Architect and teacher Witold Rybczynski has a short piece in Slate about how computers have affected the practice of architecture, and in particular the process of thinking about architectural problems. Traditionally, given “an architectural program for a building,”

the student was required to produce, quickly, a parti, or architectural concept. The rest of the time was spent refining—but not altering—the parti into a finished building design. In part, this was an exercise in developing the ability to quickly deduce the crux of a problem. It was also a recognition that stick-to-it-ness was essential in the lengthy process of architectural design, especially as the large, elaborate watercolor renderings required by the Beaux-Arts took weeks of meticulous work….

Over the centuries, a steady stream of devices altered the way that architects worked: pencils, erasers (what a boon they were!), T-squares, tracing paper, parallel rules, technical pens, rub-on lettering. No device has had the impact of the computer, however. It doesn’t simply mechanize drawing; it allows the designer to explore scores of alternatives rapidly before settling on a final solution. Since the finished drawing is quickly drafted by a mechanical plotter, last-minute changes are easily accommodated.

Surely this march of progress is all to the good. Who would want to go back to the days before pencils and tracing paper? But the fierce productivity of the computer carries a price—more time at the keyboard, less time thinking. The thumb-nail sketch—an architectural staple since at least the Renaissance—risks going the way of the T-square. “But architecture is about thinking. It’s about slowness in some way. You need time,” Renzo Piano said in an interview last year. “The bad thing about computers is that they make everything run very fast, so fast that you can have a baby in nine weeks instead of nine months. But you still need nine months, not nine weeks, to make a baby.”

Notice the way he contrasts productivity with thinking: “the fierce productivity of the computer carries a price,” he says; “more time at the keyboard, less time thinking.” Some schools, he notes, are reintroducing drawing, with an aim to getting students to think through the program– or perhaps more accurately, reintroducing practices that give students space to think. “This is not a question of turning back the clock but, rather, of slowing it down,” he says, “and recognizing that rigor of thought is as much a part of design as making shapes.”