Envisioning Architecture: Space, Time, and Meaning (EAEA), 2017
Capturing a message of meaning as contained in the milieu of the contemporary city and its archit... more Capturing a message of meaning as contained in the milieu of the contemporary city and its architecture presents new challenges for a student often classified as a digital native. As a response, the authors of this study chose to use music and gaming as vehicles to engage students in processes of abstraction, analysis, interpretation, and craft. The sense of time and meaning, as embodied in instrumental music and the ancient game of chess, challenged design students to develop ideas
associated with sequential space and city form. Mobile media technology in the form of analyzing music, learning the game of chess, mapping and providing information in field study, and surveying student reactions were employed. Structured methods of traditional representation and drawing assisted the construction of physical models and communicated aspects of space, time, and meaning for the student.
A translation of music into a limited vocabulary of points, lines, and planes
As part of their first semester of study in the field of environmental design, students were given a project that embraced a limited and elemental vocabulary of point, line, plane, and volume as a means to translate a piece of instrumental music into a spatially defined passageway within a confined framework. Students were asked to consider the elements as a sequential series of informed components as a means to capture a series of spaces that at times may constrict, swell, or shift in direction within the predefined framework. To minimize the occurrence of preconceived elements such as stairs, ceilings, and floors, the passageway was to be conceived as a gravity-free environment, thus promoting concepts of compression and release in place of ascent and descent.
The inclusion of music as a thematic inspiration for the project offered the students both a series of constraints and strategies as they began diagramming their initial interpretations of the given selection towards the physical embodiment of the music into defined spatial passage. Concepts such as rhythm, tempo, pitch, or transitions have a dependency on time, and therefore, suggest two initial approaches for the project – one that focuses on the creation of volumetric centers, or swells, along the passage and then develops the transitions between these centers, or an approach that embraces the development and manipulation of a spine that reacts to the various translated information and directly confronts, dictates, and affects the movement of the user through the defined path.
At the conclusion of the project, students are asked to consider how the changing of scale for their physical models might affect the meaning of how they use point, line, and plane to create a defined volume. The students are asked to shift the scale from the representative environmental condition of their design to that of 1:1. Criteria are then given to construct a collective threshold out of the series of projects that relates directly to that of the human scale, thus introducing a new associative meaning to the project as they work collectively to define and capture space using the original elemental vocabulary of point, line, plane, and volume.
A translation of precedents into the typologies of a chess set
The game of chess is one of the most recognizable products of civilization. The Chicago skyline, as a home to many distinctive high-rise buildings, is an intersection of design and planning across multiple scales and epochs. Students were challenged to examine how the pieces, the game board, and the rules associated with chess could potentially embody the variety of designers and planners who shaped Chicago and the trajectory of environmental design across approximately a 150-year period. Students could then recognize the city skyline as a design project that evolves over a period of time. The meaning of these individual expressions then can be read as part of the meaning of a collective whole, and a city’s overall visual and physical identity.
Students were introduced to a brief history of chess sets, ranging from archaeological findings dating from 12th century Scotland, through to the 19th century legacy of British writer Howard Staunton, who endorsed the general design of the sets we often see today. Students were assigned a literature and image review of six personalities that practiced in Chicago to influence the design for six piece typologies found in a standard chess set. Students chose at random six names from a list of 50 people associated with Chicago architecture, landscape architecture, urban planning, or public art. A mobile app was also developed prior to a four-day field trip to the city, giving students a geographic and digital reference to many of the sites and personalities who shaped Chicago architecture and planning.
Given Chicago’s noted heritage and tradition of tall buildings, students were asked to consider the potential role of tripartite division of form. As conveniently observed, the traditional Staunton chess sets possess similar divisions, becoming a vehicle for visual discovery.
During the literature / image review, students were asked to sketch a comfort pallet of details, forms, concept sketches, geometries, and pictorial interpretations from the work of the six assigned inspirations, and from examples experienced in Chicago. Students created sketches using digital tablets or sketchbooks.
Students then constructed a set of chess pieces, using materials of their own choosing, and were challenged to document the construction process, whether using an additive, subtractive or hybrid method of craft. An emphasis on procedural design process was communicated here, as well as the notion of the ergonomic / look and feel of the pieces, and whether their interpretations were still able to function in game play. Students were also asked to consider the assigned “move” behavior of each piece. Such challenges, interpretations, and learning opportunities seasoned and imbued the students’ design thinking and process throughout. A group-wide chess game day was held to test the effectiveness of the sets and game boards.
As a final step, students made two sets of drawings. One set became the procedural story of one chess piece in isometric view, as depicted in four to six steps. Such a set of drawings was intended to show how the piece was made. A second drawing challenged students to think of their chess pieces as a collective city skyline in frontal elevation projection, imagining the chess pieces in the scale of city buildings. Both drawings were rendered using a paper cut out method, placed behind a translucent sheet of vellum that contained the line art. Discussions of how these two layers and methods of representation stimulated discussion.
Conclusion
It is hoped that the exploration of music and gaming in these two design projects shall serve as an effective vehicle of communication between notions of space, time, and meaning as embodied in two forms of art and culture that can stimulate a student’s imagination and design
thinking. The authors are confident the exploration across scales, metaphors, narratives and forms found in the contemporary city and in architectural space can create rich inquiry in the mind of the beginning design student and form a foundation for continued dialogue between experience and representation.
