When the Line Demanded the Right to Rise: Mastering SketchUp

In an empty room in Boulder, Colorado, Brad Schell asks a line on his screen what it wants to become, and the line answers that it has spent its life imprisoned between its ends and has been promised height before, only to be buried under commands, menus and figures. Schell goes to the software developer Joe Esch with a wish for software that thinks the way the hand thinks: draw a line, push it, and the wall rises. Lines close into a surface, the surface is pulled upward into a box, and when Schell pushes a rectangle into its face a doorway opens onto buildings still waiting to exist, a bridge with no far shore and a child holding a pencil house he does not know how to enter. The line then reminds Schell that height alone does not make architecture and that what matters is knowing why it should rise, since the tool can build a wall and cannot give it meaning. The book presents the model as the question that comes before the building, and closes by asking the reader to open SketchUp, draw a line, raise it and ask what life will happen there.