430 EAAE no 35 Teaching and Experimenting with Architectural Design: Advances in Technology and Changes in Pedagogy
something about the morphological aspects of the future profession. In the light of
the present duration of the course, techniques can only be introduced incidentally
in the knowledge that the ice will already have been broken for perfecting certain
techniques on one’s own initiative.
Make it!
If the project component of the course (the P series) stands for ‘how do you think
up something that at a later stage could become reality through the intervention of
others?’, then Morphology could stand for ‘how do you turn an idea into reality with
your own hands?’.
A distinction between Morphology and the project component should be that
nothing is represented in the Morphology exercises; the only activity is making. All
the representations that are conventional in the project component, such as draw-
ing panels, scale models and references, are taboo in Morphology as soon as they
threaten to be deployed as (re)presentations of what should have been made. You
think something up and you make it. Just do it.
All the same, something often goes wrong here. In many cases it takes a lot more
time to think something up than to make it. Perhaps creating by copying can play a
role here. When the assignment is to convert an already existing idea into practice,
the difficult stage of thinking up a relevant idea can be skipped and all the energy
can be thrown into translating an idea into a creation. This sounds like more of a
short-cut than it is. Copying has always been important for designers as a reproduc-
tive technique, and it already played an important role in education a long time ago.
Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci, for instance, were trained mainly by copying the
masters of their day. The study of originals from the past can be a way of developing
a vision of your own with regard to the use of something that was thought up by
someone else in the past. Recreating the work of the masters fostered an infallible
understanding both of the motives and the techniques behind the creation of the
work. This enabled the pupil to rise to the
level of the master, and the talented pupil
to rise above it. If we look back on the
twentieth century, we can see that copying
has been transformed from a reproductive
technique into one of the important crea-
tive techniques of our era. Think of Dada,
Surrealism, Pop Art, Hip Hop, House. Think
of Picasso, who started to copy Velasquez
at the end of his career to add depth to
his own work. [fig. 6 & 7]
If prospective designers are encouraged to work with existing ideas, materials
or objects, they may come to discover that design is not just about being unique
and original (the stifling ideal of the 1970s), but that the way in which links are
made between existing facts can lead to unsuspected combinations and thereby to
original creations.
fig. 6 fig. 7