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Papers by Sean Burns
Unlike the traditional interpretation of the single authored book, the author/orator in architecture is not one entity. Instead, it is composed of a complex chain of “authors” where the transfer of authorship may be evident within the final product that is offered to the end-user. Critic Robin Evans (1997, p.182) speaks to this process and its possibilities: “...transfiguration, transition, transmigration…any of which would sit happily over the blind spot between the drawing and its object, because we can never be quite certain, before the event, how things will travel and what will happen to them along the way.” This transfer of control results in the acquisition of what critic Lars Spuybroek describes as ‘savage’ details that alter the original intended narrative of a project.
Spuybroek (2016, p. 3) characterizes the imperfect “savage detail” created by workmen who inevitably make, “...mistakes in their carving…because of the open design system of the Gothic, which at certain points leaves them to decide what to do….” The system of authorship in Gothic architecture is imprinted upon its architecture through the imperfections of its details. For Spuybroek, the limitations and deficiencies of the builder should not be cast aside or corrected, but embraced as a means to advance the design intentions of the architect’s original narrative.
In an increasingly CAD/CAM-driven manufactured world, the narrative between design, drawing, and construction has undergone a remarkable shift. With the advent of materials like 3D-printed concrete, the extension of a design and its fabrication procedures can now simultaneously unfold. The nature of drawing and its significance to the builder has evolved since the Gothic, where realized imperfections emerged as signifiers to arguably transfer authorship between architect and constructor. Here, this exchange incited an essential convergent point to enact a narrative construct, where the end-user experiences the final product as an impressionable resultant of the design/fabrication process. Intriguingly, the CNC machine and 3D printer have brought about a return to the rude and savage ‘workmen,’ where the technology has created opportunistic imperfections that can be seen as a window into the design process and its translation to construction, dependent upon robotic constructional processes. This paper will seek to explore the possibilities inherent in current technology’s opportunistic savagery to promote narrative measures through Herman’s concept of “what it’s like” – the conscious experience of the end-user.
Bibliography/References
Evans, Robin. (1997) “Translations from Drawing to Building,” in Evans, Robin (ed.) Translations from Drawing to Building and Other Essays. London: Architectural Association Publications.
Herman, David. (2009) Basic Element of Narrative. London: Wiley-Blackwell
Ryan, Marie-Laure. (2014) “Story/Worlds/Media.” In Storyworlds across Media: Toward a Media Conscious Narratology. Edited by Marie-Laure Ryan, Jan-Noël Thon. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press.
Spuybroek, Lars. (2016) The Sympathy of Things: Ruskin and the Ecology of Design. 2nd edn. London: Bloomsbury Publishing.
Marco Frascari expands on this principle to suggest that: “The conception of the architectural space achieved...is the result of the association of the visual images of details. gained through the phenomenon of indirect vision, with the geometrical proposition embodied in forms, dimensions, and location, developed by touching and by walking through buildings.” Form is therefore not a guaranteed result, but instead an evolving dialogue of sensory elements throughout the design process. The relationship of elements, at times disparate, creates the basis for the generation of form through processes of iterative design, helping to initiate a design process.
Addressing and enhancing the process of design as generative in itself is significant for the development and understanding of beginning designers, as the idea of “process” provides a conceptual basis for developing a design, without the necessity of scale, typology, or form from the onset.
This paper examines two projects that begin with an analysis of the joint, composed of two disparate conditions, properties, or materials, and then evolves to address the interpretive performance of these systems and how can strategically generate form.
This paper examines a series of architectural design projects that encourage students to envision, design, and fabricate their own ‘site’ based on hermeneutic approaches to various theoretical and philosophical texts. As such, these projects ask the students to abandon their preconceived notions about the sequence of observing, documenting, and reacting to a physical site as a formal procedure to creating an architectural intervention. Collectively, the projects exemplified an array of efforts to expand the view of architecture’s role as a mediating article throughout the design process, towards demonstrating a profound relationship between an edifice and its accommodating field. This paper offers examples of this pedagogical approach and argues that when online students are prompted to consider alternatives to ‘site’, they are presented with new interdisciplinary opportunities that expand their horizons.
Within architectural design studio courses, second-year beginner design students are frequently asked to understand and react to the environment. Unfortunately, these students too often draw upon entrenched preconceptions of architecture as inspiration for design. As a means to eradicate these prejudiced notions that are often based primarily upon the perception of how architecture should appear visually, and instead examine elemental and systematic conditions and processes for how architecture might engage the earth and participate in the perceptual atmospheric conditions of the sky, the terms tectonics and stereotomy were introduced to broaden their knowledge of procedural and site-specific operative maneuvers as inspiration for architectural design. Understanding and interpreting the various writings of tectonics and stereotomics, as related to architectural design, provides early architectural design students a vocabulary and methodology to perceive the site as a malleable entity that is negotiable to accept and respond to additive elements of an architectural solution, throughout the design process.
This paper examines the introductory work of second-year architectural students, specifically related to an initial exploration of stereotomy and tectonic intermediations to realize potential space configurations among and beyond the site, and a subsequent project entitled Room and [bill]Board that asked the students to inherit and repurpose all elements of an existing billboard as an opportunity to transform an identifiable object into a series of specified and functional spaces. Each project probed the students to begin the design process by first perceiving the site as an active agent of design towards developing a series of enveloping spaces, and then propose vertical and horizontal supporting circulatory elements intended to be woven among the interior and exterior environment in response to the maneuvers exhibited through their proposed design operations. In this manner, students were persuaded to think volumetrically and encouraged to displace the earth, as needed, to support their design solution, as influenced by their interpretations of the provided readings of tectonics and stereotomy. Ultimately, students were prompted to reconsider their engrained mode of perceiving the environment and diminish their preconceived notions of architectural design, towards creating a site-specific architectural intervention.
