Design Analysis - Contextual Architecture with Landscape Methods

This paper describes the contextual analysis of architecture with landscape methods as both design and teaching methodology. The methodology applies our understanding of research as design and design as research, and involves the evaluation of landscape architecture-based approaches to built examples in a region famous for its constructed landscapes – The Netherlands. In a series of design courses the authors have been teaching in Delft and Rotterdam from 2009 to 2012 analytical methods were developed through a combination of one-to-one contextual readings of built architectural projects.

Symposium ‘Ghost Writers: Collectors, Creators, Archives, and Memory’

Matthew Skjonsberg

Design practice depends heavily on display of drawings or photographs – representations of buildings and landscapes – from architecture schools to competitions and from client meetings to the final publicity of a completed project. Archives and other records of memory serve an essential role in architectural creation as well in that designing a real building, one that stands solidly, is attractive, and functions – in fulfillment of the Vitruvian triad – is a complex process and having access to as many sources as possible of how other architects handled these questions is fundamental to the overall process and design and the ongoing education of an architect. While designers are always looking for their next commission, their antennae are also open to interesting projects, whenever they were built. The exhibition “The Living City: Park Systems from Lausanne to Los Angeles” displays works that come from archival collections and are assembled with the intention to open and influence discussion about landscape issues still of great importance. Exhibitions about historical architecture and surviving documents that represent or interpret those works speak to an essential part of the architectural consciousness. Indeed most architects have an internal archive of buildings seen or experienced that are fundamental to their understanding of what a building is for them.

2019

Fantastic Form: Digital Design as Fiction and Fact

Russell Alexander Loveridge

Design and architecture has always been used within film to engage the fantasy of the viewer. By providing both a sense of the familiar and by communicating complex information about context architecture and design enhance the believability of place and substance, and in turn this creates the stable foundation from which the viewer can engage “the fantastic”. Technologies employed in the film industry enable story tellers and film makers to set their scenes in convincing yet fictional environments. This longstanding symbiotic relationship between architecture, design, and film is increasingly being enhanced (or even supplanted) with the use of digital visual effects. As parallel yet associated development, computer aided design and visualization technology gives designers and architects the enhanced ability to create their own design fictions: Photorealistic designs, existing only in digital space, that are not encumbered by the limitations of real world constraints. Yet, just as with digital movie effects, the craft of design risks credibility when it is too heavily invested in appearance rather than substance. The origin of this investigation was an invitation from the Centre d’Art Neuchâtel (CAN) and the Neuchâtel International Fantastic Film Festival (NIFFF) to collaborate on a small and temporary architectural project to be installed at the fantastic film festival. The architectural brief was the starting point for this design-build project, but it was the notion of “the fantastic” and its relation to both the issues of fiction and design which became the driving interest of research.

University of Applied Sciences Northwestern Switzerland FHNW, Academy of Art and Design, Basel2010

Care. Emerging Natures

Pieter Versteegh

The work addresses research by design as a subject and a method. It explores theorizations, experimentations, and verifications, all of them engaged in writing, drawing and building. It is discovery-led, and starts from a blurry "state of the arts". It oscillates between architectural processes, products and performance without considering any of them isolated as research. Its relevance emerges. It is the design process that constructs, delimits the research corpus and produces architectural insight and knowledge. The first part addresses architectural meaning. It engages interdisciplinary connections: structuralism in linguistics and philosophy, color theory, and a displacement into deconstruction. It concludes that, although an architectural design process can deliberately try to produce and uphold determinate architectural meaning, such (objective) meaning is immediately deviated, notably by the appearance of architectural usages, scale, and possibilities of appropriation. The second part investigates deviation as a substantial part of architectural creation. If noise is irreducible, it must also structure architectural creation. It connects to domains resisting to reductionist thought: complexity sciences, literary critics, archaeological processes, and theorizations dealing with the secondary such as psychoanalysis and gender studies. The work is marked by a dilemma related to empowerment: the originality and authenticity of design and its delivery at a certain moment always seem to prohibit inhabitation, appropriation. The secondary, subject to dominant, single authorship, becomes primary. Architecture seems resistant to modernity in the Kantian sense. The work re-centers on psychiatry, gender studies and (health) care: the understanding of natures rather than appearance, structure or essence. In the third part, it moves from the production of difference to inscriptions of memories and future possibilities; from design as making to design as the initiation and care of a shared transformation process, accompaniment of differance. The understanding of architectural reality shifts from the finality of object to a process beyond control, co-construction between different authors/users occurring in minor events, in a very local and specific context. The work proposes a design process driven by care, encounter of authors and users in quality, accompanying different and specific emerging natures of (territorial) identity.

EPFL2012

Care. Emerging Natures

Pieter Versteegh

EPFL2012