416 EAAE no 35 Teaching and Experimenting with Architectural Design: Advances in Technology and Changes in Pedagogy
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Example of student work from Greg Lynn's studios at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna.
Lars Spuybroek, who is a Professor at the University of Kassel, ascribes the insufficiency
of urban design to the fact that the recent French-American thought placed its main
focus upon the object itself. Moreover, he identifies two directions that planning could
take: "One is nano-urbanism or micro-urbanism and the other is branding...an approach
that you develop a strategy that will allow it to be read in multiple ways." One very
interesting part in Spuybroek’s interview was his dream for urbanism and the way he
envisions digital media to make this dream come true: "We always think about strategy
and chaos or it is all necessity and order. It is clear that we have to find an in-between
solution. This is where computers come into the game. They can process huge amounts
of information and still produce coherent systems. My dream is not a mini-urbanism, but
actually a mini-urbanism that is part of a much larger urbanism. You would almost have
an invisible master-plan that would really work with bottom-up rules. But it would really
adapt and grow and change while it’s being done...This is my dream for urbanism."
After Greg Lynn and Lars Spuybroek, Ben van Berkel was the third one from the
generation of architects who invested in diagrammatic architecture (each one of
them from his own point of view). In his interview, Van Berkel grows worried about
the effect created by the computer architects: "My problem is that computer design
became Beaux-Art in the sense that it is becoming too much the same of the same...
To be very critical, I like to almost call it spaghetti architecture. It is too much the
same. And I try to get a little bit away from it." He also talks about how he tries
to teach his students a kind of anti-design: "It is a contradictory kind of name, the
'design model,' because people think at the beginning that it is about design... It is a
kind of new thinking around design... This is a more complex model design, but it is
also giving a new kind of control’." In most of his lectures, as well as in his interview