INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE- RETHINKING THE HUMAN IN TECHNOLOGY DRIVEN ARCHITECTURE

CHANIA 30-31 AUGUST 2011

Thoughts on Digital Architectural

Education:
in search of a digital culture of architectural design

Antonis Papamanolis doctoral candidate

Katherine A. Liapi, Ph.D. associate professor

University of Patras Department of architecture

Haphazard implementation of information
technologies in architectural curriculum.

Lack of an holistic conceptual framework

of digital architectural education.

How can digital architectural design education

set its own criteria and values?
 develop objective science, universal
morality and law, and autonomous art
according to their inner logic

Jrgen Habermas
Modern and Postmodern
architecture(1981)

The digital
and the incomplete project of modernity
Digital media as a collaborator?

Is digital mapping the inner logic of architecture?

Do theoretical discourse & practical methodologies

define the conceptual framework of Digital
architecture?
The logical self-reflection that accompanied the
development of the human sciences in the
nineteenth century is wholly governed by the
model of natural sciences.

In this effort to understand themselves [i.e the

human sciences] by analogy to natural sciences,
the idealistic echo implied in the idea of Geist
(spirit) and of a science of Geist fades into the
background.

Certain experiences cannot be raised to a scientific

level through the method of natural sciences
because they do not aim to confirm and extend
universalized experiences in order to attain a
universal law , rather understand how it
happened that it is so.

Hans Georg Gadamer

Truth and method(1960)
The introduction of information technologies in
architecture

Highlights the discrepancy between scientific means

and ends.

Facilitates and accelerates the alignment of digital

architectural research with the norms of natural
sciences.

A process that reduced all that is worth knowing about

architecture to transparent, productive knowledge

Dalibor Vesely
Architecture in the age of divided
representation(2004)
The digital media of information technologies operate
based on quantifiable elements.

Architectural synthesis is a process that operates

based on non quantifiable concepts.

What aspects of architectural synthesis are marginalized by the introduction of

digital design methods?
The new time is a fact; I exists whether we say yes or no to it
it is a pure given what is decisive in only how we assert
ourselves toward these givens.

What matters is not the what but only the how. That we
produce goods and the means by which we produce them
says nothing spiritually.

Whether we build high or flat, with steel or glass, says nothing

as to the value of this way of building.
Whether one aims for centralization or decentralization in
urban planning is a practical question, not one of values.
But it is exactly this question of values that is decisive.
We must set new values and point out ultimate goals in order
to gain new criteria.

For the meaning and justification of each epoch, even the

new one, lies only in providing conditions under which the
spirit can exist.
Mies Van der Rohe
Werkbund meeting speech
Vienna 1930
The fragmentation of architectural culture into
architectural theory and architectural praxis.
M.Hays
Architecture theory since 1968(2000)

Postmodern architecture as a projection of

disorientation and fragmentation.
F.Jameson
Postmodernism or the cultural logic of late
capitalism(1991)

What do digital architectural spaces illustrate?

Digital architectural culture through digital architectural
education

a. An educational system that cannot rationally answer

the logical question of those subjected to its education
why must we learn that? remains incomplete
b. An educational system that does not afford the
maximum possible degree of freedom to those
educated is bad.
C.Castoriadis
Psychoanalysis or the demand of autonomy(1989)

Are the processes of architectural training emerging in the wake of the digital
revolution incomplete, or even bad?
how we design ultimately effects what we design
B.Kolarevic
Digital architectures (2000)

a. The reification of the digital

Attempts to infuse meaning to digital architectural
artifacts by means of the information technologies applied
during their production are doomed to failure .
M.Goulthorpe
Scott Points: exploring principles of digital creativity (2003)

b. Why we design.
Opportunities for introducing questions of a critical nature
regarding architectural artifacts in a digital media dominated
design process are limited.
R.Martin
Critical of what? (2005)
form follows function remains meaningless so far as we
cannot agree what form, function, or follows mean.
W.Mitchell
The logic of architecture(1990)

A digital architecture projection through a process of transcoding

the invention of a set of terms, the strategic choice of a

language, such that the same terminology can be used to
analyze and articulate two quite distinct types of objects or
texts, or two very different levels of structural reality
F.Jameson

What is the code of digital architectural education?