levels of the subject’s mind.
The understanding of a drawing as the expression of a thought should remain
constantly present. New technologies are also the direct result of human thought,
and they do not operate freely without precise instructions or without resorting to
the functional commands which dominate the new architectural vocabulary – draw,
trim, extend, offset, copy, paste, etc.
Behind these designations, lies the existence of concepts, since they are not lacking
in meaning. In their technological condition, they are coated in pragmatism, which
in certain ways contradicts the abstraction that characterises the genesis of an archi-
tectural image. It becomes fundamental to insist on the importance of these concepts
and the drawing’s true meaning as well as its intentional and human nature.
The new technologies should therefore be assumed as the architect’s design hos-
tages, instead of the product of his imagination that should never be conditioned
by their natural limitations.