Teaching and Experimenting with Architectural Design

Maria Vrontissi Department of Architecture, University of Thessaly, Volos, Greece 151

reality... (the materials, the tools, the forces, the people, the team, the interaction,

the disappointment when the connections do not fit into place, the joy when the

project is set up, the trial, the error, the path,...).

Trial-and-error approach is the basis for every experimentation [Fig. 16]; an

interactive method where feedback (re)defines the next step. In this sense, design-

ing and building a project is definitely a play, but furthermore it is an improvisation

act, an experiment by definition. Similarly, in the project of teaching, the teacher

is there as director and actor in the same time, acting as sensor and actuator – to

be the first one to feel possible ways to go and activate students to try them out in

an open process, their participation, commitment and feedback being crucial to the

success of the project as well as to the renewing of the process...

References

1 Beukers, Adriaan, Ed Van Hinte, Lightness - The inevitable renaissance of minimum energy

structures, 010 Publishers, Rotterdam,1998

2 Palmer, Angus, CAD/ CAM for the Design and Construction of Complex Structures, in ‘New Tech-

nologies in Architecture, Digital Design and Manufacturing Techniques’, 2nd International

Conference, Harvard University Graduate School of Design, November 2001, pp. 39-42

3 Bechthold, Martin, On Shells and Blobs, Structural Surfaces in the Digital Age, Harvard Design

Magazine, no.19, Fall 2003/ Winter 2004, pp. 68-72

4 Vrontissi, Maria, S. Pollalis (supervisor), Information Technology in the Design of Tensile

Membrane Structures - the Case of FTL-Happold, NY, USA, research paper at Harvard University

Graduate School of Design, Cambridge, MA, USA, 1999

Fig. 16
Tensegrity Structures: setting up and
trying out the formwork for the foun-
dations