Often, students are taught to sequentially operate within the design process by observing, recording, and then responding to it conditions with an architectural intervention. This procedure, while beneficial in teaching students to acknowledge and appreciate the contextual environment for their design, can be misguided as it emphasizes the site as a given, invariable constraint that is static and impermeable in nature. Architectural design involves a mediation of the designer’s intentions with the site. As such, students should be encouraged to consider architecture and the conditions of the site as malleable, accommodating bodies.
This paper will present a series of projects, introduced to students in their second-year of study, that encouraged students to break the sequence of observe, record, and respond to allow site and architecture to be responsively in dialogue with one another throughout the design process. At the outset of each project, students were asked to blur the demarcations of architecture and site, among the earth and beyond to the sky, towards discovering ways in which the architecture and its contextual surroundings might respect, respond, and support one another to cultivate a desired user experience. These exercises offered students an avenue to creatively and critically maneuver the design process while promoting collaborative thinking between architecture and its environment.
appearance of an architectural act, as opposed to placing value on how architecture performs, offers spatial organization, and engages the site and its users.
This paper challenges these aforementioned perceptions by introducing a pedagogical approach focused on investigating and embracing the performance of structural assemblies as an inspiration for architectural design within these supporting structural courses. A series of physical explorations were presented to students as an opportunity to expand upon their understanding of the lessons, simultaneously being covered in class, related to the behavior of forces and the capabilities of structural systems to transfer and withstand various loading scenarios. These hand-on exercises asked the students to design and fabricate physical models to be tested under various performance criteria and challenged the students to consider ways in which structural behaviors and architectural design might inform one another. The students were assessed on their ability to innovate, test, reconsider, and summarize their predictions and findings for how their designed systems behaved internally and responded to applied external influences. Along each of the phases for these projects, students were asked to embrace failure as an integral part of the iterative design phase, persuading students to primarily focus on designing performance-orientated solutions and concentrate on studying how the actions of constituent parts systematically contributed to the performance of its composite assembly.
beginner design students often start by analyzing the situational
features, topographic composition, and contextual forces of the
project’s site to generate conceptual parameters for their
design’s response. While this process encourages the students
to acknowledge, and appreciate, the context of a project, their
strategic design maneuvers are frequently bound as a reaction
to these existing conditions. In turn, the contextual site assumes
the risk of being viewed as a static, unwavering constraint with
limited capacity to be reimagined or reshaped to best
accommodate the desires of an architectural proposal.
To challenge this perception, architectural theorist Gevork
Hartoonian states “Architecture is relentlessly reformulating
itself according to formal and contextual factors.”1 Students
should be encouraged to extend the dialogue between
architecture and its situational context throughout the design
and development phases of a project and consider the site as
soft and malleable condition capable of influencing and
responding to the intervening architecture. This viewpoint
promotes beginner design students to view architecture and
the contextual site as co-dependent participants throughout the
iterative design process, centered on creating an experience for
the end-user that is site-specific.
To promote methodological processes to architectural design
and site intervention, the students explored the terms tectonic
and stereotomy, through the writings of various architectural
theorists. The lessons of these authors varied in message,
whether primarily concerned with the material capabilities of
each as a system,2 to descriptions focused on the act of creating
through additive and subtractive processes.3 Each student was
asked to formulate and apply his/her authentic interpretation of
these terms and as a means to define and extend spatial
configurations for architectural design that mediated its
engagement with a contextual site.
This paper presents a two design projects, respectively entitled
The Plinth and The Tower and Instigating Slab, that
were introduced to beginner architectural design students.
These theoretical exercises were aimed to promote the
students to question any preconceived notions of context and
site as an inflexible and assimilating condition, and instead
consider an approach to architectural design that accepts the
ground as an accommodating mass or negotiable plane. For
each project, students were asked to author and craft a scape
as a medium to apply their interpretations of tectonics and
stereotomy to integrate, and develop spaces among, within,
and beyond the earth’s compromising mass and atmospheric
conditions of a contextual site.
The terms stereotomic and tectonic have been defined and discussed by various authors, such as Gottfried Semper, Kenneth Frampton, Robin Evans, and Gevork Hartoonian. Exploring the writings of these authors reveals that these terms have variations in their descriptions towards methodological approaches to architectural design. Robin Evans, in The Projective Cast, defines stereotomy by its etymological derivation: the science of cutting solids. For Evans, stereotomy indicates a subtractive process, concerned with the carving of voids from a solid mass and the resultant surfaces generated to create and define space. Comparatively, Semper’s definition of stereotomy, in Style, is a classification of architecture related to the “earthwork, formed out of the repetitious stacking of heavy-weight units.” Semper’s definition suggests an additive process using a taxonomy of aggregated units as a means to extend the mass and strata material of the earth beyond the ground plane towards the architectural creation of a self-supporting structural element.
Tectonics is generally accepted as the art of construction, although explicit explanations also vary among the aforesaid authors in pertaining to this idiom as an approach to architectural design processes and applications. Frampton, in Studies in Tectonic Culture, addresses the tectonic as the lightweight frame related to the sky, characterized by its temporary condition, opposed to the permanence resulting from sterotomic processes of architecture more closely associated with the earth. By contrast, Hartoovian emphasizes that the art of construction influences our sensitivity to define space. In his book, The Ontology of Construction, Hartoonian focuses on the methods and approaches to creating and detailing structural aspects of architecture, as he beckons the importance of theatricality between the stereotomic and tectonic processes as stated, “It can be inferred that between the structural utility of architectonic elements and their analogical representation, there is a ‘void,’ so to speak, where the tectonic resides. This void molds architectural knowledge, that is the logos of making.”
