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

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.

Design Analysis - Contextual Architecture with Landscape Methods

Matthew Skjonsberg

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.

Taylor & Francis2014

Dynamic Ornament: The Design of Responsive Architectural Environments

Mark Meagher

This thesis study investigates the architectural potential of digital information, using case studies and prototypes to explore the integration of dynamic information in the architectural environment. Responsive architecture, a design field that has arisen in recent decades at the intersection of architecture and computer science, invokes a material response to digital information and implies the capacity of the building to respond dynamically to changing stimuli. One important function of responsive architecture is the communication of dynamic qualities of the environment, a function that has the potential to enhance the experience of the building by giving expression to its fleeting, changeable aspects. I have chosen to use the discourse of architectural ornament as a means of engaging the architectural roots of interactive intervention. Like responsive architecture, ornament addresses the integration of furniture and objects, and well as movable, mechanical elements in the work of architecture. This is a topic that I believe has particular relevance for computer-augmented architecture. In addition, the history of ornament offers into the integration of information in buildings, and can be mined for strategies that have the potential to inform the integration of dynamic data in the built environment. "Dynamic ornament" is a term that describes the subset of responsive architecture that I will investigate in this thesis. I have focused in the thesis on responsive components whose functionality involves the communication of dynamic information. The primary contribution of the thesis is the identification of design strategies for the integration of dynamic digital information in buildings based on the tradition of architectural ornament. A primary intention of the thesis is to rehabilitate the position of computer-augmented architecture by addressing some of the principal critiques made against it: rapid obsolescence, superficiality, and irrelevance to the central concerns of architecture. Like ornament, the digital augmentations of architecture are commonly treated as accessory to the central and lasting concerns of architectural theory and practice. It is my contention that the modernist debate over ornament is a persistent topic which has refused to go away, and which continues to influence contemporary discussions of architecture and digital technology. I hope to bring a new focus to the design of responsive architecture, one that emphasizes the symbolic aspects of digital interventions by engaging a neglected history of architecture augmented by technology.

EPFL2010

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.