462 EAAE no 35 Teaching and Experimenting with Architectural Design: Advances in Technology and Changes in Pedagogy
accessible all the time, and this is a totally new thing. In this room there must be
five or ten thousand processors, and that is a totally new thing. There are so many
changes, and the technology also changes faster and faster. That means that it
makes no sense to teach only the technology of today, because tomorrow it will be
out-dated. Similarly, there is little point in teaching a particular software; it makes
more sense to give an overview of technologies and the possibilities these technolo-
gies open up. Or you start to experiment, because with experiments, in my opinion,
you start as a student to think by yourself and you learn how you can learn. I think
there is a very interesting difference between learning from books and learning by
doing. This, I think, is the main point of many of the projects we saw here, where
students learn by doing, by trying out the material, whether analog or digital it does
not matter. That was something we saw in many projects, and that is what to me is
the most important thing.
Sean Hanna, London, United Kingdom
I am a bit hesitant to try to sum up, because there is a lot here that I would not
be doing justice to; it is very complex. Instead, I will go back to some of the key
words, particularly from the first day, and some of the key notions that were reflected,
things like ‘non-standard’ and ‘diversity’; and I will try to relate those to teaching.
We have seen, I think, a lot of standards; but perhaps they are no longer standards of
form, but standards of process and standards of methodology. In my view parametric
design as a technology is a really good example of this. It is something that people
always try to explain as something that allows us to defer our decisions; but in fact
in making a parametric model you have to be very, very precise, and you have to set
a standard right at the beginning that you then follow, and while you can change
its dimensions you have to keep it as a standard all the way through. This, I think,
is the kind of thing that we are seeing in some of the more high-tech studios that
we have seen; also, particularly in the unit system that we have in a lot of schools,
there are very definite standards, probably of process and methodology. And I think
that one of the initial thoughts in ranking the initial call for proposals was that a
few of us expected that strict methodologies might have been a bit of a thing of the
past, and what we might see in a lot of the papers was something along the lines of
performance being the driver for education. I know, Neil Leach mentioned perform-
ance a few times. We expected, at least, I know I certainly expected, a lot of papers
having to do with optimisation and goals. But in fact it has been a bit of a surprise
to see that this is not the case, that there are so many very strong methodologies set
up; but it seems to me that the strict sort of method allows for a lot of experimenta-
tion within its constraints, and with experimentation you get a lot of surprises, not
just from the students’ point of view but also as teachers – we are just as surprised
by the outcomes as the students are. A lot of people have said this better than I
have, I think, but we may perhaps be moving away from a sort of ideal of traditional
design being the starting point of a complex problem that we are trying to solve, a
complex sort of classical studio project, architectural project, when we work towards
something with some kind of predefined aesthetic goal. We may perhaps be mov-
ing towards something that is more along the lines of a research model, where we
start off with a definite process, perhaps a scientific or some other method, but the