The Architect's Indispensable Hand - NYTimes.com Re "Architecture and the Lost Art of Drawing" (Sunday Review, Sept. I wholeheartedly share Michael Graves's concerns about the "death of drawing" in architecture as the computer supplants manual approaches. Another casualty of technological change is the increasingly lost art of architectural model making. This is unfortunate, because the architect's ability to create models with wood, cardboard, clay and other materials adds additional understanding, not always apparent in a computer-generated model, of a structure's spatial relations as well as its relationship to its environmental context. Architectural practices and academic programs should rethink their wholesale replacement of teaching hand drawing and model making with computer skills alone. Digital tools can enhance the tactile interpretations of architectural concepts, and there should be room for teaching both when educating architects of the future. The writer, an architect, is an assistant professor at Parsons the New School for Design. In addition to the fine points made by Michael Graves, note that it is our very inability to draw perfectly that makes drawing by hand so important: failing to depict with exactness what the brain is imagining leads to new and better sketches and hence new variations and ideas. This iterative process, so key to creativity, is not possible on the computer, where even the first drawing looks perfect and asks no more of the architect or designer. Mr. Graves's layering new drawings over previous ones is precisely that process; each new drawing suggests additional approaches and refinements of the concept. WAYNE HUNT Pasadena, Calif., Sept. The writer, a graphic designer, is an adjunct professor at the Art Center College of Design. Michael Graves's article rings true in another arena: teaching science and engineering. The push in education to use software tools to generate visual representations of scientific structure and concepts has a negative side: the tools inform the students" thinking. Something wonderfully different happens when we ask students collaboratively to draw a particular scientific phenomenon. In our program Picturing to Learn, financed by the National Science Foundation, we asked small groups of students to work together with paper and colored pencils to come up with their own visual representations of particular phenomena in science and engineering. Many of the final drawings were fascinating metaphors - ideas they could dream up only without the impediment of software. The less obvious result, and perhaps a more important one, was that they were teaching one another - discussing, for example, where the metaphor falls apart (as all eventually do). Mr. Graves writes, "Drawing by hand stimulates the imagination and allows us to speculate about ideas." One can only imagine what that can bring to our needy world of teaching science and innovation. The writer, a research scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, teaches and advises on the visual representation of science and engineering. Michael Graves decries the ascendance of computer-aided design, or CAD, software over drawing in architecture. In one sense he is correct: something is lost when design must conform to software requirements instead of the limits of imagination. One might say the "D" in CAD stands for drafting, rather than design. But the problem is not the computer, but the tools provided to the profession. Advances in computer-assisted drawing (different from CAD systems) can correct many of the problems Mr. Graves describes and even expand drawing's capabilities. Rather than using a sheet of paper, an architect might sketch in context, even within the building site. She could change perspective, rotate structures and quickly create three-dimensional representations without formal mock-ups. As for sharing pictorial ideas, cloud computing will allow this to happen between continents, not just across a table. With the right software, computers need not squeeze the art out of architecture. The writer is a professor of computer science at Yale and director of Yale C2: Creative Consilience of Computing and the Arts.