William Cho

Restoring the Physical Nature of Design

July 12, 2019

This article was originally published on Common Edge.

As the architecture and interior design professions have advanced through the centuries, so too have their tools, from drawing on parchment in the Middle Ages to drafting on vellum with graphite in the 20th century. Today, tools like Revit and numerous 3D-modeling programs allow users to create an image of a design more quickly than ever before; in some cases, programs even generate elevations and details. Digital imagery of finish materials and 3D-block libraries of furniture and fixtures allow us to create an entire project without any tactile interaction with the items or finishes specified. But these tools, and the instant gratification offered by them, raise critical questions: Are architects and interior designers losing the physical aspect of design? Has our relationship with the physical qualities of design been watered down because we no longer have to draw a chair or bathtub, but can simply download them, thereby losing the intimacy of working out the details ourselves?

A New Architectural Style for the Age of the Individual

August 19, 2014

As modernist architects broke free from vernacular architecture and developed a homogenized international style, many created sterile spaces and places out of touch with the decorative warmth of historical forms of human inhabitation. Negative reactions to the brutality of Modernist spaces encouraged architectural movements such as post-modernism and deconstructivism, but these never managed to usurp the rational modernist box as a dominant architectural paradigm.

However, the intended machine-like precision of these buildings has often become unintentionally humanized over time, through the addition of curtains, coloring, or even through accidental breakage and imperfect repairs or alterations. I believe that building on the successes and failures of modernism has spawned a new and previously unclassified architectural style: Pixelism. Find out what this new phenomenon is after the break.