In 2018, second-year architecture students researched, critiqued, and formulated informed interpretations of the terms tectonics and sterotomics. The intent of this paper is to present the work of these students, over a series of sequential projects, through the lens of their applied interpretations of tectonics and stereotomics. These terms served as a basis for a methodological approach to architectural design that commenced with the engagement and manipulation of the site’s surface and mass, through additive and subtractive processes, towards creating a new architectural expression.
As an exercise intended to encourage students to consider ways in which structural behaviors and architectural design can inform one another, students were challenged to fabricate a thirty-inch vertical structure using repetitive or modified patterns with specific material palette restrictions. The initial expectation given to the students for the project was that each design would be tested to support a minimum weight of seven pounds. The project was dually entitled “hollow column/stick tower” in an effort to persuade students to consider the project at a multitude of representative scales.
Upon testing the strength of the structures to meet the minimum loading requirements, the project was continued and the hollow column/stick tower was reconsidered as a new design problem for the students. Each project was placed beneath a robotic arm, which compressed the structures in incremental steps towards failure until the structural assembly was left in a damaged state. The projects were then returned to the students with a charge given to design and fabricate a prosthesis, using different materials, to once again make their project capable of supporting seven pounds. For this phase, students were required to leave their project in its current damaged state and not repair it back to its original configuration. Instead, each student was asked to address their prosthesis as a complimentary and critical element that responded to the vulnerabilities of their damaged structure, allowing the student’s original designs to have a second life as a structural assembly.
The intention of this paper is to explore the lessons and learning outcomes of a design project that persuasively introduced adaptation after failure, with evolving criteria based on the actions and discoveries of the previous phases within its duration. The robotic arm served as a device that allowed each structural assembly to generate a new form while exposing the vulnerabilities that led to failure. The prosthesis design and fabrication asked students to consider ways to extend the life of their designs in an adapted state and make their assemblies structurally capable again. It is the author’s belief that asking students to explore and exhaust potential responses to emergent criteria established in the phases after the initial testing can help teach beginning design students to be more adaptable in their approach to the design process, appreciate the lessons learned from failures, and question architecture as a finite entity.
associated with sequential space and city form. Mobile media technology in the form of analyzing music, learning the game of chess, mapping and providing information in field study, and surveying student reactions were employed. Structured methods of traditional representation and drawing assisted the construction of physical models and communicated aspects of space, time, and meaning for the student.
A translation of music into a limited vocabulary of points, lines, and planes
As part of their first semester of study in the field of environmental design, students were given a project that embraced a limited and elemental vocabulary of point, line, plane, and volume as a means to translate a piece of instrumental music into a spatially defined passageway within a confined framework. Students were asked to consider the elements as a sequential series of informed components as a means to capture a series of spaces that at times may constrict, swell, or shift in direction within the predefined framework. To minimize the occurrence of preconceived elements such as stairs, ceilings, and floors, the passageway was to be conceived as a gravity-free environment, thus promoting concepts of compression and release in place of ascent and descent.
The inclusion of music as a thematic inspiration for the project offered the students both a series of constraints and strategies as they began diagramming their initial interpretations of the given selection towards the physical embodiment of the music into defined spatial passage. Concepts such as rhythm, tempo, pitch, or transitions have a dependency on time, and therefore, suggest two initial approaches for the project – one that focuses on the creation of volumetric centers, or swells, along the passage and then develops the transitions between these centers, or an approach that embraces the development and manipulation of a spine that reacts to the various translated information and directly confronts, dictates, and affects the movement of the user through the defined path.
At the conclusion of the project, students are asked to consider how the changing of scale for their physical models might affect the meaning of how they use point, line, and plane to create a defined volume. The students are asked to shift the scale from the representative environmental condition of their design to that of 1:1. Criteria are then given to construct a collective threshold out of the series of projects that relates directly to that of the human scale, thus introducing a new associative meaning to the project as they work collectively to define and capture space using the original elemental vocabulary of point, line, plane, and volume.
A translation of precedents into the typologies of a chess set
The game of chess is one of the most recognizable products of civilization. The Chicago skyline, as a home to many distinctive high-rise buildings, is an intersection of design and planning across multiple scales and epochs. Students were challenged to examine how the pieces, the game board, and the rules associated with chess could potentially embody the variety of designers and planners who shaped Chicago and the trajectory of environmental design across approximately a 150-year period. Students could then recognize the city skyline as a design project that evolves over a period of time. The meaning of these individual expressions then can be read as part of the meaning of a collective whole, and a city’s overall visual and physical identity.
Students were introduced to a brief history of chess sets, ranging from archaeological findings dating from 12th century Scotland, through to the 19th century legacy of British writer Howard Staunton, who endorsed the general design of the sets we often see today. Students were assigned a literature and image review of six personalities that practiced in Chicago to influence the design for six piece typologies found in a standard chess set. Students chose at random six names from a list of 50 people associated with Chicago architecture, landscape architecture, urban planning, or public art. A mobile app was also developed prior to a four-day field trip to the city, giving students a geographic and digital reference to many of the sites and personalities who shaped Chicago architecture and planning.
Given Chicago’s noted heritage and tradition of tall buildings, students were asked to consider the potential role of tripartite division of form. As conveniently observed, the traditional Staunton chess sets possess similar divisions, becoming a vehicle for visual discovery.
