Toward a Theory of Architecture Machines

Abstract

The fall 2009 option design studio at MIT—Ferry Slip Mashup—was the site of a pedagogical experiment in engaging the vast historical archive of disciplinary knowledge for the purposes of designing a ferry terminal on the Maine State Pier in Portland, Maine. While the first premise of the studio was that we needed to relearn how to think historically, its second premise was that we had to find an appropriately contemporary way to do that. And if the first premise pointed us to engaging the issue of precedent head on, the second ensured for our precedents the status of entries in a vast archive of architectural knowledge.     

Compassionism and the Design Studio in the Aftermath of 9/11

Abstract

The events of 9/11 are dramatically reshaping society. The terrorist attacks in New York City and in Washington, DC, have been extensively examined in the media and addressed in the work of professionals and academicians across a broad spectrum of disciplines. The profession and discipline of architecture is reassessing its position in relation to these events. Architectural education, and the functions of the design studio in particular, are similarly subject to this process of reappraisal. A case study is presented of a studio project on the topic of transportable medical facilities for disaster mitigation. This work is discussed against a backdrop of societal constructs concerning the functions of compassionism in architecture in the aftermath of 9/11. The case study is but one example of the potential of the studio to emerge as a rapid-response vehicle to foster in the student a genuine attitude of social and civic engagement.     

47 frames a Collaborative Production between a Second-Year Studio at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte and the Cypher Collective of New York City

Abstract

An interactive collaboration with two actors and a visual artist, this design studio investigated the generation of form and space through the study of theater and performance art. The project asked specifically how an architectural perception might be enriched and informed by the theatrical process, and vice versa. The resultant built works and performances were tangible explorations of design in an arena of complex and often shifting variables.     

Open Sourcery

Abstract

The reappropriation of abandoned technology is a long-standing practice with a deep history. This is particularly the case when deprived cultures overlap with privileged. Often associated with the underside of emergent technologies, hacker or maker culture provides us with an alternative approach to engaging technology. This article discusses the potential of implementing hacking as a way of making architecture and poetic program. The Dedale studio at the University of Manitoba investigates the civic and architectural implications of discarded technology in the Point Douglas neighborhood in Winnipeg, Manitoba.     

Craft and Innovation

Abstract

This paper looks at a way of studio teaching that emphasizes direct experience with real materials. It argues that innovation takes place when a student “plays” with real materials and adopts a critical attitude toward craft. Recent studios demonstrate a way of working that discovers forms, strategies, and techniques unlike those discovered by a student when working to scale in drawing or model. An essential aspect of this teaching is the emphasis revealing to the student the critical thinking inherent in the activity of making.     

Translation and Materiality: The Space of Invention between Designing and Building

Abstract

The “Ethereal Theatre” is a portable theater designed and built by Temple University students for the Philadelphia Fringe Festival's annual summer celebration of dance, theater, and performance art. The studio challenged conventional modes of designing/building by questioning the projective relationship between drawing and building. Within a six-week time frame, students designed through the entire drawing/building process, constructing a continuous space of invention as they went. Conceptually as well as physically, the theater became an exquisite corpse (of constructions).     

Why the Orders Belong in Studio

Abstract

The Orders, the long-time emblematic centerpiece of architectural education, were banished from studio in the United States a half-century ago. They were exiled to the curriculum's sparse offerings in history when the Bauhaus system of education in architecture displaced the Beaux Arts system. The Orders stand for an entire system of design based on recognizable building components, proportionality, and coherence. Their presence would improve the formal qualities of designs across the entire spectrum from buildings addressing the increased interest in traditional qualities in buildings to those pushing forward the legacy of Modernism's founders, men who themselves knew the Orders well.     

Know the Client

Abstract

The house as a container for our personal possessions is a type of architecture that we encounter on a daily basis. The possessions change over time reflecting our personal changes, yet the house often remains a static icon in its location and in our memory. It is within the house that we first understand the act of dwelling through public and private areas, along with an architectural scale that gives us a gauge by which we encounter all other architecture. An investigation into the nostalgic conception of house is the focus for an Advanced Design studio at The University of Texas at Austin titled House Lab where the typical bungalow is explored.     

Letter to the Editor

Abstract

This article describes a decade-long research project that intersects the practices of architecture, engineering, teaching, surrealist methods of collage, and construction technology. Two specific examples illustrate the approach to design/research pursued in this work. The first is a studio teaching environment/method that uses analogue construction materials and processes to discover architectural forms and ideas. The second is a method of forming reinforced concrete structures in flexible fabric membranes that has extraordinary potential for both architectural design and civil engineering. The latter is a technical research practice that is indistinguishable from design speculation, while the former pursues methods of teaching design that are indistinguishable from technical invention.     

