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Last week, the American Society of Architectural Illustrators (ASAI) came together in Toronto, host city for the Boston-headquartered ASAI's 30th annual meeting. From October 14-18, the ASAI took over the King Edward Hotel, its members engaging in a series of panel sessions and discussions, as well as a handful of walking (and sitting and sketching) tours of various points of interest around Toronto. UrbanToronto caught up with the Society at the Distillery District, and attended a talk by world-renowned, Toronto-based architectural illustrator Michael McCann.
At the Distillery District, UrbanToronto met with several ASAI members, including ASAI President Jon Soules, an illustrator and a principal architect at Diamond Schmitt Architects in Toronto. Over coffee, Jon explained the importance of perspective in architectural illustration, a technique first developed in the Middle Ages, and the concept from which the ASAI named their annual publication, Architecture in Perspective.
More technical than free-hand sketching, perspective drawing requires the artist to first create a wire-frame grid upon which the subject is drawn, and from here to adjust the perspective around a set vanishing point, making use of complex mathematical principles dating back several hundred years. For now, however, Jon was more than happy to oblige with a quick sketch of an antique truck.
From here, the ASAI members departed for Fort York, having already spent the morning touring around the St. Lawrence Market and Union Station. The following day, UrbanToronto dropped in on the conference at the King Edward Hotel to attend a presentation, but not before checking out the entries submitted by various ASAI members for a silent auction, many of which had been sketched while touring the city.
Michael McCann, of Michael McCann Associates Ltd. of Toronto, delivered a fascinating presentation, essentially offering an overview of his impressive, 45-year career, peppered with a lifetime's worth of personal and professional anecdotes and observations. A graduate of OCAD in the mid-sixties, McCann had his heart set on becoming an animator for Disney, an achievement he met only to discover that his true passion was for architectural illustration. By the 1980s, at the dawn of the computer age, McCann recalled fondly that he and his firm had resisted the urge to go digital, recalling his words to his bewildered colleagues at the time: "Illustrators will soon be dinosaurs, but look how valuable dinosaurs are—people love dinosaurs!" And so it was, that despite the digital wave that soon overtook the entire industry, McCann stayed true to his roots and kept on drawing by hand and has never looked back.
Seen above, the watercolour renderings by Michael McCann, completed for UrbanCapital's The Ravine development in York Mills, were offered up during the presentation as a good example of when doing it by hand pays off. Despite a much longer turnaround time (as much as three to five days to complete a single rendering), McCann stressed that in the end, the client was always more than pleased to see their dreams brought to life in watercolour, as opposed just another digital 3D rendering. The freedom of artistic expression allowed by doing it by hand, could not, in McCann's estimation, be replicated by a machine.
In all, our time at the conference was a pleasant two days spent with the welcoming, international members of the ASAI, and it was a genuine pleasure to make their acquaintance. Educational as well, it was interesting to contemplate the continued role of hand illustrations and of architectural illustrators in the 21st century. Too often, it is taken as an inevitable certitude that technological innovation will eclipse and surpass the old ways of doing things, the time spent with the ASAI going a long way to challenge that belief.
