456 EAAE no 35 Teaching and Experimenting with Architectural Design: Advances in Technology and Changes in Pedagogy
Vitruvius onwards. If you look at the kind of terminology used to describe beauty in
Vitruvius, it is all about moral terms, of appropriateness, of becoming, and so on; and
then we move into the 20th century and another allegory is used to explain beauty,
that has to do with the revolutionary, the democratic, and so on. There are all these
strange logics that architects hide behind in order to address the question of beauty;
and I do not know how to answer your question except to say that I think that you
are absolutely right, there is a problem there, and I am as guilty as everyone else
because in the end I am absolutely obsessed with beauty in a certain sort of way.
But I think probably the issue ultimately is not necessarily to see it as one versus the
other, but to see a healthier way in which these questions can be bounced against
the post-modern background, where people were very superficially concerned only
with ornamentation and aesthetic concerns as against questions of performance. I
think deconstruction is an example of that. I think deconstruction in architecture is
highly post-modern, and does not address any of these questions.
Rivka Oxman, Haifa, Israel
Thank you for a beautiful lecture. It was so informative, and really the whole scope
of the field was revealed, and it was really very enjoyable. Anyhow, I have a question
or a comment, just so that I can hear your approach. Many of the ideas that were
already there twenty years or more ago, are appearing, for example, in association
with the computer field: for example, AI technique styles and genetic algorithms were
there and were used in certain areas. So it is very interesting to see how they are
reused – they are not reinvented, they are reused now. One of the reasons for this, I
think, is perhaps the fact that technologies, graphic digital technologies especially,
have developed so far. I remember that when we were doing some experiments that
were probably like Urs’s and other’s, in the same kind of research community, we
did not have the possibility to have this graphical media attached to the genetic
algorithm. Even when Christine O’Shea presented her work in Portugal, and actually
here in Lisbon, in 1998, it was all about a grammar and taking her programme and
putting it in a new context, and it was very interesting. But I think that AI and other
computational fields should deserve some kind of recognition.
The other thing I wanted to mention was regarding a shifting paradigm. I think it
was Kuhn who said with regard to paradigm shift that you really recognise when the
paradigm shift is there only looking backwards; so we never can predict a paradigm
shift, but only reflect and look backwards on what has happened.
Neil Leach, London, United Kingdom
Just a couple of comments on that. Firstly, I was taught in Cambridge where everybody
was reading Heidegger and nobody was talking to the Martin Centre, a research centre,
no one was talking to the engineering group, nobody knew that Christine O’Shea was
sitting in a building next door behind the School of Architecture; and what happened
is that basically they started producing generations of architects that were unemploy-
able because they could not use computation methodology. And what actually was
a source of inspiration for me was when the Cambridge school came to London and
started preaching to people in London about how they should be doing things, and
I was so incensed that I set up two conferences for the RIBA think-tank building