During the literature / image review, students were asked to sketch a comfort pallet of details, forms, concept sketches, geometries, and pictorial interpretations from the work of the six assigned inspirations, and from examples experienced in Chicago. Students created sketches using digital tablets or sketchbooks.
Students then constructed a set of chess pieces, using materials of their own choosing, and were challenged to document the construction process, whether using an additive, subtractive or hybrid method of craft. An emphasis on procedural design process was communicated here, as well as the notion of the ergonomic / look and feel of the pieces, and whether their interpretations were still able to function in game play. Students were also asked to consider the assigned “move” behavior of each piece. Such challenges, interpretations, and learning opportunities seasoned and imbued the students’ design thinking and process throughout. A group-wide chess game day was held to test the effectiveness of the sets and game boards.
As a final step, students made two sets of drawings. One set became the procedural story of one chess piece in isometric view, as depicted in four to six steps. Such a set of drawings was intended to show how the piece was made. A second drawing challenged students to think of their chess pieces as a collective city skyline in frontal elevation projection, imagining the chess pieces in the scale of city buildings. Both drawings were rendered using a paper cut out method, placed behind a translucent sheet of vellum that contained the line art. Discussions of how these two layers and methods of representation stimulated discussion.
Conclusion
It is hoped that the exploration of music and gaming in these two design projects shall serve as an effective vehicle of communication between notions of space, time, and meaning as embodied in two forms of art and culture that can stimulate a student’s imagination and design
thinking. The authors are confident the exploration across scales, metaphors, narratives and forms found in the contemporary city and in architectural space can create rich inquiry in the mind of the beginning design student and form a foundation for continued dialogue between experience and representation.
Full-scale design exercises offer the opportunity for students to reconsider how a conceptual message might be translated through the holistic composition of elements and their tectonic relationships within the design.
Aggregation implies the repeated use of a singular, or adapted unit as an assemblage of internal entities that inform the overall object. Emphasis on aggregation techniques in the initial design stages of a 1:1 full-scale project allows students to pause and refocus their attention on a singular, repetitive, and adapted unit, disengaging their fixation on initial overall form generation. Using this strategy, the overall form of the design ultimately is informed through the use of the aggregate units, their proximity, interactions, and implied behaviors relative to an overarching concept.
This paper investigates how the student work of two separate 1:1 full-scale fabricated projects specifically utilize concepts of aggregation as a fundamental strategy to achieve the intended, embedded messages with a design. In each case study, the overall form of the final design is emergent as students focus on an inward-out strategy as opposed to an outward-in design methodology. The external form is therefore informed by the configuration of the aggregated units and how the aggregates shape each other towards a discovery, interpretation, and translation of an experience by the end user.
Unlike the traditional interpretation of the single authored book, the author/orator in architecture is not one entity. Instead, it is composed of a complex chain of “authors” where the transfer of authorship may be evident within the final product that is offered to the end-user. Critic Robin Evans (1997, p.182) speaks to this process and its possibilities: “...transfiguration, transition, transmigration…any of which would sit happily over the blind spot between the drawing and its object, because we can never be quite certain, before the event, how things will travel and what will happen to them along the way.” This transfer of control results in the acquisition of what critic Lars Spuybroek describes as ‘savage’ details that alter the original intended narrative of a project.
Spuybroek (2016, p. 3) characterizes the imperfect “savage detail” created by workmen who inevitably make, “...mistakes in their carving…because of the open design system of the Gothic, which at certain points leaves them to decide what to do….” The system of authorship in Gothic architecture is imprinted upon its architecture through the imperfections of its details. For Spuybroek, the limitations and deficiencies of the builder should not be cast aside or corrected, but embraced as a means to advance the design intentions of the architect’s original narrative.
In an increasingly CAD/CAM-driven manufactured world, the narrative between design, drawing, and construction has undergone a remarkable shift. With the advent of materials like 3D-printed concrete, the extension of a design and its fabrication procedures can now simultaneously unfold. The nature of drawing and its significance to the builder has evolved since the Gothic, where realized imperfections emerged as signifiers to arguably transfer authorship between architect and constructor. Here, this exchange incited an essential convergent point to enact a narrative construct, where the end-user experiences the final product as an impressionable resultant of the design/fabrication process. Intriguingly, the CNC machine and 3D printer have brought about a return to the rude and savage ‘workmen,’ where the technology has created opportunistic imperfections that can be seen as a window into the design process and its translation to construction, dependent upon robotic constructional processes. This paper will seek to explore the possibilities inherent in current technology’s opportunistic savagery to promote narrative measures through Herman’s concept of “what it’s like” – the conscious experience of the end-user.
Bibliography/References
Evans, Robin. (1997) “Translations from Drawing to Building,” in Evans, Robin (ed.) Translations from Drawing to Building and Other Essays. London: Architectural Association Publications.
Herman, David. (2009) Basic Element of Narrative. London: Wiley-Blackwell
Ryan, Marie-Laure. (2014) “Story/Worlds/Media.” In Storyworlds across Media: Toward a Media Conscious Narratology. Edited by Marie-Laure Ryan, Jan-Noël Thon. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press.
Spuybroek, Lars. (2016) The Sympathy of Things: Ruskin and the Ecology of Design. 2nd edn. London: Bloomsbury Publishing.
Marco Frascari expands on this principle to suggest that: “The conception of the architectural space achieved...is the result of the association of the visual images of details. gained through the phenomenon of indirect vision, with the geometrical proposition embodied in forms, dimensions, and location, developed by touching and by walking through buildings.” Form is therefore not a guaranteed result, but instead an evolving dialogue of sensory elements throughout the design process. The relationship of elements, at times disparate, creates the basis for the generation of form through processes of iterative design, helping to initiate a design process.
