Teaching and Experimenting with Architectural Design

Titie Papadopoulou, Stavros Vergopoulos, Marianthi Liapi Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, School of Architecture, Greece 419

In his interview to our research project, Trummer further explains: "Yhe good thing

about associativity is that the software, in its core element, is built upon components.

So, for example, I begin with a small component. I add it to a bigger one, and then I add

those two together with another component in order to build up a chain of associativities

between various elements. This chain of associativities allowed me to realize that it is

not only about variations of one object, but it is one object contained in another, and

then in another and the whole allows us to build up a structure. Like a cell. On each

scale you start to discover new ideas. This is the reason I became more interested in

using associative design tools -like TopSolid- because they allow me to think through

various scales about architectural process... So I found it more interesting to put them

as alternatives to master-planning and look into something like housing, where all those

scales come together, and moreover where there is a very interesting architectural history

in terms of neighborhood making." Trummer applied the aforementioned technique to

student projects that dealt with a neighborhood in the outskirts of Madrid. He used as

a basis an active strategy that aimed for 'a new living environment with very particular

performances.' It should be noted here that Trummer’s studio did not place any focus

upon social parameters: 'I design a conventional process...but I use computational

techniques to force people to produce effects they might not know about.'

According to the TU Delft philosophy, on the other hand, it is true that the urban

landscape has moved away from conventional divisions like center/periphery, acces-

sibility/mobility, neighborhood/community and culture/society, so it has to return

back to those issues in order to regain an understanding of the possibilities for

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Example of student work exploring Peter Trummer's Associative design technique at the Berlage
Institute.