THE CYCLE OF THEORY AND PRACTICE, LEARNING AND TEACHING

DIGITALIZATION AND GLOBALIZATION

Since the architectural practice has transformed rapidly and profoundly due to digitalization and globalization, architectural teaching has necessarily changed too. In the offices the drawing tables have gone out, the staff has become international; in the universities and academies the same shift has occurred. The architectural project has changed; most often it now consists of a multi-functional hybrid of urbanism, infrastructure and various public and private programs, and this is what we teach. Architects have become hyper-conscious of the economic ramifications of their work: rising ground values, commercial potential, investment values, these are phenomena that were meaningless and unfathomable until the client, in collusion with the economic news media, enforced a new awareness of their importance. In response, architects have earnestly begun to try to incorporate economic principles in their design approach. Students, never having known a world without the pervasive echo of the media, have been quick to respond.

THE PARAMETRIC AND FANTASY

Preparing students for the new architectural practice has entailed a heavy emphasis on the instruction in computational design methods, which, despite the differences in approaches, techniques, programs and applications used, are increasingly gathered under the umbrella label of parametric design, referring to the practice of describing the various elements of architectural design as sets of parameters, which are expressed as numeric and geometric relationships. The problem with parametric design, however, is that it requires rigorous pre-planning. Themes must be collected, parameters selected and somehow you must device some kind of tool that enables you to edit your own design as you go along. This is not yet taught to students, just as it is not practiced widely.
Six years ago in MOVE we wrote, “Architectural constructions that were pure fantasy a few years ago can now be built thanks to new design and construction techniques”; yet now we question if the cross fertilization of a particular fantasy with computational design and construction techniques has really been that successful. The extreme focus on acquiring and perfecting design techniques has not been complemented by an equal development of the fantasy, the ideal image of what the product of those techniques would be and would do. On the contrary, we seem to have arrived at a point where the fantasy, the goal, has become repetitive, and thus the technique, the medium, is becoming a pointless ritual. A small industry linked to conferences, exhibitions, and lost competition entries offers desultory attempts to continue to present parametric design exciting, dynamic, and avant-garde even, but its obscuring rhetoric cannot conceal its real, stagnant state.
Digital design labs all over the world spew out an interminable stream of inchoate compositions in the form of hectically curvy spaghetti, impenetrable blobs, and, as a last resort, the dune-like shapes that result from morphing blobs into spaghetti. It makes no difference if the topic of the parametric design study is a museum, a school, a railway station, or a rich person’s house; it makes no difference if it is supposed to be situated on a beach, in a city, or in a post-industrial periphery. Spaghetti is always on the menu.

THE PITFALLS OF DESIGN

This is the Beaux Arts all over again: architecture has become restrictively academic once more. But how could this have happened?  There is nothing intrinsically sterile to this technique. The only reason for the lack of evolution of computational design techniques is that they are taught and exercised in a hermetic way that is impossible to sustain in the actual practice of architecture, which is profoundly complex. It simply is not possible to foresee and to register in your computer all the real parameters that you will be working with as you engage in the long process of architecture as a practice that begins with an early vision, not necessarily that of the architect, and ends with a ruin in progress.
The conclusion? There is nothing like teaching to open your eyes to the pitfalls of design. Seeing twenty to thirty projects unfold similarly and ineffectually every few months must be one of the most efficient forms of early warning system. It tells you that no further time must be wasted. Architects had better learn to apply more intelligence, more planning, and more strategic planning to design!