Addressing and enhancing the process of design as generative in itself is significant for the development and understanding of beginning designers, as the idea of “process” provides a conceptual basis for developing a design, without the necessity of scale, typology, or form from the onset.
This paper examines two projects that begin with an analysis of the joint, composed of two disparate conditions, properties, or materials, and then evolves to address the interpretive performance of these systems and how can strategically generate form.
This paper examines a series of architectural design projects that encourage students to envision, design, and fabricate their own ‘site’ based on hermeneutic approaches to various theoretical and philosophical texts. As such, these projects ask the students to abandon their preconceived notions about the sequence of observing, documenting, and reacting to a physical site as a formal procedure to creating an architectural intervention. Collectively, the projects exemplified an array of efforts to expand the view of architecture’s role as a mediating article throughout the design process, towards demonstrating a profound relationship between an edifice and its accommodating field. This paper offers examples of this pedagogical approach and argues that when online students are prompted to consider alternatives to ‘site’, they are presented with new interdisciplinary opportunities that expand their horizons.
Within architectural design studio courses, second-year beginner design students are frequently asked to understand and react to the environment. Unfortunately, these students too often draw upon entrenched preconceptions of architecture as inspiration for design. As a means to eradicate these prejudiced notions that are often based primarily upon the perception of how architecture should appear visually, and instead examine elemental and systematic conditions and processes for how architecture might engage the earth and participate in the perceptual atmospheric conditions of the sky, the terms tectonics and stereotomy were introduced to broaden their knowledge of procedural and site-specific operative maneuvers as inspiration for architectural design. Understanding and interpreting the various writings of tectonics and stereotomics, as related to architectural design, provides early architectural design students a vocabulary and methodology to perceive the site as a malleable entity that is negotiable to accept and respond to additive elements of an architectural solution, throughout the design process.
This paper examines the introductory work of second-year architectural students, specifically related to an initial exploration of stereotomy and tectonic intermediations to realize potential space configurations among and beyond the site, and a subsequent project entitled Room and [bill]Board that asked the students to inherit and repurpose all elements of an existing billboard as an opportunity to transform an identifiable object into a series of specified and functional spaces. Each project probed the students to begin the design process by first perceiving the site as an active agent of design towards developing a series of enveloping spaces, and then propose vertical and horizontal supporting circulatory elements intended to be woven among the interior and exterior environment in response to the maneuvers exhibited through their proposed design operations. In this manner, students were persuaded to think volumetrically and encouraged to displace the earth, as needed, to support their design solution, as influenced by their interpretations of the provided readings of tectonics and stereotomy. Ultimately, students were prompted to reconsider their engrained mode of perceiving the environment and diminish their preconceived notions of architectural design, towards creating a site-specific architectural intervention.
Often, students are taught to sequentially operate within the design process by observing, recording, and then responding to it conditions with an architectural intervention. This procedure, while beneficial in teaching students to acknowledge and appreciate the contextual environment for their design, can be misguided as it emphasizes the site as a given, invariable constraint that is static and impermeable in nature. Architectural design involves a mediation of the designer’s intentions with the site. As such, students should be encouraged to consider architecture and the conditions of the site as malleable, accommodating bodies.
This paper will present a series of projects, introduced to students in their second-year of study, that encouraged students to break the sequence of observe, record, and respond to allow site and architecture to be responsively in dialogue with one another throughout the design process. At the outset of each project, students were asked to blur the demarcations of architecture and site, among the earth and beyond to the sky, towards discovering ways in which the architecture and its contextual surroundings might respect, respond, and support one another to cultivate a desired user experience. These exercises offered students an avenue to creatively and critically maneuver the design process while promoting collaborative thinking between architecture and its environment.
appearance of an architectural act, as opposed to placing value on how architecture performs, offers spatial organization, and engages the site and its users.
This paper challenges these aforementioned perceptions by introducing a pedagogical approach focused on investigating and embracing the performance of structural assemblies as an inspiration for architectural design within these supporting structural courses. A series of physical explorations were presented to students as an opportunity to expand upon their understanding of the lessons, simultaneously being covered in class, related to the behavior of forces and the capabilities of structural systems to transfer and withstand various loading scenarios. These hand-on exercises asked the students to design and fabricate physical models to be tested under various performance criteria and challenged the students to consider ways in which structural behaviors and architectural design might inform one another. The students were assessed on their ability to innovate, test, reconsider, and summarize their predictions and findings for how their designed systems behaved internally and responded to applied external influences. Along each of the phases for these projects, students were asked to embrace failure as an integral part of the iterative design phase, persuading students to primarily focus on designing performance-orientated solutions and concentrate on studying how the actions of constituent parts systematically contributed to the performance of its composite assembly.
beginner design students often start by analyzing the situational
features, topographic composition, and contextual forces of the
project’s site to generate conceptual parameters for their
design’s response. While this process encourages the students
to acknowledge, and appreciate, the context of a project, their
strategic design maneuvers are frequently bound as a reaction
to these existing conditions. In turn, the contextual site assumes
the risk of being viewed as a static, unwavering constraint with
limited capacity to be reimagined or reshaped to best
accommodate the desires of an architectural proposal.
