Design representation: Perfection and imperfection

Says Craig Mitchell (Dip AA): 'Nowadays on larger projects you’d have a facade specialist, amongst many other specialists, to whom the architect's historic role is relinquished. You don’t need an Architect to build a building. The architect works on the peripheries of projects, more removed from the process. Specialists in their field work towards optimisation, even in a design capacity they might become obsessed with generating the perfect swoop, the perfect parametric hard line.I don’t really subscribe to this. Hand drawing and physical model-making give you access to imperfect surfaces, which are crucial to my project’s proposal. Through making or drawing something, you have a deeper understanding of scale and its implications. If they had been perfectly smooth, computer generated, calculated surfaces, they would have been much less tactile than this ‘vernacular’ aesthetic that I was interested in generating' - 'I found it so interesting to draw and design like that. I was exposed to the work of other units during my time at the school who have a very precise way of drawing, based in plan and section, more historically typical of professional architectural drawing. But then I was thinking about how space could be produced in a totally different way, that freed me from a prescribed way of drawing. Source: https://www.aaschool.ac.uk/news/craig-mitchell-winner-of-the-nicholas-pozner-prize-for-drawing-discusses-drawing-photogrammetry-and-architectural-representation