I have discovered that I am irretrievably analog. Not artisanally Groovy; not proudly Ludditian. No, I am just ground into a 20th century life pattern that has the digitally based 21st century laid atop it. Like many Boomer architects, I can feign computer literacy, but I am in fact a competent laptop typist who can Google (and nostalgically recall the Post Office, land lines, bound hardcopy competition entries, and paper drawing archives). But we live and work in the 21st century.

I have a blog, SavedByDesign, that gets 20,000 hits a year (tiny by mainstream standards, hugely great in the analog cave). My firm’s website has 500 visitors a month, a passive PR approach that we invest a few thousand dollars a year in upkeep. In the 20th century we sought publication of projects, to some success. Both approaches net out to about 20 new projects a year, the vast majority of them occurring through referrals.  

All of my work is communicated to builders, municipalities, vendors, and public relations outlets electronically. I have five very computer savvy architectural employees, and after buying computers, software, printers and scanners, and monitoring the work of those five employees, I “know” how the stuff connects, how it can be used; I just don’t know how to actually use it. I don’t have AutoCAD, let alone the more exotic design softwares, on my laptop, so I beg for prints to redline, a truly 20th century exercise. 

 But the analog here-and-now is unavoidable, and for good reason: It includes anything constructed by hands. “Printed” buildings can use computer numerical control (CNC) technology for some parts of some buildings—more to prove a point of innovation, something for its own sake. No builder I know thinks 3D printing is the ultimate answer. The technology has been around for a couple of generations. 

Still, regardless of how much we try, every site is unique and exists in the here and now. Because building is fundamentally in the present, a physical act, an analog basis for creation is not completely misguided. Nobody lives or goes to work or eats lunch in a virtual reality. No matter what we base our designs on, we build in an analog reality. I hand draw every early thought and show those to the client. And then, unlike in the digital world, I make physical models.

We make hundreds of models a year. No “modeling concepts” for us; instead, we fabricate little buildings and spaces and construct physical things that can be held and modified. We’re asked to digitally “model” designs (we pursue outside consultants, if a client wants the glowing image on the screen, and a few do), but all of our clients and builders and code enforcement officials are thrilled with physical models. It’s now edgily unusual and out-of-touch to base our work on touchable things. It’s even more antique to actually use these models to design things, often alongside clients and town officials. In the past, most celebrated models were used to “sell” a design, and the same is now true for digital renderings.

This analog foundation remains the core of an electronically driven architecture office. We’re certainly not alone. Much of humanity is living with one foot in analog reality, the actual physical world, and one foot in digital facilitation. Last week, I went to get blood drawn for my annual physical and found myself in an empty room with a computer screen. The system had no record of an appointment that I had carefully made, electronically. The next office I resorted to after the computer rejected me involved three people who greeted and attended to me, and then drew blood, all within 11 minutes. After which the results of 80-plus tests are provided within hours, electronically. Just like my firm’s drawings.

But the revelation of the chasm between the analog and the digital crashes hardest in my life when I think about the books I’ve written. I have authored eight. The first five, for McGraw-Hill, were typed on paper, with hard-copy art, all set in boxes with indexes. Hand deliveries were made in multiple sets to publishers, who then retyped the text and copied the photos and drawings to make books. Those books and related book clubs were one of the mainstream ways ideas were shared and designs were exposed, right along with the three paper magazines of the architecture profession in America.

My last three books were electronic creations, much more easily made than when we all used analog tools. But today, publishing has taken fringe writers like myself, who earn their living doing something other than writing, and has made the hard, uncompromising judgment that if I write, I must go digital, I must Substack, I must self-publish. Beyond the blogging or the electronic publishing that you’re reading here, I must be the wizard who publishes in autodidactic isolation—and who pays others to do all the work of editing, printing, promoting, and distributing.

I assume all the risk, with only the faint guarantee of the ego reward. Sadly, most of us who self-publish are being used by the system to throw money at a possibility, rather than partner in risk with others.

Buildings, on the other hand, are always a partner in risk: there are no self-created structures. We build in the here and now. I may be the dinosaur looking up at the bright flash in the sky 66 million years ago, when the Chicxulub meteor slammed into the Yucatan peninsula. But unlike publishing, blood draws and actual buildings exist in the analog world. No matter how much we may try to live a digital life.

Featured image courtesy of Duo Dickinson Architects.