Notation and The Architectural event

CAAD Instruction: The New Teaching of an Architect, 1992

School of Architecture 43-6 Bedford Square London WC1B 3ES UK DIFFERENTIATIONS I should like to differentiate three ways in which computers can be applied (used) in any field-although, in this case, I shall speak of architecture as the universal exemplar: that is, three approaches. I should also like to differentiate two attitudes to what computing is.

Although the user interface and operation of AutoCAD may seem counter to architectural predilections, the software can be better understood in a historical context of themes of computational design, automated production drawings, and design graphics. Current interest in Building Information Modeling draws upon themes in architectural computing established 40 years ago and expressed in AutoCAD throughout its 25 year history.

Design and Culture, 2016

Facing increased calls for “practical skills,” the arts and humanities are under immense pressure to demonstrate their value to a public that demands measurable metrics. As a response, graphic design has adopted the language of “research” as a way to engage with tangible benefits. Research, in turn, has emphasized applied learning and the field of engineering has been suggested by some as a possible model for graphic design education. This paper instead proposes architecture as a more aligned disciplinary model for education, practice, and research. During the late 1960s and early 1970s, architecture faced a crisis very similar to the one affecting graphic design today. But rather than relinquish disciplinary control to the positivist scientism of behavioral science, operational research, and design methods as they asserted control over the codes of architectural practice, a number of architects and educators sought architecture’s autonomy, an inward reflection on the methods, techniques, and questions that were restricted to how architecture sees itself. Architecture’s inward turn, or “criticism from within,” was ultimately responsible for its return to cultural significance. Funded in part by a grant from the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC).

This paper reviews architectural CAD in terms of its current use, development and status within the U.S. The characteristics of a new generation of architectural CAD system, called building modeling, are outlined. Criteria are developed for the evaluation of CAD systems that support building modeling. Some of the opportunities for universities growing out of building modeling are reviewed, including pedagogical implications and opportunities for research. 1. THE CURRENT CAPABILITIES OF COMPUTER-AIDED DESIGN AND DRAFTING By the mid-1970s, the first generation of CAD systems had evolved into powerful drafting editors, supporting the layout of a range of graphic primitives, their composition into symbols, cells and layers, and the management of graphic information using the electronic equivalent of pin-registered overlay drafting. The object to represent within CAD systems were drawings; that is, the units of composition were lines and text. Application languages were later added, allowing procedural definition of common compositions. Initially, procedural capabilities were directed toward complex drawing entities, such as dimensions and crosshatching. Later, they were used to deal with non-graphic information such as bills of material and with rule checking. Reports and schedules could be extracted from the non-graphic data associated with a drawing. Tests could be applied to the data. Architectural applications were developed that included wall editors that merged adjacent wall segments and allowed insertion of doors and windows. Because of the continued emphasis on the 9

Combining aspects of engineering with traditions of studio art we investigate an interface between both worlds: using a substantial acumulation of electrodigital refuse, taken as a .raw expressive medium., an elective course ( TAP: .taller de arte y programacion. . Studio of art and programing. ) takes a large mixed group of students ( engineering, art, architecture, music, etc..) with very different levels of skills, for a sustained immersion into an exploration context. Eliminating in a large measure the problem of .costs. by using obsolete, discarded computer parts, students manipulate, observe, deconstruct, reconstruct functional hardware and use programming to produce an expressive documentation of the process. The objective is not to work on .products. but on the production of .symbolic value. by uncovering and staging the fundamentals of electro-digital-computational knowledge into a form of .theater of technology..

The paper presents a speculative account on the role of software in architecture, and posits the questions of software medium specificity as crucial for understanding of the role that new, software based modes of drawing have for design. The notions of Volumetric Diagram, the Gaze and the Grid are introduced as framing concepts for understanding software specificity. Ultimately, a question of possible new design subjectivity as engendered by software is examined, and compared to historically determined subjectivities enabled by orthographic or perspectival projection systems.

