8 EAAE no 35 Teaching and Experimenting with Architectural Design: Advances in Technology and Changes in PedagogySean Hanna, London, United Kingdom
I would like to thank everyone who has made a presentation in this first session. Let us
now proceed to the discussion.
Gustavo Ribeiro, Copenhagen, Denmark
I have a question for the team from Graz. Some of the work you presented emerged from
workshops, and I was just wondering how you follow that up. How do the students work
further with workshop material, how do they experience it? Do they take some of these
experiments with technology and integrate them into the design of a building, or what?
Could you say something about how these experiments become integrated in studio work
or how they are developed in relation to architectural programmes?
Urs Hirschberg, Graz, Austria
As you just said, during those workshops it is very important for us to frame very clearly
what it is that we are doing, which is not precisely architectural design; although it is very
much about design, it is not architecture in the full sense, in that there is no programme
and so on. So I think that one notion that Martin showed in one of his slides was that
we like the students to build the tools that they build with and that they design with;
and that is something that they take from those workshops, and that they also bring
into the design courses. We also teach a design studio, and the way people use media
there is much looser, but many of them do actually set up procedures like that in their
design classes and in their design work. This is something that is really important for us,
because they develop a certain ease with it; so it is not that the software, or whatever it
is, operates on them, but rather that they are able to orchestrate and use these media
and immerse themselves in them in a way that is suitable to the concepts and to the
questions they are pursuing in their design concept.
Maybe Christian would like to answer that too.
Christian Fröhlich, Graz, Austria
Personally, I do not see much of a difference in this in whether we are talking about a
design studio or an elective course or a workshop, because for me design means inven-
tion. So if they learn how to invent something, whether they put it into practice in
designing a building or in designing a set-up for an installation does not matter – that
is a problem of scale: what matters is that they acquire that state of mind. Therefore I
use the term workshop more for these special set-up things that means doing things in
a relatively short time, very precise, high-powered, intense, then leave it or go on. It is
more about bringing the group together and discussing the topics and then letting it
flow. So it is more about the concept of how to open the minds of the students, I would
say.
Neil Leach, London, United Kingdom
I do not want to ask a question so much as make a comment about the first two presenta-
tions we heard in this last session. I enjoyed all the papers, but the last three particularly
I found very special. Just to make a comment about Darren’s paper and Carmella’s paper,
because they interacted in an interesting way; to me, there was a dialectic going on.
Carmella made the distinction between performance of material and performativity of