Imperatives of Craft: Pedagogy for Emergent Technologies

Expectations of craft, both digital and manual, situate drawing as the primaryagent of synthetic investigation for architecture. However, with constantlyevolving software, scripting, databases, and various other analyticalprograms added to the architect’s media of brain and pencil, both studentsand curricula face choices about how to position design and skills curriculabetween broad exposure to many tools or narrow specialization in the mediaof the moment. Attempting to locate a school’s position along such agradient means that one is forever playing catch-up to the latest softwareupdates. But in comparison to technology, fundamental design principlesmostly remain constant. The pedagogical outline must be robust in principlebut malleable in structure so that digital and manual tools can evolve withthe industry while architectural principles stay intact.In this paper we show such an approach within the context of an undergraduatefoundation studio. Our approach to digital processes as generativetools involved defining spatial qualities through the lens of edge, zone, andassembly tectonics in a carefully sequenced series of cumulative design exercises.Through these exercises, students are expected to develop a designprocess while engaging in experimentation that demands a hybridizationof manual and digital crafting techniques. This paper explores opportunitiesfor combining the conventional hand drawing and modeling with digitalfabrication, rendering, and making within the virtual environment. A priorityfor this studio is to overcome students’ expectations that digital craftrepresents a final outcome. For this group of undergraduates, manipulationoccurs exclusively within the virtual environment and any output is consideredimmutable. This presents a clear barrier to integrating inquiry as publicdiscourse, iterative design process, and digital craft into the design process.In this pedagogical model we use Semperian tectonic principles as a wayof providing linkage between the different steps in the studio sequence. Examplesof student work will show that as a pedagogical tool, keeping spatialfundamentals stable, we are better able to keep up with the dynamic paceof technological evolution.Positioned at the very beginning of a curriculum this studio constitutes thestudent’s first exposure to digital media in design, much less digital fabrication.This reality presents a pedagogical problem. How do we structurea project that offers necessary skills based training, coupled with designinstruction with an emphasis on integrating manual and digital methodologies?Can this structure be used to reinforce and develop a process of designin which discovery is a result of craft? How can there be tectonic languageor even an attitude towards assembly when one is plotting models? How dowe formulate a studio structure to deliver content that anticipates constructionlogics for materials, structure, environment, and organization ratherthan formal gymnastics divorced from actual limitations? And, within thelarger architecture curriculum, how does this project help prepare studentsto enter an ever changing, technologically diverse, discipline?

Volume Editors
Martha Thorne & Xavier Costa

ISBN
978-0-935502-83-1