Sketch-n-Sip on Cleveland's Flats West Bank

Yesterday, AIA Cleveland's Sketch-n-Sip crew gathered at the offices of Richard L. Bowen + Associates for an evening that was unique in its program and setting.

Their building is a piece of Cleveland ingenuity in itself. Their office fronts two streets, one that floats in the sky; they enter from Center Street down the Flats, walk up five stories, and exit onto the Superior Viaduct. Two front doors, two worlds, one building bridging them.

Our presenter was Philadephia-based architect, Vlad Liflyandchick of Vlad Design. He led a discussion, "The Energy of Becoming: A Case for Sketching in the Age of AI." Vlad and his wife used to live in Cleveland, and he wove humor throughout the talk, including his bit that when anyone in Philly asks about his accent, he tells them it's a "true Cleveland accent." Delivered, of course, in his unmistakable original Russian accent, the place he emigrated from decades ago.

The 2 HSW learning units the program earned focused on how observation through hand drawing helps us design better environments for people. Hand-drawn work is soft. It invites interpretation. It brings the public into a design conversation, during zoning, entitlement, community review, and in ways a photorealistic render forecloses. Sketching, in other words, is site analysis, contextual judgment, and public engagement all in one practice. It is also a way of "seeing". What the hand draws enters our brains as information coded differently than other methods of documentation, a point made during the program and backed by studies.

One of the best threads of the night was a wide-open conversation about how A. I fits into all of this. Depending on when each of us came up with the profession, we learned to draw differently, some exclusively by hand, some hand-plus-CAD, some through 3D modeling, and now every one of us is figuring out what AI means for how we do the work. Nobody had a tidy answer. But everyone agreed the hand isn't going anywhere, because the hand is where the thinking happens.

Afterward, we all headed up to the Viaduct with sketchbooks and drew the skyline and the industrial flats from above. The weather was perfect, the sunset over the lake and the old warehouses and high-level bridges was one of those Cleveland evenings that reminds you why we live here, and most of us lingered, taking in the warm glow of the sunset.