Teaching and Experimenting with Architectural Design

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

Teaching methodology

I have been teaching, since many years, Environmental Design, interpreting it as the
relationship between building and environment. This relationship to me is a kind of
revolution in design for it implies to take into consideration the role of energy flows
and matter cycles both in landscape and in building.
Landscape is used to be thought of as a visible range of natural and man-made
elements, and surely its visibility (view and perception by people who live it) is one
side of the environment.
But the other side of the environment is less visible, and it may be at all invisible
in what concerns the dynamic cycles of matter moved by energy flows in the biosphere,

• which are to be taken into consideration in architectural design.
  A building in fact has to cope, not only with space and landscape, but also with
  climate (sun radiant energy, sun heat, rain, wind, humidity, users comfort), ecosus-
  tainable materials (the energy cost incorporated in them) and users comfort.
  Users comfort by the way is part of individual aesthetic perception and as such is
  not less important than sight-seeng, touching, smelling, moving around etc.
  The complexity of environmental design at building scale is then to be well under-
  stood, before any possible temptation of playing with building volumes morphology,


• which today is certainly facilitated by software programs.
  Such understanding of complexity at building scale can be successful only by being
  aware of both nature and man-made environment complexity.

My course is composed of three main teaching modules, eventually distributed in dif-
ferent years: 1) Theories on environment and society; 2) Building and environment;
3) Landscape and environment.

Theories on environment and society

This introductory module deals with environment scientific theories in XIXth and XXth
century.
I try to follow some research paths in different authors and schools, both in sci-
entific essays and in literature.

A. Evaluation of man made objects, through matter-energy-labour costs

Explicit and direct dissertation on this subject is developed by the XX century bioecon-
omy school of Georgescu Roegen and his followers (Hermann Daly, Jeremy Rifkin).
But in “Gulliver’s Travels” by Swift (1726) one can find a sort of anticipation of
the bioeconomic themes, when Gulliver describes abroad the rich life in London of the
upper class, not in terms of money costs, but in terms of energy costs (travels around
the world in order to get special food or special tissues) and in terms of labour costs
(how many hours of work for sewing an elegant dress).

B. The limits to growth: technology scale and urban size (decentralization)

The negativity of big scale institutions is to be found in XIX century anarchist phi-