Vol. 4, No. 1, May 1999 |
Design Creativity and Materialization |
Content |
1) Object and Process: The Aspect of Material - Invention as a Celebration of Materials (Myriam Blais, Montreal) - Shift of Conditions: Shift the Action, Shift the Meaning (Jorge Carvalho, Porto) - Architecture and Design Graphics (Valentin Gorozhankin, Kharkov) 2) Design Apprenticeship,
Building Process and Architectural Education 3)
Phenomenology of Design 4) Design
History 5) The Designer 6)
Rationality and Process of Design |
1) Object and Process: The Aspect of Material | |
Myriam Blais (Montreal) |
Invention as a Celebration of Materials This article explores the possibility of thinking about technology
as a place for celebration. This proposition relies on the sixteenth-century works of
Françis Rabelais, doctor and novelist, and Philibert de l'Orme, architect, for their
useful suggestions about providing a space for this celebration. |
Jorge Carvalho (Porto) |
Shift of
Conditions: Shift the Action, Shift the Meaning Design is here described as a process deeply intertwined within a cultural framework, but still with its specific difficulties and potentials. The text is written from the point of view of the designer while observing other architects conditions of work, intentions and means of expression. It scrutinizes two works, by Fernando Távora and Eduardo Souto de Moura, considering issues of process. Even within a certain conceptual line and working under similar specific conditions, architects develop different meanings for architecture, both conditioned and stimulated by the changes in the generic conditions of work. |
Valentin Gorozhankin (Kharkov) |
Architecture
and Design Graphics
The designer organizes the production and consumption of an object or building by means of graphic modeling of the form. However, his design illustration procedures are the means to create form and become an integral part of an object and its specific attributes. The facade - the materialized part of the drawing - as well as other kinds of projections (axonometric sections and perspectives), have dominated architecture in European culture. The abstract graphic code assumes a correlation with traditional values. The search for such meaning comprises a problem in architecture language. |
2) Design Apprenticeship , Building Process and Architectural Education | |
Hajo Neis (Berkeley) |
Building Architecture and Design Architecture "Traditionally, every era has manifested
a unitary organizational strategy called a zeitgeist, or spirit of the times. Architecture
has always had the capacity to both mirror and be driven by the zeitgeist... What
characterizes the Rome of Sixtus V, Haussmann's Paris, or the work of Le Corbusier, whether
mirroring or transforming, is that their plans derived from a singular body politic, an
operating and animating principle where a unitary world view was possible. Now,
ironically, at a time when the entire world can be seen as part of a singular operating
network, such a singular world view is no longer possible. There is no one body politic
and, thus, no single zeitgeist." (Peter Eisenmann, "Confronting the Double
Zeitgeist", Architecture, October 1994.) |
Ralf Weber (Dresden) |
Styles
of Teaching and Styles of Designing Different dilemmas of educational structures that have developed out of the process of institutionalization of architectural education will be described, in particular a need for an awareness of problems within design situations, the missing complexity within project processing as well as a lack of evaluation measures for finished projects. It will be argued that the design situation for students are never even halfway near a simulation of design processes in architectural practice, thus the assumption, design situation during student projects would train for real life, is mistaken. At the beginning of a modification of teaching concepts for design must stand the acceptance of the fact that students cannot be taught real life situations with simulations. Yet, universities should recognize their potential to teach students by comparative systematical discussions of different design strategies, enabling them, to come to intelligent and competent decisions. |
Robert pacek, & Marian Zervan (Bratislava) |
Projection
and Self-Projection of Architecture
This article will discuss the concepts "project" and
"projection" in their general-philosophical, specific-scientifical and
architectural meaning. On the one hand a movement from general-philosophical to
specific-scientifical meaning can be seen in architectural education and within the
architectural realm: Project as a disposition of possibilities, as an intention, has been
driven out step by step by the meaning of materialization; similarily architectural
projection has become transformed to mere projection: the definite and completeness become
attributes of architecture, especially as a technical piece of work. As a consequence, the
piece of work will be prefered as an object and the possibility for self-projection of
architecture as a discipline will be lost. |
Sander
W. Wilkens (Berlin) |
Gestalt-Principles
within Design Theory and Vivid Categories
This essay concerns architects and philosophers, critics of art and design. I. In current theory of planning and architecture there is an agreement about conceiving a building from the principles cube, roof, wall, bar and socle (E.Gerber with reference upon M.v.d.Rohe). Their - emancipated - meaning is originating in the philosophy of Bauhaus. II. The coverage is really unlimitied: not only valid for buildings but also for a magnitude of objects by craftsmen and industrial production. III. The philosophical meaning of these principles has to be recognized equivalent to Kant's categories of mind. The conception of Kant´s notion of cognition has therefore to be permuted: the principles have to be regarded as categories of intuition and their efficacy is relying on the convertibility of faculties within the relations of cognition. IV. A mathematical and V. logical proof demonstrate this convertibility out of Gestalt and a plan of Rohe with immediate evidence for planning. |
Aleksej Solovev (Moscow) |
Design
and Architectural Education at the Moscow University for Building under
the New Economic Conditions in Russia
Epoches of historical changes are always connected with changing
demands for the society as well as growth of creative potentials, mainly based on
enthusiasm. Thus in november
1995 the architectural scene in Russia celebrated the 75th anniversary of the
foundation of the High Artistic Technical Workshops (WCHUTEMAS), which 1920 enhanced the
artistic technical and architectural education in Russia. The new economic situation after
communism (1920 began the new economical politics of NEP- and with that the strong
development of the market in Soviet Russia) pushed the development of a new school for
design, quite similar to the Baushaus in Germany, connecting art, industry, architectural
and artistic ideas as well as the necessary techniques. |
3) Phenomenology of Design | |
