88 EAAE no 35 Teaching and Experimenting with Architectural Design: Advances in Technology and Changes in Pedagogy
Sean Hanna, London, United Kingdom
I think while we are on this discussion I will just say that your point, Darren, about the
connection being less literal is well taken; but there are certainly a lot of students and
a lot of other practitioners making it very explicit. I do not know whether the Graz team
might have a contrasting view on that, in terms of visualising things.
Urs Hirschberg, Graz, Austria
Do we think of our work as being a sort of applied philosophy?
Sean Hanna, London, United Kingdom
No, not philosophy so much, but I guess the ideas of explicit processes – I mean your
presentation, the Formotions, in particular, are literal embodiments of an idea of move-
ment.
Urs Hirschberg, Graz, Austria
Yes. The notion of processes is obviously important – or rather, has become important
in architectural education, for it has not always been like that. So there is this inter-
est in process as a way of understanding how things come about: instead of attribut-
ing things to a mysterious faculty like inspiration, you focus on the process in order
to f ind out how you get from an initial idea to a design. Figuring out how processes
can be orchestrated, what happens during them and what kinds of tools you use is an
important part of that.
So, I would say that I am bit sceptical when architects dabble too much in philosophy.
I like to keep things grounded in the sense that in the end you want to also have a result
of that process, so our approach is very much about doing things and trying things out
that have not been done in that way before.
I do not know if that answers the question.
Carmela Jakoby-Volk, Israel
I just want to say that I agree, but I think that the shrinking cultural aspect of education
diminishes the ability of students to navigate a critical path; and I think that when they
do not have this ability, I think that the doing is very much impaired.
Urs Hirschberg, Graz, Austria
I am not saying that they should not be critical. I mean, I do think that there is a certain
danger in getting a little lost in being only critical of being critical. In order to apply
this critical thought you actually have to have something to oppose it to. So that is why
we are interested in the processes and the result of these processes. Also, when you
are working with these new media – and we are dealing with these virtual things where
anything is possible – what you discover is not that anything is possible: you actually
have to do it, and you learn things by doing it, and then of course you reflect upon it.
Neil Leach, London, United Kingdom
I think that there are a lot of things that have been done with Deleuze which are very
regrettable. And just taking notions of fold and using Maya programming and so on is
like that, because I think Deleuze was never dealing with the language of form; he was