In this essay, Jose Luis Mateo defines the architectural process as series of steps with a specific direction. He explains that a project will begin as a vague idea, gain a structure, and finally assume a skin and spatial condition. In his conception, buildings today are composed of skin and bones, separate entities combining to define space. While this may be a successful approach to framing a process, it leaves out possibilities of feedback between structure, space, and skin. Because these elements are hierarchically separated, the project loses its ability to form hybrid and novel architectural conditions.
In citing possible dangers to the process, Mateo argues that projects need ideas that do not restrict formal explorations. My professor last semester would reiterate a similar sentiment: Don't let the project become a building too soon. In Mateo's first two steps, a "phantom" pairs with structural logic. For me, the "phantom" is the set of potential relationships between users, environment, and context that the project must content with. The structure is not the physical members tasked with overcoming the force of gravity, but a framework of decisions that organize space. The interaction and feedback between data (the phantom) and decisions (the structure) produces the hierarchy, rules, and specific geometry necessary for defining space, skin and physical structure. The architectural process is then about gathering data of various types (environment, program, occupancy, codes, etc) and coupling them with analytical tools and form-finding algorithms that translate data into workable architectures.
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For me, the "phamtom" is unclear and undefined existence. Unlike nature of the "phantom", it drives architects to imagine, ask questions, and unveil its existence so that they can come closer to their clear and fine design for projects.
ReplyDeleteData are collected and studied to uncover the "phantom" in his or her own way.
I think that your comment on the interaction between data and feedback hits right on to what Mateo talks about. This idea of the phantom continues to inform and is an influential factor to the entire design process. By exploring and allowing the idea or "phantom" to dictate and guide our thought process, it allows for the design to stick true to the initial approach and not stray away to form a building to soon.
ReplyDeleteCraig,
ReplyDeleteYour response to the article leads me to a very interesting question in my mind. Do you believe, when you state the use of algorithms as a means to inform the design process, that it would literally be a computer taking outside data to inform the design, or in your mind is it more the application of rules and logics upon other data to inform design, which in my mind is a more free, less rigid version of the former? In many cases, the act of math defining form ends with the designer pushing and pulling, tweaking the results - so perhaps this use of algorithms, as it is in practice, should be thought of in theory as well as a means of definition of ideas, not of form.