Other Perspectives: Extending the Architectural Representation

This paper discusses how the tension between arts and science inherent in the discipline of architecture, can be traced in architectural representations, which are not neutral but actively contribute to the design process, ranging from highly poetic, subjective, and artistic to more exact and objective. Within this paper, we reflect on how to overcome this restrictive perspective implicit in conventional design media by comparing two elective courses that aim to broaden the traditional architectural perspective. In doing so, we take a position in the broader debate on the role of artistic practices within an academic learning environment

Fabricating Material Intensities: Designing and Making Mediated by Computation

In practices of design and architecture, making and materiality are increasingly mediated by computation. Through advances in digital fabrication, computation is extending beyond the confines of the computer and manifesting itself in material artefacts. At the same time computational models have become more informed about material world, and incorporate material behaviours, fabrication constraints and anticipate making. This convergence of material and computational worlds provides designers and architects with possibilities to explore making and materiality at a resolution and precision unseen before. Digital fabrication technology however is not a transparent or neutral means of going from design intent to material artefact, how information is encoded into files for fabrication, the working of the machines and the material it works with all influence the materiality of the fabricated artefact. In my creative practice, actively engaging materials through making models, prototypes and drawings plays an important role. Prompted by the convergence outlined above, I have extended my practice into coding my own design software as a principal means of exploring making and materiality through digital fabrication. While computational models used in digital fabrication generally describe only extensive qualities of material artefacts, this case explores the added value of colour in additive fabrication as an intensive material property. It looks at this specific fabrication technology not as means of realising already completed design ideas, but as trigger for design ideas, where visible traces of how information was encoded in files, the processes of fabrication, material properties are explored as material qualities.no issnstatus: publishe

Teaching Physical and Digital Modelling in Architecture

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Projective Modelling: Shifting Media Spaces

Architecture is a mediated activity: while designing architects don’t construct buildings, they represent design ideas through other means – sketching, drawing, drafting,writing, modelling... The media designers use are not just neutral tools for expressing design ideas, they have a logic of their own. Some ideas are represented easily in a certain medium while others find resistance. Mediation acknowledges this idea of the guilty medium: media extend possibilities of a designer but also influence the design outcome. The nature and degree of mediation depends on the medium and the skill the designer has in mastering it, but no design is mediation free. In the complex process of constructing a building, representations are used as a way to communicate architectural ideas to other stakeholders: contractors, clients, engineers, officials... But architectural representations are not limited to communicating ideas after the design has been formulated, they play a vital role in the design process itself. They form a way for a designer - or a group of designers - to communicate with themselves. This process is not linear: ideas don’t start as a pure thought, are then represented and finally build. A design process can be seen as a iterative cycle of representation, interpretation and reflection; a conversation between designer and designed.status: publishe

Hacking Agency: Digital Fabrication as Design Medium

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From Lab to Field: Extending the Architectural Design Studio to Integrate Emerging Technologies

The architectural design studio, as a place for educating future practitioners, is faced with two necessary dissociations: the distance from practice and its futurity. While the responses in architectural education have been varied, the question of how to integrate emerging technologies seems to further sharpen these dissociations. This paper discusses the lab and field, two learning environments set up as extensions of the design studio aiming to question the impact of emerging technologies on architecture. These extensions are particular ways of responding to the dissociations between the design studio and practice and its futurity: through hands-on experimentation with emerging technologies and questioning their relevance for architectural practice and culture, by exploring the impact of technologies on the environments in which we operate as architects, deliberately looking for places and sites where emerging technologies manifest themselves with a particular urgency. The argument builds on a number of design studios, workshops and elective courses, and describes the shift from lab to field in terms of subject matter, spatial setting and pedagogical approach.edition: http://www.acsa-arch.org/programs-events/conferences/teachers-seminar/2019-teachers-conferencestatus: Published onlin

Substantiating Lines: Threads, Folds & Traces

designing and making, between idea and materialization, a role that since the emergence of the profession has been fulfilled by architectural drawings. This paper reflects on the role of drawing in architectural practice mediated through digital fabrication, and its impact on the allocation of authorship. Based on three design explorations from architectural practice and teaching, using computation and digital fabrication, the paper looks into different types of lines emerging from those processes: threads, traces & folds. This tentative, not exhaustive, categorization of lines is based on their agency in the translation between design idea and material artifact. The paper proposes substantiating lines as a way of researching processes mediated through computation and digital fabrication. This approach is situated them within the lineage of architectural exploration of the gap between drawing and making, instead of approaching digital fabrication as closure, where digital models provide complete determinacy of the material artifact.status: Published onlin

Digital Bricolage: New Media and Architecture

Emerging technologies and digital media are having a profound impact on architectural practice: not only on the tools for designing and representing architecture, but also on the field in which architectural design takes place. The digital media are altering the way we perceive, inhabit, build and interact with space. Architecture, traditionally qualified as static, heavy and durable, seems to be having a hard time adapting to this rapidly changing digital medium and visual culture. Architects can learn and expand the architectural toolbox by looking at other artistic disciplines that are dealing with these emerging technologies, especially those that add a time dimension such as performance and interaction. This paper explores performative architecture. This is an approach to architecture that incorporates new media in the design process, within the content and context of the design itself. It is an approach that is fluid, that interactively negotiates with its users, and that consciously questions the tools we use to design and the role that we play as designers. Furthermore I want to look at the impact of these developments on the teaching of digital media within the architectural curriculum, stressing the importance of experiment, bricolage, the notion of play and the ability to be surprised by the tools we use in dealing with this digital medium. I will investigate the possibility of setting up a workshop/elective/lab that enables students to experiment with new media in a proto-architectural context.status: publishe

Allographic Drawing: Agency of Coding in Architectural Design

Allographic Drawing explores the agency of coding in architectural design processes and its impact on architectural drawing and the allocation of authorship. The paper uses drawing as a lens to look at coding in architectural practice and argues that engaging with coding introduces novel ways of mediating between context, proposition and constructed artefact. Against the backdrop of the paradigm shift from drawing-based representation to model-based simulation, this paper argues that we can look at drawing as a means of understanding the mediation of coding in architectural design processes. The research looks specifically into algorithmic approaches to scanning and mapping environments, ideation and exploration of variation within architectural design processes and the translation between design proposition and material artefact through digital fabrication.status: publishe

Coding as Creative Practice

This paper looks into coding as a creative practice within architecture, more specifically into textual and graphical coding as a practitioner during the design process. It argues that coding is not a mere tool for designing but a particular design medium, with its own affordances and resistances. Using code as a design medium provides a specific form of feedback, it influences the design process and its outcomes. Code is a technological and conceptual support for design thinking. In other words, code and coding can be ascribed agency in architectural design. This research is based on a number of cases from design practice and teaching, ranging from small design experiments, developing software tools for specific design projects and teaching workshops. The cases are grouped into three metaphors, each describing a particular aspect of coding as a design medium.status: publishe