Computers have had a great effect on the way we live our lives. They let us do things faster and with more ease than ever before. The cell phones we have in our pockets have more computing power then the computers we took to the moon.

As soon as computers started to show up in our everyday lives people have been saying they are either the devil or something from heaven. As someone who has grown up during this time, I can remember how things were done before and after. We now have access to all the worlds’ knowledge at any time, but yet our lives still work the same way.

Architecture is one of the oldest professions, and for almost all of that time we have had the same tools. For the first time in its history there is a now tool for us to use. In the interview Thom Mayne talks of how architects have been “invested in incredibly antiquated ideas and style and history and notions that should have been gone a hundred years ago” - those ideas have made the greatest buildings in the world, and one should be careful not to forget that. Yes, computers let us model things faster than ever before. We can make drawings in seconds that would have taken us days or weeks before. We can test ideas faster, but computers are just one tool we have - a big new tool that isn’t fully understood yet.

In my first few weeks of architecture school someone told me about this article where a well-known architect is quoted saying the plan is dead. My first reaction to this was to think “hell yeah it's dead all I will ever use is 3D modeling”. I soon found out that this was not the way to learn architecture. 3D modeling is a very important step in the design process, but we need to work in 2D at the same time.