Drawing in the Digital Age: Exclusive Interview with Sam Jacob

A household name in contemporary architecture circles, Sam Jacob recently sat down to talk with Architizer about his ongoing work with students and drawing in the digital age. We mostly discussed his studio at Yale last semester, taught in collaboration with his FAT buddy Sean Griffiths, and how that was informed by broader notions about digital culture and architecture’s positions within in it.

Architizer: Let’s start with the Yale studio that you taught in the fall of 2014, can you tell us about that?

Sam Jacob: Well, here Sean Griffiths and I are — teaching a studio together at Yale just after we had broken up FAT. It was the perfect opportunity to do a studio explicitly about the work of the teachers, a post-mortem autopsy on the body of work that was FAT. We could get ten other pairs of eyes to look at our work and maybe even see things that we’ve never seen or tell us things that we never knew about our own work. The idea was to do two things: To pick apart our work and to invent new stories about what it might have been and what it could be.

It was a speculative reassessment of what we’ve done, and about exploring about the kind of field that we’ve always been interested in and that field includes both the kind of reference that we hold quite dear and the tradition that we feel apart of or influenced us. That included a field trip where the students came to London and we took them to a series of buildings that cover the story of British architecture. There are very clear points of reference to the project. But there’s also this wider idea that architecture is a broad culture and should engage with its broader culture.

FAT’s Blue House in the style of Zaha Hadid. PJ Nakamura. All images courtesy Sam Jacob.

How did this play out in the drawings?

It encouraged us to look at the kinds of techniques techniques of representation we’ve been interested in, since the way in which we draw — the way in which an object represents itself — is absolutely key to the whole way that we have thought. It’s part of a project that I’ve been working with through teaching for a while: Using experts’ drawing techniques in a digital age in order to find the kind of territory of what architectural representation might be now.

Images are floating free of their original meanings, delaminated from whatever it was they were supposed to be part of in the first place.

At Yale, that was a simple equation really projecting our buildings in a series of canonical drawings which also span the history of architecture from Piranesi to early Zaha. The importance of that is that they have many different graphic signatures. The way Zaha pens is so entirely different from the way Piranesi drew. As an individual and as a student, you can kind of borrow or work within other peoples’ languages. As an exercise, it’s a way of picking apart, breaking down, and understanding how different drawings are composed, from composition and color to depth and projection — all for those very technical aspects of how one makes drawings.

On a cultural level, it’s also about being able to work within or develop a collage approach to the way you can make images. Like your graphic signature, the way you leave pen on paper, might not be the most important or authentic expression of your own way of thinking. So the fact that you find yourself drawing like Zaha or like Piranesi, I think, is a kind of important statement as well about the nature of authorship in the digital age, such as our relationship to images. The tools are certainly different, but we also have a way of contextualizing our own projects through these forms of graphic representation — sometimes in a speculative way. Like what happens if you draw an art school designed in 2004 built in Holland in the style of Piranesi? Does it reveal something about the architectural intent or conversely, does the message get transformed by the representation chosen to depict it with?

FAT’s Sint Lucas in the style of OMA/Alex Wall. Student: Michael Miller.

How would you say that this Yale studio has exploited the potential of new relationships? You mention in the Strange Harvest piece that drawings combine a series of issues and a series of techniques and a series of sources. How would you say that the Yale studio has specifically exploited this? Is there a project in particular that you thought was really surprising?

It is about those kinds of new relationships. Images have changed so much in the last ten years. The way in which you used to find a reference image was a very difficult process: Reading hundreds of magazines coming across the right image, forgetting where it was, trying to find it again, etc. But now, of course, with a particular search term, you can turn up almost anything and sometimes things that you don’t expect at all to be part of that bracket of that search. I think that means also that the way the image is arrived upon is often disassociated from its own context. It comes to us out of a webpage so that you don’t have the framing devices to capture the accompanying text. Images are floating free of their original meanings, delaminated from whatever it was they were supposed to be part of in the first place.

In that sense, that’s the kind of image culture that the studio was dealing with. What is the consequence, architecturally speaking, for images if that’s the case? Mainstream architecture’s imagery is really tight, like the photographic or super-photographic render — rather than the drawing. That’s the sort of conceptual idea of it.

Summer Islam / Wall House / AA / 2010.

In terms of the project, it’s like what happens if you take things from the real world that seem to be oppositional? Like FAT’s Blue House and Zaha’s early drawings. You think, “Well the Blue House’s exterior is interested in being two dimensional with a kind of over-literalness of reference.” Zaha’s paintings have much more to do with an incredible sense of infinite depth within the picture plane and abstraction at the same time so you’re not even sure what you’re looking at or how you look at it — which way’s up or if there’s a mixture of up and down at the same time, or whether it’s something which is happening over time.

