458 EAAE no 35 Teaching and Experimenting with Architectural Design: Advances in Technology and Changes in Pedagogy
of performance criteria is just producing forms in a very, very old-fashioned sort of
way, and to my mind that is why I teach theory. But I also teach design, because for
me it is important for theorists to be involved in design and also for designers to be
reflecting in a theoretical kind of way. And I think that it is important to the notion
of criticality to bring that in, and I think that that is possibly what Mark Wigley
is teaching. I have not taught at Columbia for a while, so I do not know what his
basis is; but the idea of traditional critical theory is to question things, not just to
see something new as being good in itself. So I think you are right, I should not be
commenting on certain forms and just very sort of superficially saying those things,
and in any case that catalogue depended on who had collated the material for those
particular schools.
Saeed Arida, Cambridge, U.S.A.
How do you define progressiveness? What would you say being progressive means?
Neil Leach, London, United Kingdom
Being progressive? I think in a nutshell it means being open-minded to the poten-
tialities that are presenting themselves today in a critical fashion.
Saeed Arida, Cambridge, U.S.A.
And if we look at AI, which is kind of the model that shows us what computation is
about and referring back to Chomsky and Marvin Minsky and all those people, you
kind of feel that the field is stuck. Even at M.I.T. there is no new research being done,
and it seems like the field is diminishing. So we can see already that the limits of
the Turing machine are in front of us. And in architecture, now, because we are so
new to it, and not being very critical, we call that progressiveness. For me, I think
that we have only to look at AI to see that we need to find something, some system,
where one plus one does not equal two; that the creative process has something more
than the Turing machine.
Neil Leach, London, United Kingdom
I think that the fetishisation the computer is potentially very dangerous. There is a
form of material computation in the world as such, but it is infinitely more sophisti-
cated than the kinds of things that we can do digitally. I am reminded of a comment
that Cristiano Ceccato often makes. Cristiano was one of John Fraser’s graduates from
the AA who went and did a degree at the Imperial College of Computation and now
works at Gehry Technologies, and he if anyone knows about how you can use these
techniques, and he just had a baby and he said that there is something way more
impressive about how nature itself operates than any of this digital stuff. But that
was a nice question, thank you.