Teaching and Experimenting with Architectural Design

58 EAAE no 35 Teaching and Experimenting with Architectural Design: Advances in Technology and Changes in Pedagogy

immaterial grand concept posited at the start and to be obeyed at all costs, then para-
doxically, the origin (idea) of a project emerges or is drawn out through distillation.
Restructuring the ‘project space’ as a steadily growing f ield has helped turn our
attention towards the interconnecting logic that gathers together this m(or)ass of mate-
rial and media. When speaking to students about course-related matters we avoid using
a language of abstract boxes containing words connected by arrows. We prefer to speak
of ropes built from strands that map multiple pathways of architectural elements and/or
media. Tied into knots, loops and points of coalescence, these strands of matter can be
characterised as either slow and lumbered, or quick and responsive. They can digress, as
if they have a life of their own, or join up under the influence of more powerful synthetic
agents. Diagram 1 (below) expresses the aforementioned relationships.

Such descriptions have helped us rearticulate the project according to a matrix of con-
junctions governed by interference, bundles, knots, slowness, swerves and multiplicity.
To understand this internal order with any precision we shall need to go into more detail.
Below is a second, more evolved diagram (2) illustrating how materiality interferes
with and particularises the standardised pathway of a project. The resulting swerve – a
Lucretian concept recently taken up by the historian of science Michel Serres – injects
vitality into a process that would otherwise be limited by standardised criteria.^6

Diagram 1: Accumulating Density (by the authors)

Diagram 2: Material Interference (by the authors)