By Gary Tischler

They call it "Tools of the Imagination," this 4,000-square-foot exhibition of high tech and low tech artifacts, full of pencils and pointy objects and precision tools and parabolas and protractors and software design programs that boggle the mind to the point of headache.
If you’re one of those people who could never draw a straight line or an oblique one, or who got the cold sweats before mechanical drawing class in high school, you might call it a torture chamber.
I walked into the first room of "Tools of the Imagination" at the National Building Museum on a Saturday afternoon, and I watched as a mother leaned over a case containing several objects. "That, honey," she said to her little daughter, "is a protractor. That’s one of the first things mommy learned how to use in her drawing class."
A protractor! I remembered T-Squares and compasses, and slide rules and weighty things with steel points and drawings that when you rolled them out, made no sense whatsoever. At least to me, they didn’t.
To Thomas Jefferson, who did a lot of drawing when he wasn’t writing the Declaration of Independence, traveling to France and watching his back on account of Aaron Burr and John Adams, they would make wondrous sense. I suspect he would not be taken aback by computer models, either.
In the end, "Tools of the Imagination," even for the uninitiated or the non-draftsman, is about what separates man from other living things, and about the advances of technology, and what it allows man to do and dream.
It bills itself as an "exhibition that explores the architect’s toolbox." That’s a mighty big toolbox, if you ask me. Out comes paper, a pencil, and before you know it, you have 3-D, virtual reality models.
Small wonder architects are closely bound to painters and sculptors, their sketchbooks and drawings. On second thought, "Tools of the Imagination" is exactly right: the architect is the artist longing to be the pragmatist and builder. The building, the edifice, is their version of eternity and immortality, and they achieve it with the tools of their trade.
Those tools, as becomes abundantly and amazingly clear, change remarkably fast, or rather, are added to. Pencil and paper—and the slide rule, and the compass are still with us, as is the sketch book—but what the computer can accomplish is another matter entirely.
The exhibition ranges across 250 years, although, technically, the starting point goes back a little further, to 1560 to be exact, when graphite was first mined in the United Kingdom. This, of course, led to the birth of the modern pencil in 1662, when German inventor Friedrich Staedtler of Nuremburg put graphite between two halves of wood. Presto, the future No. 2.
The exhibition is about drawings, and models, and sometimes of the meeting and mergings of the two, and how the tools allowed architectural imagination to spread its wings. Or, as artist and educator Glenn Vilppu put it, ‘There are no rules, only tools."
So, you’ll find the familiar richly brown T-squares, a case of compasses, looking for all the world like a packet of dental tools, to 19th-century devices whose names are unfamiliar to the ordinary bloke, like the trammel, the centrolinead, the perspectograph and the ellipsograph, although you can guess at their function. From there, you move quickly into the future as the present (the architectural software, 3D modeling programs such as AutoCAD, Autodesk, VIZ, MicroStation and CATIA, which allow architects to envision, model and create buildings as they might be).
In the course of the rooms, you move from Jefferson’s drawings of the University of Virginia’s rotunda, to Pope’s visions for the National Gallery, to a 3-D simulation of Frank Lloyd Wright’s waterfall construction in Pennsylvania, one of the most beautiful—and least inhabitable—homes ever built. And in the wink of an eye, you’re in the world of Frank Gehry and other contemporary architects who use old tools and combine them with the latest sophisticated technology.
“Tools of the Imagination” is a hands-on exhibition in the sense that you can use many of the tools and programs on display.
And don’t worry.
There will be no tests.
("Tools of the Imagination" runs through October 10 at the National Building Museum.)

New Exhibits
Anne C. Fisher Gallery is showing the new works of two familiar artists this month. The paintings of John M. Adams and the sculpture of Frances Sniffen. The show is titled “Resonance” and continues through April 9, with an artist talk on Sunday, March 13, at 2 p.m., and receptions on Friday, Mary 18, at 6 p.m., and again on Friday, April 1, at 6 p.m. Anne C. Fisher Gallery is in Canal Square in Georgetown, 1054 31st Street, NW.
The Renwick Gallery is showing “High Fiber” consisting of objects from the Renwick’s permanent collection. The Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum is at 17th and Pennsylvania Avenue, N.W. On Sunday, March 13, artist Lindsay Ketterer Rais will present an illustrated lecture dealing with her baskets and other three-dimensional objects made using a distinctive “knotless netting” technique that allows her to elegantly combine materials such as pistachio nuts and stainless steel mesh. The lecture begins at 3 p.m.
The Smithsonian is offering a four-hour workshop on Wednesday, March 23 (10:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m.) where students will learn how to cut, grind, foil, and solder glass pieces to create a stained glass hanging wall mirror. Jimmy Powers, who teaches stained glass classes in the Washington region, will conduct this free workshop. However, materials are provided for a fee of $45. Preregistration and payment is required. For information, e-mail saamprograms@si.edu The workshop repeats on March 26.
The 48th Corcoran Biennial: Closer to Home takes as its focus contemporary artists making use of traditional arts methods, favoring earnest individual expression and historically resonant aesthetic dialogue over high-tech media. The Corcoran Biennial, among the oldest continuous biennials in the world, was founded in 1907 and since its inception has retained a focus on new American work of exceptional quality. The 48th Corcoran Biennial: Closer to Home is on view at the Corcoran Gallery of Art from March 19 through June 27, 2005.