Conference Reviews

Abstract

The desire to teach in a way that acknowledges our position in the world as global citizens faces several challenges, many of which are global in nature. We identify three of these. First, there is the split between “modern” and “traditional” that can be found in a wide range of institutional and historical practices the world over. Second, there is the problem of language which has embedded within it certain historical presumptions. Third, there is the hesitancy in studio teaching to address issues that allow students to see themselves as actors in global history. What we advocate is a global critique of anti-global practices.     

The Goals of Professional Training

Abstract

Skins &; Screens, the graduate-level elective studio offered at the University of Pennsylvania, posits the building surface as a dynamic condition, simultaneously real and illusory, opaque and evanescent. Termed sheer opacity, this quality of enclosure provides an investigative focus for the consideration of surface as a dynamic perceptual field, a site for the mediation of physical and perceptual phenomena. Close analysis of selected work of the West Coast art movement Light and Space and that of contemporary installation artists inspired projects that used sheer opacity to examine the possibility of transforming space through the design of the building surface. Projects were developed through a series of “layers” in which students made installations, material constructs, digital simulations, and large-scale detail studies of their proposals.     

Continuity,Criticality, and Change

Abstract

This article reconsiders a joint seminar and studio that studied how an expanded vision of site and culture influences architectural production. The Barnes Foundation controversy provided a vehicle for this study. The Barnes is a private, world-renowned collection of art situated in an unlikely suburban Philadelphia neighborhood. Arguing that its current home was untenable, in 2002 the foundation announced plans to relocate—a move that runs counter to its founding charter, which bars any change to the collection, its content, or its location. Against a background of continued public protest and legal appeals, the Barnes decision prompts myriad vexing questions that are valuable for consideration in architectural education. Chief among these: is replication a valid, meaningful, or sufficient way to preserve cultural value, and if so, how?     

Op Arch

Abstract

JAE's White Issue is long overdue. The notion that architectural experimentation requires a rigorous feedback between design and research has been at play in design pedagogy since at least the 1960s and 1970s, which included the seminal research studio by Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas ¹; the rise of operations research and systems engineering; the urban networks research of Shadrach Woods, the Smithsons, Constantinos Doxiadis, or Kenzo Tange; and the structure and materials research of Buckminster Fuller, Frei Otto, and Robert Le Ricolais, to name but a few. Concerns about the deterministic instrumentalism of systems thinking led to a new wave of humanism and composition, seen especially in the postmodernist uses of both historical examples and junkspace vernaculars as a Disneyesque brand image. The work of Venturi and Scott Brown, ironically, was to lead the way on the heels of the “duck vs. decorated shed” conclusions of Learning from Las Vegas.² Unlike most postmodernists, however, Venturi and Scott Brown did not abandon research, and their understanding of the relationships between pop culture, branding, and marketing techniques remains sophisticated and timely.     

Architecture in American Society

Abstract

The Small Built Works Project is an experimental design-build program that uses the city as its laboratory. Work is primarily initiated by a senior undergraduate option studio offered in the Spring then augmented by a construction techniques elective open to both graduate and undergraduate students. Small Built Works has completed twenty-seven streetscape projects in Buffalo's urban core since 2001 under the management construct of six conceptual projects that have generated four approved building permits. These six projects are the Community Transformation Project (2001–2004), the Bus Shelter Project (2002–2005), the Gateway Project (Kiosk and Planter 2003–2005), the Totem Project (Mardi Gras float and the Connecticut Street Sculpture Park 2004–2006), the El Museo Gallery (2005–2006), and the Greening Collaborative Project (2006). In 2005, the Small Built Works Project won the National Council of Architecture Registration Boards Grand Prize for the creative integration of education and practice. This presentation is broken down into three aspects of the concept of 1:1 inherent in the work.     

