474 EAAE no 35 Teaching and Experimenting with Architectural Design: Advances in Technology and Changes in Pedagogy
was just speculating about how Japanese calligraphy is taught. I don’t know how
many of you know much about Japanese calligraphy, but there are several styles, and
there is one that is very, very fluid, as far as the individual characters are concerned
- a bit like my scrawling handwriting that is on the verge of being illegible, except
that all the letters, all the characters, actually make a lot of sense. The individual
characters are sort of digital in that sense, and the layers of meaning that go into
the quality of the brushstroke correspond to the analog; and I was just thinking that
in terms of what we are teaching there is a whole lot within architecture, within the
discipline, that we can state explicitly as our pedagogical goals, and that is along
the lines of how you make a character, and there are a whole lot of other things that
are far too complex to teach a student in, say, three years, that really do take thirty
years of experience of actually doing architecture, just as it takes lots of experience in
making those brushstrokes to actually come to terms with it. So I think if we wanted
to come to any sort of idea of what meaning might be here, we might say that there
are certain things we can agree on: these digital characters, certain pedagogical
goals we might have; but there is also a whole series of other things that I think we
should not even try to define, that we should just leave completely open as a matter
of accepting that this is going to change and is going to be something that is going
to take on far more complexity. I do not know if that is an answer to the question
of meaning you raised, but it is a concrete image that occurred to me that I thought
might shed some light on it.
So I just wanted to express that we do not think that there should be any
agreement, I mean in some sense there is no agreement and no consensus, even up
here.
Kas Oosterhuis, Delft, Netherlands
I always try to look at things from a very practical point of view, and thinking about
meaning is a kind of practice for me also, giving meaning to things. And practically
speaking, I would say that meaning is just a boundary condition. The meaning of
life? It begins here and ends there. Thus, the meaning of the process is very much
in the cage in which the process is taking place. For example, if you populate a
surface, where does the surface begin and where does it stop? In other words, it is
actually the boundary condition that gives meaning and that actually positions that
process somewhere. That is something that I have heard nothing about at all; and,
being more practical, how we address this in our own work is actually that we do
populate surfaces, we do run processes, we do intervene in processes, but we also
put boundaries to them, and boundaries are also very much a top-down process. Let
me use for example the concept of power lines and empowering something to put a
boundary to something. So it is very much empowering certain gestures or certain
ideas to give meaning to otherwise more fluid and distributive processes; and that, I
think, is, speaking from practice, very much a daily task. You must demarcate: this is
where it starts, this is where it ends. And in practice you also have time: this is my
deadline; and you also have a client who gives you a commission which you have to
perform in a certain amount of time, and that is also very important. In education you
do projects; and especially when you come to products, you also realise that time is
a very important factor. And when you are starting on such a process, seen in time,