The MIT Press Reader, 2022

In the decades after World War II, new forms of learning transformed architectural education. These radical experiments — explored in the new volume “Radical Pedagogies” — sought to upend disciplinary foundations and conventional assumptions about the nature of architecture as much as they challenged modernist and colonial norms, decentered building, imagined new roles for the architect, and envisioned participatory forms of practice. Although many of the experimental programs were subsequently abandoned, terminated, or assimilated, they nevertheless helped shape and in some sense define architectural discourse and practice. In the excerpt from “Radical Pedagogies” that follows, architectural historian Evangelos Kotsioris looks at Harvard’s now-defunct Laboratory for Computer Graphics (and Spatial Analysis), one of the most historically significant experiments in computing.

2002

Although technological changes have arrived within the architectural profession at a slower pace than other fields, the recent use of 3D modelling and multimedia applications portrays significant changes that are occurring currently in the field of architectural visualisation and design representation. Architects and designers have begun to experiment very recently with the digital media that reaches beyond the purpose of mere presentation or documentation in Auto CAD. Compared to the invention of still photography and its elaboration into the motion picture, architectural drawing formats and conventions have lagged behind. Before the advent of electronic technology, there were no new drawing types since the invention of perspective theory in the Fifteenth Century. The theory of axonometric drawing or parallel projection, another convention of three-dimensional drawing, also dates back to the time period of the Italian Renaissance. If a new approach could be achieved that would brin...

Online Education: Teaching in a Time of Change Conference 21-23 April Amps Proceedings, 2021

This paper takes on a long been used design education approach, learning from the precedents, to tackle the earlier uncertainty of Covid19 lockdowns. Architecture Making Trivia is a four-session online workshop with first-year design students. It was when the lockdown measures were just introduced, universities closed doors and most of the students went back to their family homes. This was a limbo moment for our design studio. The Faculty asked us to refrain from any sort of design-related activities. And the resume date was unsettled. Picture John Hejduk’s Wall House on your mind and re-imagine it with these features; slightly off proportioned, colours somehow matching, one room has letters from a famous cologne brand and another room has a telephone number printed on. Or, remember Terunobi Fujimori’s Takasugi-An, raised fairly above wooden pillars, now re-imagine it with a folded, bent Birkenstock box on uneven wooden brushes. Or Steven Holl and Vito Acconci’s Storefront with a magenta pink potato sack bursting out from the rotating surfaces towards the front street. In Architecture Making Trivia, the brief was to find drawing sets of a project from the list of architectures and make models. The workshop was not about making the exact model, but to follow their interest in these projects and reflect it to the making. The only rule was to model by reclaiming the materials of commonly used things during the lockdown. In the first two sessions, we have talked about the projects in general and their plans for model making. In the third session, I introduced a reading set for each project and asked students to think of their projects through their context. The aim was for them to develop a critical approach to the project rather than referring to the projects with generic information. There were twenty-three voluntary students and thirteen projects. Initially, this workshop aimed to keep the students engaged with the design studio during all the turmoil. The unexpected twist of the process was about the lockdown materials. This approach glitched the realm of the precedents with the new-normal everyday and added another narrative. In the last session, I asked them to write the story of each material they have used. Then, the precedents became mementoes of their lockdown days. This was the very reason that students thought of these projects as their own. The solid gap between these architectures and the first-year design students crumpled. Using the precedents as a conversation starter (or here as the means of making) elevated the variety of architectural design explorations. In this paper, I aim to rethink learning from the precedents as an anchor to explore the probabilities of an online first-year design studio, and, Architecture Making Trivia is the research of this attempt.

2001

Descriptive geometry and mathematics have had a progressively diminishing presence in architecture and related spatial design education since the late nineteenth century. Despite recent advances in automated manufacturing, virtual prototyping, and a more fluid ability in three-dimensional form making and spatial manipulation in disciplines such as mechanical engineering and product design amongst others, Cartesian measurement is still the principal descriptive approach for constructing buildings. Without delving into the historical reasons for this separation, or the implications of the haptic intuitive processes facilitated by proprietary software in this post-digital era, the central question posed here is whether the introduction of simple computer programming with a tangible link to figurative space is a way to reintroduce mathematics as a basis for spatial description. How can this process extend the understanding of topology, Cartesian space and morphology? This paper describe...