Burkhard Biella (Duisburg) |
Designing
in Design
An architects design is an individual measure as well as a standard and offer in a social context, in the context of nature, of technology and culture, offering the development and formation of "the others" individuality in dwelling. Designing is thinking about "the others" existence, based on the design of "the own" existence. Designing is essentially part of practice (in an aristotelian sense) of architecture, which involves an ethical moment, that obliges the actor to his own and the common human life, even if an agreement is arranged by the supposition of an ideal community of communication. Accordingly a form of Kants categorical imperative can be defined for achitecture: Build in a way, that your design creates the openness of space, which allows everybody to develop his individuality just like you wish to develop your own individuality. |
Joachim Ganzert (Biberach) |
Premises
for a Tackle with "Projecting/Designing"
A present tackle with "projecting/designing" has to correspond to the fundamental premise of our modern principle of thought and Gestalt, even though the term "modern" - at the end of this century - should be defined in a different way than at its beginning. The end of the 20th century is characterized by a "globalization-process" which cannot simply be understood as a one-dimensional and economical one, but, corresponding to our context of knowledge, frame of reference and heritage, this process should be understood as multi-dimensional, amplifying and encouraging transformation from narrowed ideological-political perception towards appropriate and more open cultural and historical "spaces". The dimension "time", and that implies "history" and "culture", basically contributes to a definition of such a concept of "space". Consequently "projecting/designing" and "architecture" must be based on such an understanding of space. Within this conception of "space" a mode of perception and judgement has to be developed, where "adequacy" is the crucial intention and a differenciated notion of architecture and design is in demand. |
Alban (Karlsruhe) |
Architecture
is Design
As the basic premise design is considered not as dealing with objects but
situations, since our architectural experience aims essentially at an undivided reality of
architectural space and our existence in space. A typical feature of architectural
experience consists in the aesthetical act of becoming aware of this totality: The way the
situation of space and acting is worked out appears for our experience as if it was
prepared for us. Consequently we experience it as appreciation of our situation. |
Thorsten Bürklin (Karlsruhe) |
Projecting
an Anticipated Performance of the Architectural Space
In projecting and providing architectural space the hard facts of financing, construction supervision, etc. are still linked together with a traditionally humanistic subject: building as housing and giving way to mans action and behavior according to the characteristic anthropological corporeal as well as intellectual - modi of knowledge persist throughout all modifications of the construction organization, the process of projecting and the applicated means, etc.. Therefore as a central task of projecting the indispensable fact of being-part of architectural space requires an anticipated performance of the spacial arrangement in the correlative view of the physiological and intellectual disposition of mans constitution. With the anticipated taking-part of these unalterable conditions one becomes aware of individual and collective action and behavior especially within every-day routines, i.e. of sitting, walking, coming-in, staying, etc. as an essential trait of the spacial potential and consequently of the architectural projection. |
Christof Ehrlich (Berlin) |
The
Construction of the Idea and its Tools
Regarding the complaints, architectural design would increasingly
become determined by external constraints, rises a position, that claims it would be the
same with designing. |
4) Design History | |
James McQuillan (Cambridge) |
Beyond Logistics: Architectural Creativity as Technê and
Rhetoric in the European Tradition The present architectural scene is tainted by feelings of puzzlement and desolation and caught between the glamour of global conquest and regional marginalisation. The great dilemma of modern art is the failure to reconcile the determinism of empirical rationalism and the myth of artistic genius. Some reflection of our earliest recorded thinking about architecture reveals the bonding of quantitative to qualitive thinking or mathematics to rhetoric in the text of Vitruvius. An understanding of the overarching role of Christian and secular universalism up to the 19th. Century is sketched noting the rupture with the world of meaning in traditional mathematics and its mimetic potential after the destruction of the Baroque. The rise of modernity saw the disappearance of sensus communis as the link between imagination and creation and the paper concludes with a call for the understanding of Vico's philology as the domain of the human will and creativity in the field of finitude and the arts. |
Lyudmila Kholodova & Oxana Makhneva (Yekaterinburg) |
Architectural
Design of Rationalistic Utopia (On an Example of the Ural City Nadeshdinsk, an Industrial Colony of St.-Petersburg) In this
article we will investigate the myth of St. Petersburg, being able to reproduce itself. |
Jury Volchok (Moscow) |
Architecture
of Intertextuality. (Possibilities for Design Presentation) The
historical world view (as an ´understanding of space´ after P. Florepsky) reveals itself
in the true mutual relationship of those eternal key words of architectural creativity
"Time-Place-Space" especially in the context of the latest history, which is
forming today´s experience of urban planning. |
Astrid Schmeing & Lena Kleinheinz (London) |
The
Term "Design"
Our contribution is based on a number of considerations triggered by the emergence of diagrams as significant elements of the design process in a number of contemporary architectural practices. Operating in a void remaining after changes in the understanding of the relationship of architecture and the (post-)modern subject, diagrams are seen as a possibility of generating variable activity. Future uses of buildings seem no longer determinable and diagrams are catering to requirements resulting from this. After having sketched out these changes in the first part of our paper, we proceed to discuss two different examples of how diagrams are implemented into the design process and what responses they offer. |
5) The Designer | |
Svetozar Zavarihin (St. |
Architectural
Design: Between
Normatives and Conception
Like any activity architectural design is historically specific and typologically varied. Yet in design there always exist two basic tasks:
The author refers to both tasks and characterizes the particulars of the design by wellknown architects of past and present |
Jörg |
"In
which Style should we Design?"
