Clossing Session 471
that we need. I think there is a problem if we are only developing one main tool
instead of many. It is like a chain: if a chain has one weak link, it will break and
ruin the rest. If we develop only one big tool, we are going to be in trouble. I think
that everyone here has used software. The first thing you do when you open a file is
to go to Tools, where you find a set: the word processor is one kind of set, drawing
software is another set, and so on. So I think that what we have to do first is in a
certain way what Nino is trying to do, to establish and to categorise the different
elements that we need to develop with the new technologies to build the new tools
to make different kinds of things: to make evaluations, to build knowledge, to draw
and to make forms – there are many, many elements. We have to categorise them;
and I think that we have to find the way to build the tools for each one of those
categories. Thank you.
Saeed Arida, Cambridge, U.S.A.
I will just also try to explain what is happening. It is a big question, and I know I
am really young, as some people have pointed out. I want to address what is hap-
pening in the educational, pedagogical framework that is happening at my school
(MIT). I think that up until 1994 and the arrival of affordable digital computing,
the design process was very mysterious. There was always the relationship between
the master and the apprentice, which was always a kind of mystic relationship that
was impossible to define or know; and then suddenly with the arrival of affordable
digital tools, software tools, animation tools, students felt that they had a chance to
use these explicit systems to produce something. So it is not really any more about
the relationship between the professor and the student; the process has changed. I
think the whole issue involved in architectural knowledge, the whole issue of Deleuze
brought to architectural discourse, is like when Greg Lynn, in 1994, was brought by
Bernard Tschumi to Columbia to do the Paperless Studio. And then Deleuze existed at
the same time as Foucault, although the architectural audience was unaware of it, and
always in his texts he talked about processes and material processes and Manuel De
Landa and how history is produced: there is no human consciousness; it is all these
material processes that interact. So Greg Lynn, I think, felt at this point that this is
also kind of like Deleuze’s philosophies referring to material processes; so he adopted
that text, and now suddenly everybody is talking about Deleuze because it kind of fits
the architectural framework. And this goes back to the idea of architectural knowledge
being made up of fragments of something, so we appropriate certain things. So I
think that the missing thing always in architectural education is that we always try
to avoid explaining what the creative process is; and I think that the students feel
this also. There is always this break now between teachers and students, because the
students know more tools than the teacher; and I think that the teachers are always
overwhelmed by what the students know, and they cannot catch up because the sheer
number of tools is incredible. So I think that what is missing is just trying to under-
stand what the creative process is about. As Louis Kahn famously said, the architect’s
life begins at 50; and this is the failure of architectural education, in that it takes us
maybe thirty years to learn what architecture is. It is perhaps the failure of education
that we cannot compress this into three or four years and graduate students that can
really design very well. Basically, the missing part is the creative process.