To challenge this perception, architectural theorist Gevork
Hartoonian states “Architecture is relentlessly reformulating
itself according to formal and contextual factors.”1 Students
should be encouraged to extend the dialogue between
architecture and its situational context throughout the design
and development phases of a project and consider the site as
soft and malleable condition capable of influencing and
responding to the intervening architecture. This viewpoint
promotes beginner design students to view architecture and
the contextual site as co-dependent participants throughout the
iterative design process, centered on creating an experience for
the end-user that is site-specific.
To promote methodological processes to architectural design
and site intervention, the students explored the terms tectonic
and stereotomy, through the writings of various architectural
theorists. The lessons of these authors varied in message,
whether primarily concerned with the material capabilities of
each as a system,2 to descriptions focused on the act of creating
through additive and subtractive processes.3 Each student was
asked to formulate and apply his/her authentic interpretation of
these terms and as a means to define and extend spatial
configurations for architectural design that mediated its
engagement with a contextual site.
This paper presents a two design projects, respectively entitled
The Plinth and The Tower and Instigating Slab, that
were introduced to beginner architectural design students.
These theoretical exercises were aimed to promote the
students to question any preconceived notions of context and
site as an inflexible and assimilating condition, and instead
consider an approach to architectural design that accepts the
ground as an accommodating mass or negotiable plane. For
each project, students were asked to author and craft a scape
as a medium to apply their interpretations of tectonics and
stereotomy to integrate, and develop spaces among, within,
and beyond the earth’s compromising mass and atmospheric
conditions of a contextual site.
The terms stereotomic and tectonic have been defined and discussed by various authors, such as Gottfried Semper, Kenneth Frampton, Robin Evans, and Gevork Hartoonian. Exploring the writings of these authors reveals that these terms have variations in their descriptions towards methodological approaches to architectural design. Robin Evans, in The Projective Cast, defines stereotomy by its etymological derivation: the science of cutting solids. For Evans, stereotomy indicates a subtractive process, concerned with the carving of voids from a solid mass and the resultant surfaces generated to create and define space. Comparatively, Semper’s definition of stereotomy, in Style, is a classification of architecture related to the “earthwork, formed out of the repetitious stacking of heavy-weight units.” Semper’s definition suggests an additive process using a taxonomy of aggregated units as a means to extend the mass and strata material of the earth beyond the ground plane towards the architectural creation of a self-supporting structural element.
Tectonics is generally accepted as the art of construction, although explicit explanations also vary among the aforesaid authors in pertaining to this idiom as an approach to architectural design processes and applications. Frampton, in Studies in Tectonic Culture, addresses the tectonic as the lightweight frame related to the sky, characterized by its temporary condition, opposed to the permanence resulting from sterotomic processes of architecture more closely associated with the earth. By contrast, Hartoovian emphasizes that the art of construction influences our sensitivity to define space. In his book, The Ontology of Construction, Hartoonian focuses on the methods and approaches to creating and detailing structural aspects of architecture, as he beckons the importance of theatricality between the stereotomic and tectonic processes as stated, “It can be inferred that between the structural utility of architectonic elements and their analogical representation, there is a ‘void,’ so to speak, where the tectonic resides. This void molds architectural knowledge, that is the logos of making.”
In 2018, second-year architecture students researched, critiqued, and formulated informed interpretations of the terms tectonics and sterotomics. The intent of this paper is to present the work of these students, over a series of sequential projects, through the lens of their applied interpretations of tectonics and stereotomics. These terms served as a basis for a methodological approach to architectural design that commenced with the engagement and manipulation of the site’s surface and mass, through additive and subtractive processes, towards creating a new architectural expression.
As an exercise intended to encourage students to consider ways in which structural behaviors and architectural design can inform one another, students were challenged to fabricate a thirty-inch vertical structure using repetitive or modified patterns with specific material palette restrictions. The initial expectation given to the students for the project was that each design would be tested to support a minimum weight of seven pounds. The project was dually entitled “hollow column/stick tower” in an effort to persuade students to consider the project at a multitude of representative scales.
Upon testing the strength of the structures to meet the minimum loading requirements, the project was continued and the hollow column/stick tower was reconsidered as a new design problem for the students. Each project was placed beneath a robotic arm, which compressed the structures in incremental steps towards failure until the structural assembly was left in a damaged state. The projects were then returned to the students with a charge given to design and fabricate a prosthesis, using different materials, to once again make their project capable of supporting seven pounds. For this phase, students were required to leave their project in its current damaged state and not repair it back to its original configuration. Instead, each student was asked to address their prosthesis as a complimentary and critical element that responded to the vulnerabilities of their damaged structure, allowing the student’s original designs to have a second life as a structural assembly.
The intention of this paper is to explore the lessons and learning outcomes of a design project that persuasively introduced adaptation after failure, with evolving criteria based on the actions and discoveries of the previous phases within its duration. The robotic arm served as a device that allowed each structural assembly to generate a new form while exposing the vulnerabilities that led to failure. The prosthesis design and fabrication asked students to consider ways to extend the life of their designs in an adapted state and make their assemblies structurally capable again. It is the author’s belief that asking students to explore and exhaust potential responses to emergent criteria established in the phases after the initial testing can help teach beginning design students to be more adaptable in their approach to the design process, appreciate the lessons learned from failures, and question architecture as a finite entity.
associated with sequential space and city form. Mobile media technology in the form of analyzing music, learning the game of chess, mapping and providing information in field study, and surveying student reactions were employed. Structured methods of traditional representation and drawing assisted the construction of physical models and communicated aspects of space, time, and meaning for the student.
