Teaching and Experimenting with Architectural Design

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

How can a digital design oriented teaching process engage with actuality, society and
context? How can this new rhetoric of surfaces be employed as a platform for critical and
ideological positions such as Identity, gender and locality? These questions are folded
into the notion of Haptic Diagrams.
Digital technology is wrongly perceived as merely about techniques, optimization
and form performance. Nevertheless, new technologies have always generated a set of
cultural and social power relations, and at the same time provided new terminology and
critical tools for reading into broader social and cultural practices. In recent debates,
critical architecture found itself under attack calling for a move towards projective think-
ing^1 induced from inside the architectural discipline. This call was advocating for archi-
tecture of sensation, presentation and performativity.
Working critically from "the inside", we would like to introduce Haptic Diagrams as a
model which we integrated into our design methodology. This model relates social and
cultural context to materiality, corporeality, surfaces, program, event and temporality
of Identity embodied in space.

The Haptic

It is architecture that is always "Consummated by a collectivity in a state of distraction",
we raise the notion of the haptic from Walter Benjamin's state of distraction^2. Benjamin
identifies the cognitive, hence the political, potential of modernity's new technologies
and spaces; panoramas, dioramas, photography and finally cinema, generated an expan-
sion of vision and other bodily perceptions. This new mode of perceiving, empowered
by technology, is not subservient to traditional conventions or representations, thus
enable an absent-minded perception that activate a deeper, more haptic involvement of
body in space. It is the positive role of distraction as a kind of "not seeing" that releases
architectural space from the pure visual experience and opens it up to new intuitive
haptic knowledge.
The new spectatorship was related by Benjamin to the ways in which architecture
is experienced. Buildings are appropriated in a twofold nature; " by use and percep-
tion-or rather by touch and sight"^3. It is the tactile perception that engages with habit
and usage, although "as regards architecture, habit determines to a large extent even
optical perception". In this sense, the tactile and the optic, touch and sight, are folded
into each other, reciprocally generating a haptic sensibility.
The haptic, which is both a visual experience and praxis, conjures up space through
transformation, duration and temporality. It allows architecture to be perceived as a
sequence of events and multiplicity rather than a singular articulation. In this sense it
is the affective experience of a surface rather than a singular point of view situated in
a distance, on the outline or the gestalt. The haptic grants an intimate immersion with
surface, a new "closeness" to matter and texture.

This reduced distance from the surface, allowed by haptic closeness, opens a new field
for an action to be taken, an opportunity for a shif t from contemplation to praxis by
being performative. This allows us to perceive identity in a far more fluid and dynamic
way than traditional approaches, it is precisely our actions and behavior that constitute
our identity.