282 EAAE no 35 Teaching and Experimenting with Architectural Design: Advances in Technology and Changes in Pedagogy
mine “Katowice” which is in decline today. In its direct proximity runs a multi-lane
road that connects main cities of the agglomeration but at the same time this road
divides the city and places the area under consideration outside the centre. As can be
seen in Figure 3 the authors of the concept "Time sequences" remained for to long a
time at the stage of location studies and the project's context in the city.
The two first steps are an intellectual introduction to the design process; they
are based on a series of decisions determined by intuitive and acquired skills and
knowledge.
Step three
Searching for an idea. Architectural training from its beginning is about shaping
the students’ experiences. This step in the teaching process is very important and
it involves:
- developing the habit of synthesis, and
- learning to reduce problems to a basic form of a pictogram or an ideogram
We hope that this may help in defining the students’ thinking system and their
critical standpoint. An idea is not an architectural building solution which usually
is a picture, but it could also be an intellectual thought in one’s mind. Today, the
increasing possibilities of computer aided design and the availability of new types of
materials opens up a whole area for the creation of architectural ideas.
Step four
Shaping the architectural conception. In our time we find architectural solutions,
created on a basis of apparent “liberation” from constructive constraints. Architecture
joins the painter’s freedom to decide on form, texture and image. The last twenty
years have produced the most “illogical” structural forms of all times thanks to
sophisticated technologies “which appear to be capable of anything”^1. The actually
computing civilization governs the relation between technology and space. Finally,
the space concept changes together with the architectural proposition of structures.
This brings some unexpected problems to some students who are excessively fasci-
nated by computer technology and with the fabulous liberation of architecture from
structural reality. Teaching implies consciousness of issues and methods. Our four
groups of students gave us a clear picture how to discuss a particular aspect of the
four solutions.
Even if all the four solutions are equally good, each of them becomes a basis for
conclusions and comments which are important in the teaching process.
The problems of the excessive fascination with the new possibilities can be seen
in two groups participating in the workshop, although the problems are different in
each of them.
The authors of the concept "Time sequences" spent so much time discussing the
possibilities of creating computer models (new computer architectural patterns) that
they remained at the stage of localisation studies.
The team "Medial Terminal of Art and Culture" (Figure 2) terminates the process of
conception because of the antagonism between artistic expression and constructive
reality. The fascination with the possibilities of nonlinear architecture results in the