Gesture, Speech, Drawing and Writing: CAD and the Architectural Design Process

Abstract

In his book Gesture and Speech, originally published in 1964, Leroi-Gourhan argues that the real significance of tools lies in the gesture, which makes them technically effective. Intelligence, he maintains, is not a matter of prefacing every action with a thought, but rather exists in the gesture itself, immersed within the activity of doing. Human technical development begins, according to Leroi - Gourhan, with the liberation of the hand consequent on bipedal locomotion, facilitating manipulative action. He goes on to trace its evolutionary path from grasping, to the co-option of environmental objects for tool use, to the control of non-human power sources, and finally culminating in fully automated movement. In the latter two stages of evolutionary development there occurs a decoupling of perception and action, or more precisely, the removal of the technically effective gesture from the context of immediate sensory participation. Leroi-Gourhan challenges the idea that tools are the product of a disembodied intelligence. He argues that by bringing together the intellectual capacity and its mode of expression in language, with the work of the hand engaged within the material environment, speech and gesture - and thus intellectual and technical capacities become intertwined. Within any particular system of sociotechnical relations, a tool emerges from the combined activity of brain and body. Leroi-Gourhan’s notion that intelligence lies in the gesture itself, as a synergy of human being, tool and raw material, is crucial to understanding how speech, gesture, graphic expression, written words and mathematical formulae are combined within the formative development of an architectural design. The challenge is to discover how architectural representations are integrated into the course of situated actions within specific environmental contexts. As Suchman has shown in Plans and Situated Actions anthropology can offer a wider and deeper understanding of what is meant by situated action, and nowhere more than in discussions of the dynamic interrelations between gesture and speech. To understand the human being as an undivided mind/body, interacting within a world of social relations, is to challenge computer scientists’ interpretations of gestures as physical outputs of cognitive devices and thus lacking in emotion. While working as a member of a collaborative design team, I became interested in the role of the visual image and the written word in the way we understand the environments around us. And this, in turn, led me to reconsider the relation between writing and speech. It is often supposed that writing is a way of technologizing language. Through the codification of speech it makes the production of speech appear to be a mechanical operation. This appearance, however, is based upon the modern experience of print literacy, and it is this that leads us to see speech as something given in human nature and writing as something that has arisen at some stage in the history of technology. The problem with writing as -we-know-it is that it seems to make everything linear. Writing is assumed to be simply a representation of speech, where one sound or letter follows the other. But this understanding belies the fact that as long as people have been speaking, they have also been making manual gestures from speech. Given that gestures leave inscriptions of one sort or another, then writing could be as old as speech. The problem that this proposition raises is that of how to distinguish between writing and drawing within a design process. We routinely make this distinction, typically on the grounds that drawing is on the side of art whereas writing is on the side of technology. If however, as Ingold argues in The Perception of the Environment, we can break down the boundary between art and technology, then the distinction between writing and drawing likewise disappears, allowing us to think about inscription simply as a graphic counterpart to ordinary speech and gesture. This gives us quite a different view of the nature of writing itself, and also of the relationship between writing and visual imagery. In the following paper, I explore how communication between the many specialists involved in the design and construction of a building makes use of gesture, speech, image, text and number. All of these are combined in their working practices to delineate shared understandings during a interdisciplinary design process.

Recognizing the importance of specific materiality’s of media used by practitioners, and the analysis of this in terms of the senses and bodily movement, I refer to examples from my doctoral fieldwork investigations carried out between 1997 and 1999, principally in Norway (in the cities of Tromsø and Oslo) but also in Finland and Denmark, involving discussions with professionals from the building industry, systems designers, historians of science and technology, anthropologists and philosophers. As a way of highlighting how gesture, speech, image, writing and number are integrated into the course of situated actions within specific environmental contexts, I refer to conversations with Jon Godal, a boat builder and historian of traditional Norwegian crafts and skill, alongside design team members from the architecture, landscape and interior design office in Norway, Snøhetta.

Keywords: Gesture, speech, drawing, writing, computer aided design technology, architectural design process

JEL Classification: C60, C63, C88, D81, D83, L74, O31, 033