Thoughts in 3 points
- Introduction
I have become increasingly concerned about the bias towards aesthetics in building design, and the suppression of an urban discourse, in the way buildings are conceived, taught and critiqued, and about the consequent disappearance of an urban sensibility in the scale of a building and a lack of urban technological preference in architecture. I find three fundamental points out of these lines when I start drawing in a blank sheet of paper:
- Chance-Controlled Urbanity
Truly experimentation generates advanced architecture and experimentation means moving away from individual preconceptions. Only through our mistakes in a design process we can see better the proper line of dissertation. Starting from a clear origin, finishing never and transforming constantly is the only key for a retroactive evolving procedure. We weld, glue, cut, fix parts, bend, melt or crystallized for the sake of a protocol that is yet to come. But first we must eliminate the purpose to understand the notion of the transformation. Learning from John Cage and his theory of aleatoric or chance-controlled to whom music meant "imitating nature in its manner of operation". Architects should be capable of creating aleatoricly in order to anticipate acting protocols subdue in our subconscious. Although chance is always under control. There is proportion, repetition, interest, symbiotic relationships, scale, rhythm, etc. There is also function, material assemblies, weight, etc. We can talk about the reasons behind or the conceptual interpretations arising from a specific chance factor in a particular art piece for years and we should. But we should also encounter ourselves with the “object anthropologist” existing inside of us. We should analyze the object while living with it in an effort to understand the rules that define it. It is a mix exercise between the Surrealist’s further comprehension of a reality and the perfect engineer as a constructor of that new reality. Observation is performed for such a long time that afterwards you know better and allow enrichment to happen.
- Technology and media today
In the line of Kevin Kelly technology forms a kingdom by itself in all respect to evolution. Architects ought to know in what point in the evolution of technology their place in the present. Ray Kurzweil also exposes the reality of exponential evolution in the history of technology and its direct implications to human understanding of the world. Engaging with the most advance technological tools of today signifies a finer capacity to establish the changes of tomorrow. New software and media is revolutionizing not only the purely design aesthetics but also the conceptual approaches in design. Swarm intelligence as a calculated protocol in the creation process has becomes committed to design. Also new media such as smart phones constructs digital environments that defeat real landscapes and its physical structures proposing an alternative global language to the existing ones before the internet era. Parametric software and scripting coding as a tool for the design is emerging as a non-conventional and un-expected inertia in project conception.
- The City = The Body = The Building
The human of today is a prosthetic bio-human engaged with a globalize media world. The seemingly unperturbed city of today is a field of experimentation for the new technological endeavors and its direct implications. While this is changing our perception of the city in a radical way fields of study such as Preservation emerge nonetheless strongly in the theoretical scope. Preservation is a required solution in our discipline in present time and it is turning buildings as feasible for preservation even before they are constructed. In the new metropolis preservation is not only and mainly a problem of compatibilities in the use of materials but also a social, political or economical consideration to the urban metamorphosis. Sustainability of a building unit cannot be defined without a condition of urban sustainability. It is in the grid of the urban fabric where environmentally sustained implementations should be achieved in order to implicate the unit within.
We need to create architecture that learns from urban change with regeneration as a strategy for urban design. The network becomes the main organizational criteria for circulation, structure or other systems in the building/city. Not only the building responds to the urban constant density and program fluctuations, but also the city reacts to the modifications happening in the buildings.
