Teaching and Experimenting with Architectural Design

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

Part I

I will do my best to address the brief of this particular venue: advances in technol-
ogy, changes in pedagogy. My own title is a little misleading because I won’t be
discussing design technologies per se. What I am in interested in is how the recent
leaps in technology re-actualize the key sources of individual creativity. So, granted,
the advances in technology produce changes in pedagogy, especially in the last 10
years, but my own broad thesis is that we somehow have to move forward as well as
backward, and often at the same time. I will try to make this clearer as we go.
I am in private practice, but I began my career as a full-time academic, first
at the Harvard GSD and Princeton School of Architecture (1996-2003) and at the
Architectural Association in London, where I have been leading Diploma Unit 5 since

2002. I am basically teaching 4th and 5th year undergraduate studio, as well as read-
      ing a theory seminar.
      10-odd years of teaching is a long time, or long enough anyway to outline a broad
      and clear line of development for the work presented; but is that really so?
      This is what my students were doing at the GSD back in 1996. It’s a recreational
      centre. The brief was given; it was still lingering around from the days of Rafael
      Moneo’s tenure as chair, though at the time it was nicely coordinated by Preston
      Scott Cohen.
      Believe it or not, this is a first year, second semester architectural core studio.
      And this here is what my students are doing now in Diploma Unit 5, an undergraduate
      architecture studio, in fifth year. So what happened? There are no doors, no windows,
      no walls or roofs, nothing remotely recognizable as such. Has something been lost? I
      like to think that this act of disappearance may have something to do with the theme
      of this workshop, but I may be wrong.

As architects we are willing new things into being and in this sense we must come to
grips with a rather fundamental issue: the transition from nothing to something. The
variable 3D surface, which I am using as subject matter and vehicle of exploration
in my writing, teaching and practice, is basically a pretext, and not just any pretext,
but the worst pretext I could get hold of. I chose it precisely because it is seemingly
unsuitable for architectural speculation. Unless you consider it purely aesthetically, the
variable 3D surface is a messy business. It is very abstract, can be extremely technical
and is resistant to ordinary means of analysis and representation. It is indifferent to
materiality and programme: its structure says nothing about potential physicality.
Building it requires extensive material reinterpretation, and so on.
And yet, if the emergence of materiality is what we are after, these fundamental
constraints are not necessarily counterproductive. In fact they can even be of great
help.
As a teacher, I like the computed surface BECAUSE IT offers us practical and
theoretical challenges analogous to the challenges of a traditional architectural dis-
course, with the difference that the focus on materiality, iconicity, instrumentality
and performance is SENSIBLY shifted: thinking about the surface is thinking about
architecture by analogy, and the analogy is productive because it frees us from mak-
ing direct and automatic assumptions. We don’t have to worry, for instance, about