This question reveals a fundamental uncertainty about the desirable
form of design products. One possible explanation about the origin of this question can be
found through an analysis of the theoretical constrains of design throughout history. |
Gottfried Schlüter (Cottbus) |
Taming
the Designer
The
architectural design process is torn between a claim for creation, social responsibility
and the task to solve a given problem; it is torn between rationality and artistic
freedom. Browsing through german law regulations concerning the position and demand
characteristics of designers, reveals a fundamental discrepancy between private
mythologies and objective demands. |
6) Rationality and Process of Design | |
Walter Nägeli (Berlin) |
design and rationality |
Gerhard Banse (Potsdam) |
Design
between Methodology, Heuristics and Creativity
It is the matter of concern to contribute to the understandig of design (process) by analyzing its intellectual operations. The starting point is the interactive effect of three components of design processes in an analytical as well as synthetical manner: methodical ("logical", "algorithmical", "strong plannable", mostly "over-individual"), heuristical ("non-algorithmical", "fuzzy plannable", mostly "individual"), and creative (intuitive, based on "guided" imagination, subconscious). These three "classes of operations" will be characterized. Finally it will be shown, that in design the "heuristic competence" is the link between "general methodology" and "individual making". |
Martin |
Design
in EDP-Supported Sustainable Architectural Processes
An interdisciplinary approach
of the Departments of Architecture, Civil Engineering and Mechanical Engineering started a
new research project ABM" at the University of Applied Science (Fachhochschule
Hannover). Funded by the EU (EFRE) and Land Niedersachsen (MWK) experts investigate the
various aspects of sustainable developing and re-developing of public and
office-buildings. Sustainable development means a challenge for the regions in Europe as
well as the process of architecture and urban planning. |
Christian Gänshirt (Cottbus) |
Six
Tools for Design
Working out the design of a building reveals itself as a long process of
approaching reality. In order to do so we have six tools that might vary in their
effectiveness depending on the demands of the design and the goals of the designer. As a
basis for communication about design those tools shall be phenomenologically described and
their mutual relationship as well as their individual meaning for the design process will
be discussed. |
Tobias |
The
End - A ´Goodbye´ to Theory in Design.
New balls please. The global game after communism: New instructions
for mental developers. |
Dörte Kuhlmann (Vienna) |
Freedom
to Art
The present essay focuses on creativity and its implications for both the social role of the artist and the methods of artistic creation. In western aesthetics and philosophy, artistic creativity has often been identified with a liberation from traditional social, geographical or cultural bonds. Thus, creativity is bound to freedom, together with many other issues in art theory, from the notion of liberal vs. manual arts up to the Kantian perception of free beauty as the sign of art. Given the connections between art, creativity and freedom, recent proclamations announcing the end of art need to be discussed in depth. The latest design strategies in architecture reflect this process in so far as their turn to natural sciences in order to dissolve the object and the author seems to be a final attempt to escape the art world. |
Philipp Oswalt & Matthias Hollwich (Rotterdam) |
O.M.A. at
Work The authors describe the design process in Rem Koolhaas´ office O.M.A. |
The essays are open to discussion for 6 months. Remarks, comments or criticism by readers can be e.mailed directly to the author or to the editorial staff. The authors then may rewrite their essays during these 6 months of interaction with readers. After this period the articles will be frozen but still available in the net.
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Issue
1/96: Architecture in the Realm between Art and Everyday life Issue 1/97: Modernity of Architecture. A Critical Recognition Issue 2/97: Architecture - Language Issue 1/98: Architectonics and Aesthetics of Artificial Worlds Issue 2/98: Architecture and Home. A discussion of Heideggers essay `building, dwelling, thinking` (1951) |
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