A translation of music into a limited vocabulary of points, lines, and planes
As part of their first semester of study in the field of environmental design, students were given a project that embraced a limited and elemental vocabulary of point, line, plane, and volume as a means to translate a piece of instrumental music into a spatially defined passageway within a confined framework. Students were asked to consider the elements as a sequential series of informed components as a means to capture a series of spaces that at times may constrict, swell, or shift in direction within the predefined framework. To minimize the occurrence of preconceived elements such as stairs, ceilings, and floors, the passageway was to be conceived as a gravity-free environment, thus promoting concepts of compression and release in place of ascent and descent.
The inclusion of music as a thematic inspiration for the project offered the students both a series of constraints and strategies as they began diagramming their initial interpretations of the given selection towards the physical embodiment of the music into defined spatial passage. Concepts such as rhythm, tempo, pitch, or transitions have a dependency on time, and therefore, suggest two initial approaches for the project – one that focuses on the creation of volumetric centers, or swells, along the passage and then develops the transitions between these centers, or an approach that embraces the development and manipulation of a spine that reacts to the various translated information and directly confronts, dictates, and affects the movement of the user through the defined path.
At the conclusion of the project, students are asked to consider how the changing of scale for their physical models might affect the meaning of how they use point, line, and plane to create a defined volume. The students are asked to shift the scale from the representative environmental condition of their design to that of 1:1. Criteria are then given to construct a collective threshold out of the series of projects that relates directly to that of the human scale, thus introducing a new associative meaning to the project as they work collectively to define and capture space using the original elemental vocabulary of point, line, plane, and volume.
A translation of precedents into the typologies of a chess set
The game of chess is one of the most recognizable products of civilization. The Chicago skyline, as a home to many distinctive high-rise buildings, is an intersection of design and planning across multiple scales and epochs. Students were challenged to examine how the pieces, the game board, and the rules associated with chess could potentially embody the variety of designers and planners who shaped Chicago and the trajectory of environmental design across approximately a 150-year period. Students could then recognize the city skyline as a design project that evolves over a period of time. The meaning of these individual expressions then can be read as part of the meaning of a collective whole, and a city’s overall visual and physical identity.
Students were introduced to a brief history of chess sets, ranging from archaeological findings dating from 12th century Scotland, through to the 19th century legacy of British writer Howard Staunton, who endorsed the general design of the sets we often see today. Students were assigned a literature and image review of six personalities that practiced in Chicago to influence the design for six piece typologies found in a standard chess set. Students chose at random six names from a list of 50 people associated with Chicago architecture, landscape architecture, urban planning, or public art. A mobile app was also developed prior to a four-day field trip to the city, giving students a geographic and digital reference to many of the sites and personalities who shaped Chicago architecture and planning.
Given Chicago’s noted heritage and tradition of tall buildings, students were asked to consider the potential role of tripartite division of form. As conveniently observed, the traditional Staunton chess sets possess similar divisions, becoming a vehicle for visual discovery.
During the literature / image review, students were asked to sketch a comfort pallet of details, forms, concept sketches, geometries, and pictorial interpretations from the work of the six assigned inspirations, and from examples experienced in Chicago. Students created sketches using digital tablets or sketchbooks.
Students then constructed a set of chess pieces, using materials of their own choosing, and were challenged to document the construction process, whether using an additive, subtractive or hybrid method of craft. An emphasis on procedural design process was communicated here, as well as the notion of the ergonomic / look and feel of the pieces, and whether their interpretations were still able to function in game play. Students were also asked to consider the assigned “move” behavior of each piece. Such challenges, interpretations, and learning opportunities seasoned and imbued the students’ design thinking and process throughout. A group-wide chess game day was held to test the effectiveness of the sets and game boards.
As a final step, students made two sets of drawings. One set became the procedural story of one chess piece in isometric view, as depicted in four to six steps. Such a set of drawings was intended to show how the piece was made. A second drawing challenged students to think of their chess pieces as a collective city skyline in frontal elevation projection, imagining the chess pieces in the scale of city buildings. Both drawings were rendered using a paper cut out method, placed behind a translucent sheet of vellum that contained the line art. Discussions of how these two layers and methods of representation stimulated discussion.
Conclusion
It is hoped that the exploration of music and gaming in these two design projects shall serve as an effective vehicle of communication between notions of space, time, and meaning as embodied in two forms of art and culture that can stimulate a student’s imagination and design
thinking. The authors are confident the exploration across scales, metaphors, narratives and forms found in the contemporary city and in architectural space can create rich inquiry in the mind of the beginning design student and form a foundation for continued dialogue between experience and representation.
Full-scale design exercises offer the opportunity for students to reconsider how a conceptual message might be translated through the holistic composition of elements and their tectonic relationships within the design.
Aggregation implies the repeated use of a singular, or adapted unit as an assemblage of internal entities that inform the overall object. Emphasis on aggregation techniques in the initial design stages of a 1:1 full-scale project allows students to pause and refocus their attention on a singular, repetitive, and adapted unit, disengaging their fixation on initial overall form generation. Using this strategy, the overall form of the design ultimately is informed through the use of the aggregate units, their proximity, interactions, and implied behaviors relative to an overarching concept.
This paper investigates how the student work of two separate 1:1 full-scale fabricated projects specifically utilize concepts of aggregation as a fundamental strategy to achieve the intended, embedded messages with a design. In each case study, the overall form of the final design is emergent as students focus on an inward-out strategy as opposed to an outward-in design methodology. The external form is therefore informed by the configuration of the aggregated units and how the aggregates shape each other towards a discovery, interpretation, and translation of an experience by the end user.