Making spirits,making art,Nat carving and contemporary painting in pre-transition Myanmar (Burma)

ABSTRACT

Embodiment, materiality, and technology intersect in the production of sacred images where tools, media, and intangible studio protocols inform the production of efficacious things. In Myanmar nat spirits appear in the bodies of costumed spirit mediums and in the intimately tended statues that adorn their altars. Prior to the recent democratic transition, nats appeared as the subjects of paintings, sometimes offering sociopolitical commentaries. This article explores the resonances between technologies of nat making in workshops that produce images for mediums and the techniques deployed by contemporary artists who have made nats the subjects of their paintings. In the Burmese religious world view, nats are lesser entities than the Buddha; their troubled histories of injustice account for their continuing agency as spirits in the human world. Appropriately, nat images are cruder than Buddha images; carvers are less likely to use precious wood or to observe Buddhist precepts and aesthetic guidelines while carving. A similar sense of the unrefined, unsettled nat is conveyed through the daring representational techniques and liberties of artists. We argue that connections between media, technique, and object agency can have resonance when sacred subjects are deployed in secular art.     

Architecture as Conciliator: Toward a Unifying Principle in Architectural Education

We believe that architecture has lost its role as conciliator between humanity and the universe, it has lost much of its meaning. We use an example of a studio problem and process to explore issues in architecture, science, and meaning as they relate to architectural education. The confrontation of this problem in architectural education should involve the infusion of scientific thought and theoretical issues into the design studio, as well as other courses, to aid students in formulating their own world view in order to create an architecture of meaning. A seven-week design studio offered to second-year students included reading Stephen W. Hawking's A Brief History of Time and analyzing the spatial theories outlined in the book. This research informed site analysis as well as the architectural and landscape design.     

A proposal for alternative methods for teaching digital design

Computers have the potential to radically change the process of architectural design, and match more closely the formal aspirations of contemporary designers. What, then, should be the direction educators take in response to the opportunities created by the use of computers in the design process? There are, perhaps, two obvious methods of teaching Digital Design at a university level; a course adjunct to a design studio, or a course offered independently of a design studio.The computer is a facilitator of design ideas, but by itself, is not a creator of content. The primary responsibility of the design studio is the creation of content. It is the implementation of theory and critical analysis which should be the core concern of studio instruction. Given the limited time students are exposed to design studio it would seem appropriate, then, that the digital tools, which facilitate the design process, be taught separately, so as not to dilute the design studios importance. Likewise, this separation should allow the student to concentrate attention on Digital Design as a comprehensive process, beginning with initial massing studies and ending with high resolution presentation drawings. The burden of learning this new process is difficult as well as time consuming. Students are generally struggling to learn how to design, much less to design on the computer. In addition, the current lack of digital skills on the part of design faculty makes it difficult to create a level of consistency in teaching digital design. Compounding these problems is the cost to architectural departments of providing hardware and software resources sufficient to have a computer on every studio desk.Une proposition de méthodologies alternatives pour l’enseignement du design digitalDepuis des siècles les architectes ont utilisé le plan et l’élévation comme outils primaires lors de conception. La nature abstraite et deux-dimensionelle fait partie intégrale de l’usage de ces outils, mais les architectes, par définition, participent à la construction d’une forme trois-dimensionnelle. L’architecture moderne au début du vingtième siècle est devenue de plus en plus trois-dimensionnelle de nature. Nous nous trouvons maintenant dans une position ou les outils de création de conviennent plus aux méthodes de conception.L’ordinateur facilite le processus de conception, mais en soi ne crée pas le contenu des idées. La responsabilité première du studio de design est la création de ce contenu. L’implantation de la théorie et de l’analyse critique devraient être le focus de l’instruction en studio. Étant donné le temps limité durant lequel les étudiants se trouvent en studio de design, il serait alors bon que les méthodes digitales servant à faciliter le processus de conception soient enseignées séparément, pour ne pas diluer l’importance du studio de design. De même, cette séparation permettrait à l’étudiant de se concentrer sur les méthodes électroniques de conception en tant que processus compréhensif, débutant avec études de masse, et terminant avec des dessins de présentation à haute résolution. Cette apprentissage est une tâche longue et difficile. Les étudiants ont généralement assez à apprendre le design, sans parler du design sur ordinateur. De plus, la présente manque de connaissances sur les méthodes de conception par ordinateur de la part des professeurs, fait qu’il est difficile d’atteindre un niveau consistent lors de l’enseignement du design digital. A ces problèmes s’ajoute le coût pour les départements d’architecture de fournir des ressources suffisantes à l’emplacement d’un ordinateur sur chaque bureau du studio.     

Studio on Site

为了能够创造出一种“用地—场所”可亲密接触的空间类型,以此为宗旨的“studio on site”设计事务所应运而生。“studio on site”原本也含有在建设现场设计监理事务所之意。