Teaching and Experimenting with Architectural Design

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

Design in Design

Designing has no meaning on its own. It does not exist out of a general architectural
context. Furthermore the case of replacing its abstract value with methodology bears
in itself the probability of staying out of it. This only means that the question of
abstracting from reality has to continuously linger in the air in order to keep universal
values above personal.
There is no doubt that the nature of architecture is connected to phenomena and
forms in which it appears. The way architecture exists as universal in particular cases
or phenomena, designing can also take two forms that do not exclude each other.
Although we know that it is not going to help us in the progress of design analysis,
keeping architect’s position safe can not be replaced by the coincidence of having a
successful design outcome. Perhaps it is just about a concept or a chosen perspec-
tive, but position of being detached can be very useful, nowadays more for designing
than designers.
The problem of universal and specific can not be easily solved. Especially it can
not be solved by its own means. If we, for the sake of process of thinking ignore
the problem, at least for a moment, we can enable ourselves something more than
a moment of aesthetical “pleasure of denial” - a shift in idea development. Being
contemporary requires at the same time being specific, unique and authentic, but also
does not oppose common principles. Furthermore, stressing the general is a probable
form of this situation. Specially for methodology of design, which is of our main
interes, this kind of ambivalence enables anticipation, further progress or another
theorethical jurney (Baudrillard & Nouvel, The Singular Objects of Architecture), com-
mon for architecture and architects, ecology, technology, ethics and aesthetics.
Progress in technological sense it is not linked to architecture (alone), but is
part of a wider context. Whether it refers to irresistibility or “love of convenience”
perhaps has no importance, but architecture and especially architectural education
is hard to comprehend out of this symbiosis. For architectural design it is just a new
natural environment.

Skill in Knowledge

Architectural design dominates architectural education. This role was given to design-
ing because of its unique ability to, through its process, synthesize all that can be
considered relevant for anticipating (architectural) the future. Even though it takes
place in the present, designing is primarily relevant to the situations that are about to
exist. In the genesis of the word project there is a blurred relation between skills and
knowledge, that is in designing set parallel to ambiguous relation between how well
architect, creator of the processes, is informed and his intuition. Being a well-informed
architect in the era of information technologies is a common state. But selection,
usefulness and information validity are methodological topics par excellence.
If we accept existence of the authenticity of each designing case, then the method
selected is both mean and technique, process and result, question and answer. It
means that the contemporaneity of architectural form is not just undetachable from