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Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

Be sure to check out the drafting tables link at the bottom of the page (or this one, if it times out):

https://web.archive.org/web/20230408160205/https://weare.gur...

What's interesting is that this huge change in design technology has produced no similarly huge change in the physical product being designed. Buildings are designed and built at about the same speed as they were then. They cost as much or more in inflation-adjusted terms.

Yes, I know that there are lots of specific things that are easier now that we have CAD and related software, but a 1950s architecture student who was told about these technologies would probably predict major resulting changes in the speed of design and construction. But this has not occurred.

> Buildings are designed and built at about the same speed as they were then. They cost as much or more in inflation-adjusted terms.

If that is true, I bet the % amount of labour has been reduced of the total cost, and materials and/or shifting standards have swallowed up the difference.

What has happened is parametric designs. That is the big game changer, the number of people working on this stuff has dropped, and the flexibility of the designs has gone up. But on the overall price of a building it never made much difference because the drafting never was a huge factor in cost.

I worked for a big dutch architect (as a freelancer) right around the time that this transition was happening, they made spaceframes, structure made of knots and pipes with threaded holes in their ends, the obvious advantage was that if you knew the dimensions of the building you could just generate a BOM and start cutting, which before then was a lot of very time consuming computation. Never before did I get confronted so visibly with the effects that my work had on others, and it was a lesson that I never forgot. Essentially I was instrumental in making a whole bunch of draftsmen redundant and they were helping me to bring that about.

The company still exists, they still make spaceframes and I highly doubt you'll even find a drafting pencil or a RotRing pen anywhere on the premises. I still have Makowski's books on my shelf 35 years later.

In the first picture, why are they all wearing lab coats?

Drafting floor attire. When I was in EE we had to wear the same when in drafting class. This was in 1982.

Was there a technical reason (minimize potential smearing? tearing of the paper?)? Or was it more symbolic attire? Would management wear it?

Mostly so you don't ruin your clothes with indelible substances

There is this thing called analine ink, this is mostly a historical thing nowadays but in the early days of professional drafting in the industrial age it was used quite a bit and besides being nasty (poisonous) it is also pretty much indelible, what's stained stays stained, no matter how much you try to wash it out.

https://psap.library.illinois.edu/advanced-help/paper-unboun...

So I suspect the overclothing had not so much a cool lab coat vibe as well as a protect-my-valuable-cloting-underneath role. Even later drafting inks (such as in the RotRing pens that we used to use) is pretty good at staining stuff. I used to absolutely suck at drafting (my friend Jeroen at the time was an absolute master at it), I just didn't have the patience for it. And more than once I managed to foul up my 'smock' by moving too fast on a piece of work that wasn't dry yet. I still have some of my vellum from back then as well as a very early attempt at plotting using the computer for a sail maker using a hand-built plotter. That was much harder than it may seem to be today on account of it being hard to find something that could drive the pen without any slippage (this was just when Kevlar backed toothed belts became available commercially but they were still hideously expensive). But the idea that I could produce half decent drawings using the computer was an amazing skill to have.

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