Study Architecture 
ProPEL 
Author(s): Adam Dayem
Architecture’s positivist tendencies lead it toward incorporating the latest design tools and theories into its working methods at a fast pace.1 The potential benefits of embracing the newest tools and modes of thought are clear, the world desperately needs novel designs to cope with accelerating cultural and environmental change. However, at certain moments it is productive to pause, and consider how traditional or historical ways of working and thinking are still relevant, and can remain so by recasting their roles in the discipline. Taking the conference theme ‘Repair’ as a prompt to value and reconsider things existing, this project looks at how a traditional way of working (physical modeling) and a historical way of thinking (structuralist theory) were combined in the pedagogy of an architectural design studio. In this studio, students were asked to engage older, or even seemingly outdated ways of working and thinking, to develop novel spatial matrices for housing (figure 1). These spatial matrices were intended to resist the normative tendencies of housing blocks to become highly repetitive floors connected by vertical structure, while still providing students a framework in which to resolve program and spatial networks as support for social relationships within and adjacent to the project. The spatial matrices were developed through a process combining physical and digital modeling in a precise and intentional pedagogical sequence. While physical modeling is still prevalent in architectural education today, its role can be seen increasingly as an afterthought to digital modeling – as merely a physical manifestation of a series of decisions previously settled through the use of digital design tools, rather than its own independent way of conceiving and perceiving space. The pervasive use of computers in architectural design has produced and enforces a type of digital thinking that places great emphasis on quantification and the causal linking of concepts and spatial ideas.2 If one takes the position that a degree of indeterminacy and ambiguity in the linking of concepts and spatial ideas is important, both in terms of the process of design and in how buildings work in the world, how can indeterminacy and ambiguity be allowed back into a way of working with architectural models?
https://doi.org/10.35483/ACSA.AM.113.43
Volume Editors
Sara Jensen Carr & Rubén García Rubio
ISBN
978-1-944214-48-7
