414 EAAE no 35 Teaching and Experimenting with Architectural Design: Advances in Technology and Changes in PedagogyIn the past, whenever architecture faced urban issues by following options that
forejudged the future of the city, reality contradicted the outcome by escaping from
the order that a plan had imposed. As the discipline of architecture was challenged
new, anti-utopian strategies emerged, attempting to approach the city within a new
scope. The new methods of inquiry and the proposals that were brought forth by these
strategies were not limited to heterotopias and interdisciplinarity. Instead, they have
the promise of a catalytic architecture that would respond to interactivity and thus
be able to provide unanticipated events.
During the last decade of the 20th century, architectural design adopted computers
-Computer Aided Design in particular- and architects got themselves involved with
processes that produced non-conventional forms. Having a scientific or pseudo-sci-
entific backing that usually acted as a shield for experimenting with software results,
architects hoped that topology would yield something more essential than one more
style with rounded corners, organic shapes, complexity and use of metals. In many
cases today, those projects are integrated into conventionally designed master-plans
and end up being adapted to local networks without having any other preoccupation
regarding the context (aesthetics, use, history and social function to be answered by
the building) as long as the computer, is used to make the complex, formal design
possible.
Criticism of course expressed in many cases its oppositions to the products deliv-
ered by this new generation of architects, either within academic courses, exhibitions
or even architectural competitions, building that way optimism and confidence for
the architectural discipline which saw the chance to upgrade its discriminating func-
tion. This same criticism has every right to wonder whether architecture has been
carried away by a new Oedipality and to the return of the utopia that prevents any
discussion to take place regarding the re-definition of the architects’ role both in
construction and in urban interventions in the IT era, a role that could define the
terms of their education.
In March 2005, Brett Steele -Director and Head of School at the Architectural
Association in London- wrote an article where he juxtaposes 'Cities' and 'Computers'
hoping that someday there could be a convergence of these two design fields that
are represented by focus groups of adherents, supporters and critics: "To give this
division a name, we can call it a split between 'topography' vs. 'topology': between
those architects and designers who in order to find lessons that will guide how they
then operate as designers, move initially outwards in their search to understand
the conditions shaping theirs tasks as architects; i.e. towards the topography of
contemporary urbanism (or the city, including its many contemporary 'imposters')
vs. those architects or designers whose research efforts are turned inwards, towards
the operative tools and concepts (such as topology) of new digital design systems
or processes (including their growing array of networking technologies and auto-
mated production systems)."^1 In June 2006, Steele was interviewed for the project
Urban Strategies and the Resistances of Euclidean Space where among other things
he describes the present time as the era of information territories: "Undoubtedly,
the arrival of computational systems has changed the nature of cities in the way we