476 EAAE no 35 Teaching and Experimenting with Architectural Design: Advances in Technology and Changes in Pedagogy
That is a political position, talking about an individual collaborating in collectivi-
ties, free collectivities, fluid collectivities that change, identity collectivities, but
collectivities with boundaries, with targets, changing targets, fluid targets; but we
are absolutely not talking about the individual. I think that is certain. We are talking
about smart mobs, we are talking about people in the street, we are talking about
crowds, we are talking about collaborating agents and particles, but we are not talk-
ing about free isolated people. That does not exist, and I do not believe it has ever
existed. Thank you.
Urs Hirschberg, Graz, Austria
I want to bring another term into this discussion. It is actually something that came
up in a little anecdote in this morning’s presentation by Fabio and Matthias, and it
is the word trust. The story was that because Fabio and Matthias had this experience
of knowing how to code, etc., they had this credibility with their industry partner so
that he would trust them to actually use their machine, thereby saving a lot in the
budget and thus actually making the project possible. I think that the word ‘trust’
is something that we should try to endow our students with when they come out of
our schools. So I think that it is essential that conferences like this one happen, and
also that they are about education, because if we are in this paradigm shift – and I
am absolutely certain that we are in one that is going from the architecture of the
industrial age to the architecture of the information age, and this is happening as we
speak so it is not something that we have a choice about – the question is how we
as a profession position ourselves within it. So it does make a big difference where
we come from, whether we go to industry and say here is something that I would like
to do although I really do not know how it works, or whether we can tell industry to
be assured because we know about that because we have done enough experimen-
tation during our studies, we have done enough collaborating with other partners
in an interdisciplinary way, so that we do actually inspire this trust in the way we
present ourselves as architects to the partners that we need in getting things built.
I do not think there is an easy answer to that. As Oliver said, we have to redefine
things, because they change so quickly. There is no tested recipe for getting to that,
we are leaping into the unknown; but I think that as educators in this field we have
to have an awareness that there is a big responsibility, and there is a necessity of a
very high degree of professionalism if you want to survive this paradigm shift in a
way that in the end architecture as a discipline wins and is not just pulled under by
the other conflicting interests that are also there.
Kas Oosterhuis, Delft, Netherlands
I want to jump onto that because it is very much the same experience that I had in
practice, so I represent the voice of practice now. Just to give you an example: for the
Web of North Holland that we did there was half a million euro for the building and half
a million euro for the interior. We were commissioned as architects to do the exterior,
and another group was commissioned to do the interior as media designers. We got
a contract hundreds of pages long completely based on mistrust, because architects
are definitely mistrusted on the basis that they have no expertise whatsoever, they
just talk about things, and they are not responsible for what they make. The media