Architecural Design

It is remarkable that in no other eld of technical knowledge have antiquated ideas yielded so slowly to oftrepeated experience. At last, however, through the results of scientic investigation, the useless stringing of wires is being discontinued, while the sounding-board, moderately useful at times, is not now considered an universal panacea, and simple ratio between length, breadth and height is no longer looked upon as an adequate basis for acoustical design.

Designing for a complex world requires architects to think critically, creatively, and collaboratively. To support the development of this skillset, the atmosphere of the design studio in architectural education challenges students to develop ideas creatively and critically reflect upon their conceptual designs for given projects. In design education, thinking collaboratively does not need to be solely defined by the sharing of ideas and information among peers, but instead can be applied to how architecture and its site can collectively inform one another throughout the design process to achieve a desired solution.
Often, students are taught to sequentially operate within the design process by observing, recording, and then responding to it conditions with an architectural intervention. This procedure, while beneficial in teaching students to acknowledge and appreciate the contextual environment for their design, can be misguided as it emphasizes the site as a given, invariable constraint that is static and impermeable in nature. Architectural design involves a mediation of the designer’s intentions with the site. As such, students should be encouraged to consider architecture and the conditions of the site as malleable, accommodating bodies.
This paper will present a series of projects, introduced to students in their second-year of study, that encouraged students to break the sequence of observe, record, and respond to allow site and architecture to be responsively in dialogue with one another throughout the design process. At the outset of each project, students were asked to blur the demarcations of architecture and site, among the earth and beyond to the sky, towards discovering ways in which the architecture and its contextual surroundings might respect, respond, and support one another to cultivate a desired user experience. These exercises offered students an avenue to creatively and critically maneuver the design process while promoting collaborative thinking between architecture and its environment.

Intervento tenuto al Simposio ‘Disegno e modello di architettura’, organizzato da Howard Burns presso la Scuola Normale Superiore. Pisa, Palazzo della Carovana, 10 – 12 maggio 2012 (11 maggio). Invitato dal Prof. Howard Burns (Scuola Normale Superiore)
https://www.sns.it/it/evento/disegno-modello-architettura