In theory, those two things should be entirely different, entirely incompatible. What we found so interesting in bringing these two things together, using one to interrogate the other that it creates something that’s entirely convincing. Suddenly out of nowhere you have an early Deconstructivist version of the blue house, and Zaha has become representational in her use of language, but also FAT has become interested in this sort of infinite depth, instead of the two-dimensional that you so often associate with it. You could say that that’s trying to generate a new meaning which wasn’t present in the first place or you could say well actually perhaps it’s allowing latent parts of each of those distinct projects to become more physical — the spatial projects of FAT and the representational projects of Zaha suddenly become revealed.

You suddenly find that these things are not so oppositional at all. It could be a very productive relationship.

Sint Lucas in the style of Piranesi. Student: Michael Miller.

How do you define this post-digital age? That’s a word that people are using a lot, but doesn’t seem to have a specific definition. Perhaps it has different meanings in different contexts. What does “post-digital” mean to you in general and what does it mean in respect to these drawings?

What I mean by post-digital is really the situation we find ourself in now. That’s particularly to do with our relationship with information. I think now our attitudes towards the digital are maturing a little bit, one might say. That’s both the internet and it’s embeddedness in the way that we live, and also the connection of the virtual and real. There’s no longer a speculative project that there may have been in the mid-90s to early 2000s, when the internet promised a kind of revolution in a sense, which of course never quite came true.

We sketch, model, draw, and even write from window to window on the same machine.

The virtual, the mid-space, all of those kinds of ideas certainly didn’t happen in the way that we imagined, as a resurrecting force. It’s become a space for corporations and espionage, as we’ve seen in the last couple of years. Suddenly, now we’re in that era where we’re not talking about it’s possibility. It’s happened to us.

It’s the same with digital tools: For a while architects and designers looked at incredible new facilities that they provided like, modeling compound curved surfaces, switching things, scanning things in 3D, and printing them out in 3D. This is a project which is a little bit exhausted. It is of course incredible but it is much more apart of the way we work as architects and designers. It’s all digital, all the time, but that means that maybe it’s not so much about pushing the boundaries of the technology itself as it is about exploring the potential culture of that technology. I’ve always been more interested in Photoshop than Grasshopper, because Photoshop is a thing which allows you to intervene in the status of the image itself. It’s kind of a totally seamless collage. You can reinvent the world through the image rather than a digital model. That’s where it is an exciting space of a tool as an imaginative thing rather than a technical thing.

FAT’s Hoogvliet Heerlijkheid in the style of Michael Webb. Student: Kara Biczykowski.

That’s how I’ve understood it as well. We’ve mastered these techniques for the most part. It’s not misusing them to make weird shapes but using them as this sophisticated knowledge to actually produce things and not experiment with them.

Exactly. We know how to use them, how to integrate them into the design process and the building process. The big question now is what are we going to do with them? Not, “Wow, did you see what I did.” It’s about understanding the range of digital tools as well. In some ways, Illustrator is as important as Rhino because of the control it gives you in two dimensions rather than three dimensions. You could also think about the fact that we still design often very two-dimensionally. That’s been very underexploited in the mainstream architectural culture for a long time.

What tools did the students use to make these drawings?

They’re made through a wide range of techniques. They involve modeling things in order to render them, taking the renderings into Photoshop, drawing in Illlustrator, taking the drawings into Photoshop. Some involve hand drawing and much of it rendering and that’s the way that they’re brought together and composited. The act of drawing becomes about being able to bring together a whole range of different media. I think that’s also something that’s part of a digital culture. Everything we do is with the same tools in a sense. We sketch, model, draw, and even write from window to window on the same machine. There are multiple layers of media coming together to form a kind of hybrid that I think is also one possibility that our digital culture suggests.

FAT’s Hoogvliet Heerlijkheid in the style of David Hockney. Student: Kara Biczykowski.

You describe CGI and the mainstream drawing culture as a plausible fiction or dangerously plausible fiction, the conclusion of perspective which tricks you into thinking it’s real but it’s still just another lens. You’re more interested drawings that are honestly artificial, so what is the productive value of embracing this fictional nature of drawings?

Perspective and render assume a reality. They work hard to maintain their fiction as you look at them. They make you believe that this is what they really look like or what that space will look like. From experience, we know that the world is very different. We experience things in different ways. That’s one aspect.

The other aspect is the question of what is architecture and how does architecture work? Is it about objects in space? Is it about complex systems? Is it about relationships? So many other things exist apart from the things which perspective and renders allow you to show. If you’re taking those qualities off the drawing board or off the screen as you’re designing, then you need to create a new language to describe the thing you’re trying to describe. By reducing the language of architectural representation to renderings, we’ve also reduced the possibilities of what architecture can be. The earnestly fictional is also an attempt to expand or resurrect a whole range of other ways of representing architectural ideas and, by doing that, expand the possibilities of what architecture might be.