“Probably with all the best intentions the computer graphics companies foisted computer-aided design onto a gullible architectural profession. First it was just computer-aided draughting – and architects with a life-time of experience of drawing with a pen and T-square were sent back to the nursery to study a thick manual on how to draw with a mouse and keyboard. The drawings produced were slower and uglier and derived by a most unpleasant and seemingly unnatural process in front of a frustrating screen. The therapeutic pleasure of the manual drawing board process with time to reflect upon what was being produced was lost. The CAD industry had ‘solved’ the wrong problem or at best had bodged a response to a badly stated problem or possibly ‘solved’ a problem, which was not a problem at all.”

John Frazer 2006, The generation of virtual prototypes for performance optimization, inOosterhuis, K. and Feireiss, L. (eds). 2006. Game Set & Match II. Delft: Delft University of Technology, pp. 208.

A good reminder to be careful which ‘problems’ we try to solve, and also one to keep in mind whether we are not just being technology pushed rather than problem-driven.

“We still suffer the consequences of a functionalist tradition. We proudly reject the Modernists’ dogma of ‘form follows function’, but still expect each project we engage in to respond to a ‘programme’ listing in some detail expected functions to be taken care of. A time-based architecture must assume functions to be largely unpredictable except in the most general of terms. Where architecture cannot follow function anymore it must take over by itself to establish a context for change and variety by inhabitation. This new initiative will lead to an articulation of levels of form-making. But that also implies distribution of design responsibility and we have not yet abandoned the Modernist opinion that such distribution is a dilution of the architect’s role. The dilemma renders academia clueless. Change and the distribution of design tasks are not yet subjects for architectural theory, nor do they feature in school curricula.”

N.John Habraken 2005, Change and the distibution of design, inLeupen et al. (eds). 2005. Time-based architecture. Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, pp. 28.

How to deal with change when change itself is the most unpredictable in architecture? Habraken’s position has always been clear about this: there is a need to divide between what we can do as architects to supply a context for people and that which people can take care of themselves.

“A new approach to Mannerism in our era might start with an injunction: break the rules for good reason only. Functionalism is not dead. It’s still our mantra for confronting the tasks of architecture. Unlike sculptors, we have a requirement to house people and their patterns. Yet the many-layered reality, multiplicity, and changeability of the contexts, patterns, and systems we face as architects and urbanists give us no possibility of observing all the rules all the time – not because we are arrogant but because, in our complex and contradictory world, many of the rules are in conflict. But when it comes to rule breaking, we should do it well. So there is needed a new calculus – intelligent, wise, witty, artistic, and democratic – on the justifiable breaking of the rules and how it may be done.”

(Denise Scott Brown, 2004, Architecture as Patterns and Systems, in Venturi & Brown (2004). Architecture as Signs and Systems, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, pp. 217).

Denise Scott Brown and Robert Venturi have always been in my view the first and most intelligent “rule-breakers” of good taste and accepted rigid dogma’s of Modernist architecture. Just like Koolhaas, they identify the problematic areas of a design task and go about it to address these questions.

“The firm foundation of the method doesn’t take away from your creativity as a designer. There are lots of easy design problems in the world, but there are also lots of difficult ones. Glib cleverness may work for the former but will leave you afloat in a sea of confusing variables in the latter. The great value of a rigorous methodology is that it gives you a strategy for breaking down the really complex, tough problems into smaller, more familiar, and more manageable tasks that can be readily addressed. While personal creativity helps you create the right answer, mastery of the overarching process helps you address the right problem.”

Alan Cooper in Goodwin, Kim (2009). Designing for the Digital Age: How to Create Human-Centered Products and Services. Wiley Publishing Inc., Indianapolis, pp. xxiv.

There is sometimes an uneasy relation between being creative and being methodological – people feel these two things are incompatible. Alan Cooper rightly puts these two phenomena in the right perspective. Being ‘just’ creative does not help you get the process right and you may wonder off in all directions – being ‘just’ methodological does not help you get the right answers and you may come up with an uninspired solution. A great creative benefits from a great method and vice versa.

“No, I don’t [think users should be part of the design team.] I think it’s an abdication of responsibility. Users should definitely be involved as a source of inspiration, suggesting ideas, evaluating proposals – saying, “Yes, we think this would be great” or “No, we think this is an appalling idea.” But in the end, if designers aren’t better than the general public at designing things, what are they doing as designers?”

Gilliam Crampton Smith, in Sharp, Helen, Rogers, Yvonne, and Preece, Jenny (2007). Interaction Design: Beyond Human-Computer Interaction, John Wiley & Sons Ltd., Chichester, pp. 470.

A point well put, although as designers we have to be careful not to overestimate our own ability to understand the problems we are trying to solve. Keep an open mind, listen, observe, and be modest but stubborn

“I see computers not as an army of tedious clerks who will thwart all creativity with their demands for precise information, but as slaves of infinite power and patience. However, computers are not without their dangers. If used unimaginatively, they have a tendency to: dull critical faculties, induce a false sense of having optimized a design which may be fundamentally ill conceived, produce an atmosphere where any utterance from the computer is regarded as having divine significance, distort the design process to fit the limitations of the most easily available program, distort criticism to the end-product rather than to an examination of process, and concentrate criticism and feedback on aspects of a problem which can be easily quantified.
‘Imaginative use’ in our case means using the computer – like the genii in the bottle – to compress evolutionary space and time so that complexity and emergent architectural form are able to develop. The computers of our imagination are also a source of inspiration – an electronic muse.

