The Architectural Project

CHAPTER 8 Changes in Design Method: The Future in the Present

164 The Architectural Project CHAPTER 8 Changes in Design Method The Future in the Present This book can only suggest the scope and the consequences that a new revolution in architectural representation might have: this revolution results from the introduction of computer-aided drawing. A revolution in representation must necessarily produce a revolution in architecture: this is the thesis I have defended since .1 Design is not simply a technique; it is a culture. To design, one must get inside this culture. One must belong to this culture as well as mastering its practice. We are today experiencing an explosion of new techniques that will completely transform the practice of design. We must not imagine, however, that a new technique can substitute entirely for the set of operations that existed before the new way of doing things made its appearance. A design revolution is not like a scientific revolution , which supposedly reduces the former theory to the status of superstition , as has been pointed out by Thomas Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.2 In design, each new technique is grafted upon the trunk of the existing design culture. What I call design culture and architecture cannot be clearly distinguished or separated. I will not insist that both were born in the Renaissance , but I am willing to suggest that they were reborn together at that time—which implies that today’s architect is the heir to a kind of professional personality; that personality was created in the century framed by the lives of Alberti and Palladio.As Cristoph Luitpold Frommel observes: “In spite of all stylistic and technical changes, this continuity in design methods links the architecture of our century with that of the Renaissance , civil and sacred architecture; it is a tradition that has never really been interrupted.”3 The continuity to which Frommel refers resides in the representation of the project, and it began long before Monge gave precision to descriptive geometry.4 This continuity existed before the design method evolved into the two phases we now believe to be the“natural way to design”: first to determine a parti and later to develop it. This was to be a product of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and its eighteenth-century precedents. 165 Changes in Design Method Teaching and Practice Do we already have the products of a revolution in architectural representation , produced this time by the introduction of the computer? In any part of a culture we choose to examine, we will have difficulties in finding the exact date of a revolution. A new revolution in representation is taking place. We can point to some features of this transformation . It had its origins in architects’ offices before entering the design studios of the schools of architecture. Computers generate changes in the“project factory”of the architectural office before any mutation takes place in the“design laboratory”of the schools.But these changes,though produced by the same equipment and software,are quite different in those two environments.For the office environment, computers allow the architects and engineers to replicate “the same”—known spaces, proven materials, and details—only faster and with greater efficiency. For schools, computers open the way to new shapes, spaces never seen before, and they even provide the means to skirt ignorance of descriptive geometry. The studio environment is also changing, as I have hinted in chapter . We should acknowledge that unlike the art of perspective in the time of Brunelleschi and Alberti or the complete design projections from the workshop of Raphael, computer graphics were not generated in the environment of architecture; nor did practitioners demand them. In the Renaissance, the new media gave birth to the modern architect; a mutation was produced, architects as we know them were born, and the medieval architect receded into history.5 When computer graphics were introduced in the last decades of the twentieth century, modern architects already existed. Established architects today have to confront this new tool, or technique , perhaps in the same manner as their predecessors had to assimilate new construction techniques in the nineteenth century.At that time, it is worth remembering, architects employed new materials and structures in order to produce more efficiently; under the spur of critics like Fergusson and Viollet-le-Duc, they became anxious to find a style appropriate to the new materials and techniques. And this was also envisaged as an imitation of sorts; for Viollet-le-Duc it was performing like a talented Gothic master. Computer...