Week 7 Readings

This week’s readings starts off stating that architecture and design depend on sources such as clients and patrons, and need to consider the culture, the economy and the scale of the building. Architects are given the budget, consultants, and builders rather than the architect being the prime source to gather these clients, and these decisions are adjusted towards the architect.  The materiality of architecture is seen as either an impediment that needs to be overcome, or just to be placed it down and start again fresh. These impediments need to be confronted as they relate to the needs of practitioners, who ask what the architecture can do rather than what it means. 

Computer based architecture implements a dimension which seems to ignore the materiality of the form, and this becomes a problem in regards to properties such as weight and resistance to which the architecture can or cannot be converted to a real life object. So simply having built a design or architecture within a computer program and the convincing techniques doesn’t say anything about the actual experience of the built reality. A great series of questions arises in regards to the change in design from pencil to paper to virtual design, questions such as whether this “change is quantitative rather than qualitative?” and this places a questionable boundary and limitations to whether virtual design can be designed in a way so that it of the highest standard of what the architect desired rather than producing a series of random models that formed whilst trying to design a desired object.

Reference

Allen, Stan, “Introduction: Practice vs. Project,” in Practice: Architecture, Technique and Representation, (2009): xi-xxiii.

Picon, Antoine, “A different Materiality,” material by design, in Digital Culture in Architecture: an Introductin for the Design profession(2010): 143-169.