John Frazer, 1995, An Evolutionary Architecture, London: Architectural Association, pp. 18.

John Frazer very aptly sums up the benefits and dangers of the use of the computer in the design process. These are still very real dangers and we have to be aware of them. The book An Evolutionary Architecture is recommended reading for anyone who wants to study the genesis of architecture through evolutionary and natural principles.

“There is usually no need to question the validity of architectural visualizations that are produced in CAAD systems, but the performance predictions and simulation results of analysis tools are always under scrutiny. Building simulation tools all utilize different methodologies with their unique algorithms, assumptions and constraints. Especially domain experts will naturally prefer to utilize more than one tool for comparison of verification purposes. Software offered as part of a single BIM suite will never be enough to quench the need for second opinions. Interoperability requires industry wide adoption and development of open standards instead of proprietary solutions.” (Mustafa Emre Ilal (2009). The Building Performance Perspective for Interoperability. In Çağdaş, G. & Çolakoğlu, B. (eds.). Computation: The new realm of architectural design – Proceedings of the 27th Conference on Education and Research in Computer Aided Architectural Design in Europe, Istanbul Technical University and Yildiz Technical University, Istanbul, pp. 89-94.)

Ilal makes a balanced commentary what is required to make simulation and prediction tools work for both experts and architects. In the current BIM-train these aspects are often forgotten or glossed over while claims are made about performance that can hardly be met in reality.

Click here to get access to this paper in CUMinCAD.

“…a critical view can be taken of the direction which research and development in CAAD has taken over the last few years. These criticisms are articulated, somewhat provocatively, as CAAD’s seven deadly sins.
1. Macro-myopia [...] overestimating the short term impact but under-estimating the longer term impacts [...]
2. Deja-vu [...] the emergence of ‘new’ ideas in the field which have striking similarities to early, abandoned and almost forgotten work from two decades ago. [...]
3. Xenophilia [...] The obsession with importing concepts and procedures from other disciplines [...]
4. Unsustainability [...] Concern with fitness-for-purpose, cost-effectiveness and environmental sustainability has all but disappeared from the R+D agenda.
5. Failure to validate [...] In any other discipline the generation of hypotheses without some rudimentary testing, would be laughed off the conference platform.
6. Failure to evaluate [...] The absence of any credible user feedback means that further research and development in undirected and vulnerable to academic drift.
7. Failure to criticise [...] There has been a cosy conspiracy in the community to condone, even encourage, selfindulgent speculation and solipsism – a thoroughly bad example to set for young people in the academic community.” (Tom Maver, 1995, “CAAD’s Seven Deadly Sins”. In Tan, M. and Teh, R. (eds.) The Global Design Studio – Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Computer-Aided Architectural Design Futures, Centre for Advanced Studies in Architecture, National University of Singapore, 1995, pp. 21-22).

It is a good thing to once in a while do a personal ‘reality check’ using this list written by Tom Maver. Get this article, print it and pin on your wall next to the monitor.

“Design strategies that generate possible solutions in the hope of happy accidents are having a resurgence now, a decade later, using parametric design tools instead of animation tools. But while mere variations based on randomization and external or internal constraints still have a place in the academy (and in some offices), the resulting work can only be described as ugly, grotesque, monstrous, or, most accurately, amateurish. In any design field, the only way to efficiently, artistically, and predictably realize the design of a collection of individuals within a coherent species or family is by defining the design task as the creation of a family of variation.” (Greg Lynn, in Mark Rappolt (ed.) (2008). Greg Lynn Form. New York: Rizzoli, pp. 173-175).

The point that Lynn makes here, is that what we may evolve, or try to find via genetic algorithms, is structure rather than a haphazardly related set of components. The quote comes from the introductory statement by Lynn about the section called ‘Families’ in his book, and is followed by an article by Brian Goodwin that makes this point from biology. That article is at points quite obscure for non-biologists (such as me) but the point is that variation in evolution is very much structured. Reducing it to randomness and emergence is a simplification that omits the biggest possible insight, namely what is the structure that is (in biology) or should (in architecture) be evolving.

“Creative collaboration is perhaps the main challenge of our
time. Before computing it was not possible, in principle, at
the scale at which we now operate and organize, the scale
of billions and at the scale of everyone’s minds. It is bound
to be difficult but it is, I believe, the hidden question behind
the quest for longlife designing.” (J.C. Jones, 1983. Continuous design and redesign. Design Studies 4(1):60)

I think this quote is particularly insightful, given the fact that Jones wrote it in 1983, nine years before the first collaborative design systems actually came into being.  Jones’ papers are always a delight to read. Being a design methodologist, he often embarks on the writing of a text as a design process, and reflects while writing how the text comes into being. Although at some points distractive, it clearly shows how the author is involved with his own work – which is a good remedy against the impersonalised renditions of methods that we often see.