" We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us. "

Tropical Modernism

In the 1980s, Geoffrey Bawa's architectural studio in Sri Lanka did something unusual: they drew trees on architectural plans freehand with ink pens. This practice was central to birthing the architectural movement that dominates East Asia to this day: 'tropical modernism.

Every other modernist architect of the time used circles and triangles for flora, abstract symbols, location markers on a plot, efficient, universal and clinical. Bawa's draughtsman, Laki Senanayake, spent hours with traditional ink pens that produced lines of varying thickness. Their intention  was to  "render with botanical authenticity." plans that embodied the character of leaves and the way branches moved.

The tool choice mattered. A ruling pen typical for plan drawings produces uniform lines, perfect for walls and columns. But an ink pen with variable line weight could capture organic form. The thick-to-thin strokes followed the growth patterns of leaves. The tools here enforced observation.

You can't design a building's relationship with a landscape if your drawing method treats that landscape as empty space. By drawing vegetation with the same care as walls and columns, Bawa's office made it impossible to ignore the site.

Cross section and plan of Ena De Silva house 1984

The choice of tool enforced a way of seeing. When you spend hours rendering each leaf's particular curve, you can't treat vegetation as background. Tools enable creation through constraints, and constraints shape what becomes noticeable, what demands attention. Tropical modernism emerged because ink pens made it impossible to think of landscape as empty space to be filled, the drawing technique made the site's ecology central rather than incidental. The buildings changed because the drawings changed because the tools changed.

Learning Through Material Constraints

In architecture school, I drew constantly. I developed preferences: pencil for early exploration when I needed to stay loose, pen when I was ready to commit. Each tool let me think differently about the space I was designing, though I had no vocabulary for why this mattered.



Two farmers inspecting a plant circa 2019

When I discovered Bawa's drawings years later, I understood my own tool choices differently. I had been selecting not just how to draw, but what kind of designer I could be in each moment. The pencil's erasability kept me in a state of open exploration. I could propose, revise, hedge. The pen's permanence forced me into a different mode: committing to relationships between spaces, collapsing maybes into definite adjacencies.

You don't think 'I'm using a pencil.' You think 'I'm drawing a line.' This is material mediation: the resistance of paper, the friction of graphite, the weight in your hand. Physical constraints you can learn, predict, and internalize until the tool feels transparent, though of course it never truly is. The pencil still shapes what marks you can make, what becomes drawable. It's just that these constraints have become so familiar they feel like second nature rather than technology.

Recently I drew on an iPad with Procreate and felt this transparency break. The line appeared smoother than what my hand had done, the algorithm interpreted my trembling stroke as noise and optimized it into a clean spline. My hand learned to propose rather than define, to suggest knowing the system would refine. When I returned to pencil, the uninterpreted line felt strange. With the Ipad I was no longer using a tool, I was negotiating with one.

Bezier curve applied to vector paths

From Rules to Intelligence

Procreate's smoothing applies geometric principles, universal mathematical rules about what counts as a "clean" line. AI-mediated tools do something else. A system trained on millions of images and gestures doesn't optimize your line geometrically. It interprets what kind of mark you're trying to make. The algorithm brings probabilistic judgment shaped by its training data.

The common concern is that this means losing agency. I think it's a different kind of creative constraint. You're no longer working against material resistance. You're negotiating with learned patterns. The question isn't whether to accept this mediation, but what becomes possible when you work with it deliberately.

Working Within vs. Working Above

There's a difference between working within a tool's constraints and working above them. A good sculptor knows the grain of the stone will throw the chisel off slightly. You don't fight this or get frustrated at it. You incorporate it as a fundamental reality and coerce it to work with your vision, as much as possible. The grain is a condition of the material that, once internalized, becomes part of how you think about form. A sculptor who has spent years with marble doesn't consciously account for grain anymore. It's absorbed into their hands, their planning, their sense of what a cut will do before they make it.

Heidegger had language for this. A tool that has become so familiar it disappears from conscious attention is ready-to-hand (zuhanden). The hammer you swing without thinking about the hammer. The pencil you draw with while thinking about the line, not the graphite. When the tool breaks, or resists in an unexpected way, it becomes visible as an object again, present-at-hand (vorhanden). You stop thinking through it and start thinking about it.

With material tools, you move from present-at-hand to ready-to-hand through practice. You learn the grain. The tool recedes. With AI-mediated tools, the system's behavior shifts. It updates, it interprets differently based on context, it brings probabilistic judgment that varies from one interaction to the next. The tool never fully recedes. You might develop fluency, but the negotiation never quite disappears, because the other side of the negotiation keeps changing.

This means we may be working in a persistent state of presence-at-hand. The tool remains visible even as you work through it. The sculptor who has fully internalized marble's grain can become blind to it. The transparency that enables mastery also forecloses certain kinds of noticing. A tool that never fully disappears keeps you in active negotiation, where the constraints stay visible enough to work with deliberately rather than merely absorb.

Whether this persistent visibility enables forms of creative thinking that ready-to-hand tools cannot is the open question.

The Question Worth Exploring

What becomes possible with AI-mediated constraints that wasn't before?

What if you drew but never saw your own strokes, only the AI's interpretation? What if the material pushed back, if the AI refused certain compositions based on structural principles it had learned, the way stone resists cuts against its grain? What if two people drew on the same canvas but only communicated through the AI's interpretation of each other's strokes? What if an entire studio worked this way, dozens of people shaping a single artifact through an AI that learned the group's collective tendencies, a shared material with a grain formed by everyone who'd ever touched it?

When the tool doesn't only resist but even interprets, when it brings learned patterns and probabilistic judgment into the creative loop, what forms of thinking emerge?

What can you draw, design, or build in partnership with computational intelligence that you couldn't conceive working against material resistance alone?

Constraints are Generative

Bawa's office chose ink pens deliberately. They decided freehand botanical rendering would structure their thinking, and in doing so, they created an architectural movement. The constraint was accepted, explored, pushed. It opened possibilities that ruling pens and abstract circles had foreclosed.

We're at a similar moment with computational mediation. These tools offer new constraints: interpretation, learned patterns, probabilistic judgment in the creative loop. Unlike the ink pen, they also offer a constraint that is itself in motion, a negotiating partner whose behavior shifts and evolves. The only way to know what they enable is to work within them, to develop fluency with their particular resistances, to see what emerges when you stop fighting the algorithm and start thinking with it. The grain of this stone never stays quite the same.

Not every constraint is worth accepting. Dismissing computational mediation because it mediates differently than material tools, though, means foreclosing possibilities before we've explored them. Bawa didn't know tropical modernism was possible until his office committed to the constraint of botanical authenticity.

We won't know what's possible with these tools until we work within their constraints long enough to learn what they open up. We don't have the language yet for what these experiments reveal. That's the point. New forms of thinking-through-making don't arrive with vocabulary attached. The only way to understand them is to work within them.

The tools we use shape what we create. This need not be read as a warning, it can be an invitation.

References

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10. Feedback from Molly Soda that sharpened this essay.