Understanding Professional Media

Abstract

Ever since the emergence of professions and trades, when most people stopped designing and building directly by hand, media have played a pivotal role in communicating to clients proposals for future environments. Virtually all major development decisions are now made on the basis of simulations. This dependence has not been without its problems. Frank Lloyd Wright once said, "When man began to draw, architecture was lost." His own work, a lifelong effort to reestablish a direct contact between the architect and the building, by having his students learn construction and build their own living quarters, had little effect on the inexorable trend toward dependence on simulation. Today, as communications and transportation have become cheaper, for better or worse, professionals can design buildings in one part of the globe to be constructed in another part without ever seeing the site or final product in the flesh. All can be done with simulation.