418 EAAE no 35 Teaching and Experimenting with Architectural Design: Advances in Technology and Changes in Pedagogy
a unified entity. On the other hand, many courses study the city through stratagems
that re-establish continua. At this point, one can very well refer to Manuel Gausa’s^5
stratagems which constitute a "new naturartificial repertoire relating more to irregular
configurations of differential orders than to the old regular, compact and well ordered
volumetrics: 'dynamic evolutions rather than static positions,' 'impure developments
rather than basic configurations,' 'open reasoning rather than closed models,' 'proc-
esses rather than accidents,' 'topologies rather than typologies,' 'landscapes rather
than edifices.'"
It is interesting how some Schools make a reference back to the ecosystem by
forming a hybrid research field called Landscape Urbanism, like in the cases of AA^6
and Penn Design School^7 that present very notable performances. In the meantime,
the field of Planning appears to be hesitant, while conversations over the city spark
intense dialogues, like for example in the case of disputation between Edward Soja
and Mark Wigley during the TransUrbanism^8 symposium organized by V2. In the case
of some other American universities, Robert Somel^9 at the School of Architecture in
Princeton University questions the idea of the plan as an 'operational device,' while Ed
Keller from Columbia University^10 is looking into the recent natural disasters in search
of the very issue of his studio. In Europe, Saggio’s studio in La Sapienza brings forth
the concept of 'crisis' as a 'historical process of transformation': 'from the Industrial
Paradigm to an Informational one.' In the course description, Saggio states that: "The
case studies and projects can be at a very large territorial scale or at minimum scale
of object design. The issue to establish in the project is how Information Technology
is crucial in addressing and solving the issue."^11
There are two interesting examples of European design studios that present a great
case against the apportionment of the city, which emerged from approaches that
divide the urban landscape in a variety of scales. The first studio is located at the
Berlage Institute and its agenda is to promote the 'architecture of performance.' The
second one is located at the School of Architecture at TU Delft with an agenda that
promotes the 'place generating effect.'
Looking into Berlage’s design courses, one will find a design course where Peter
Trummer is promoting a technique named: Associative Design. In fact, the studio
is about a 'parametric design technique' where parameters are used "to create an
infinite number of variations. It is based on associative geometry that describes
the relationships between various assemblies and constitutes a design object as
a mutually linked geometrical construction."^12 Trummer initially collaborated with
Bernard Cache^13 who is known for his explorations on parametric techniques in object
construction. Berlage’s program 'applies associative design to all scales of the design
process, from manufacturing components to the scale of urban neighborhoods.' As
a response to the typology that promotes non-temporal forms, Trummer claims that
he promotes instead the idea of multiplicities, that is the architecture 'of the many':
"In my view the challenge for architecture is to develop architectural products that
are formulated through the interrelationship of the two main properties which drive
variations in architecture, throughout history and today. These properties may be
termed 'extensive' and 'intensive'... Such an approach has nothing to do with the
design of pre-given forms like typologies. It is concerned, rather, with the expression
of material or materialized organization through form."^14