Since long time Architectural Technology, perhaps due to its development, struggles to move inside stable borderlines and it’s forced to wonder about some new boundaries of its research scopes and its role within contemporary archi-tectural making.
This development has, partly, helped to relaunch the contribution of the discipline to the education of an architect “researcher”. An important issue that leads us to consider “knowledge” as a central activity in design processes, and to focus on problematic relationships between the architect and the many specialists that are today involved in environmental transformation and archi-tectural making.
Otherwise it is also true that the most recent organization of the sector, only partly ratified at competitive examination level and at other disciplinary area meetings, have proposed boundaries more and more “fringy” and actions often not so justified. A framework difficult to check that not always has given clear contributions in terms of innovation and advancement and that, above all doesn’t help the actual views to direct their own choices on based research and to define their own curricular profiles; much less helps each Operative University Unit to put themselves up for a role of reliable guide and service to their territory.
To this it is added the damage suffered by the sector inside the faculties, where it is more and more difficult to acquire legitimacy according to the role and the responsibility that the sector could/should carries out at the design level and at different level of educative processes.
The 5° Seminar OsDotta, while defining seminar thematic choices and final workshop, as proposed by PhD course of Reggio Calabria, suggested some remarks on these criticalities.
It’s preliminarily needed to affirm the necessity that ours declaratory judge-ments, related to ongoing innovation or future implementation, do not neglect
1Mediterranea University of Reggio Calabria.
Massimo Lauria (edited by) Produzione dell’Architettura tra tecniche e progetto. Ricerca e innovazione per il territorio = Architectural Planning between build and design techniques. Glocal oriented research and innovation, ISBN 978-88-8453-988-5 (online) ISBN 978-88-8453-990-8 (print) © 2010 Firenze University Press
“the practice” of design and the possibility that through it, some of the conse-quences that all decisions have on Architectural making and on environment, could be anticipated; all that, looking at the most recent meanings of the “the architect’s craft”, and keeping in mind all responsibilities recognized to it at National and European level (among the other, Directive 85/384 EECs and new standards on OO.PP _Public Works).
A trade that, according to the complex profiles of contemporaneity, less and less involves the problems inherent the subjectivity of each experience;
rather concerning the objectivity of a common, shared and concerted way of doing. A trade notoriously not simple: being in an unstable balance, among art, science and technique, among the necessity to know and the need to trans-form, between tradition and innovation; a trade that acts according to innova-tion and creativeness, but also usefulness. Aspects that don’t allow us to tack-le it in an exclusive way, through objectivity’s tools or scientific ones, and even with the tools of simple formalism or, worse, of the abstractness. A trade that, in each situation, needs many “external input.” An “art of border”, differ-ent from all other figurative and plastics ones; more than all others conditioned and conditioning; characterized, contrary to the others, by an essential distance between the “artist” and the “work.”. In other word, a contaminated art and a trade, more than the others, forced to face multidisciplinary system and for which the relation with all different experts is becoming more and more com-plex and controversial.
Inside this issue, there is a tendency to consign techniques and tech-nologies to engineering specialities playing merely supporting roles.
A still old open question and our task is still to wonder which technolog-ical education is needed to better place architects in the working world; talking again, in research as well as in teaching, about how to do things; reconsidering that techniques themselves today are more than ever “materials” of design.
Many speeches have been made and from different points of view on the relationship between technique and architectural design; nevertheless, it’s a still open question, permanently developed and more and more structured, considering that technique, even with reference to architecture, is not at all homogenous.
On the occasion of the 5thOsDotta workshop we proposed PhD students to apply themselves starting from results of some seminaries carried out at their own Universities, concerning three different approaches and three different type of techniques: those “material”, those “organizational” and, finally, those “mor-phological”, which are identified with the communication and language’s techniques that are not less important than the others, also in comparison to our objectives.
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They all are essential techniques for “doing” architecture; and could be defined, as just said, “materials” for architecture, and according to this mean-ing technique, as well as cultural and social apparatuses, is a “material”, dis-tinguishing, with Gregotti, among “subjects” and “material”; considering, the seconds more complexes of the “subjects”; being materials also the culture, the relationship with customer and with the users, the technical level of enterprise, our abilities in interpreting reality and our intents; they all are things that in an architectural design we acquire, select, reorganize, with the purpose to experiment and produce non casual transformations.”
An other principle that contributes to better operatively explain the mean-ing of our argument is the fact that the techniques, not only are not homoge-neous for natural reasons, but even stable; each of them, in fact, introduces spe-cific conditions of development, conservation and accumulation. A considera-tion that, joined with ethical demand of considering techniques not to be neu-tral in comparison to objectives of progress – this is the ontological issue of the techniques to which we should address our interests concerning sustainabil-ity in architecture – could perhaps conceptually postpone to a “design’s tech-nique” able to just involve aesthetical, functional and ethical anxieties with the same intensity.
Basically, we have to ask to the architectural design making the task of developing an own technique according to this level of complexity: putting together different technical fields, with the homogeneous aim of preserving/changing.
It needs, then, to do everything possible to overcome conflicts born from the fact that, in the last century, some theorist of architecture have expressed – and, partly, express still today – a kind of distrust about technical thought;
that’s, despite from the XVII century forward technique has become an essen-tial tool in increasing knowledge and improving human life conditions.
This fact implicitly brings to wonder what relationships exist among technique and science. Once the distinction was clear, technique had to do with the problem of knowledge, beyond every instrumental objective. Today the relationship is very narrow: it doesn’t exist scientific discovery that isn’t based on a technical research and on such a tools special created for that research; also science, basically, is subjugated to technical development, more than to human and society needs. A fact, for many researchers – among whom, Umberto Galimberti – that presents some contradictions and, above all, risky for humanity, and that suggests us maintaining a certain distance between science and technique, safeguarding a difference among thinking and doing.
So science could/should become a true ethics of the technique, recover-ing its humanistic value. A science devoted to humanity, not to technique, a place of the thought that sets limits. Only in this way, if really technique cannot be over-come, we could avoid to be dominates, facing us against the idea to can be free from the aim of our “doing” (see Bobbio, in The praise of meekness).
The question is still more open and perhaps has a greater interest for us as designers if we consider some relationships among technique, art and sci-ence. The instability of technique is also in its never–ending research of innovation. For it, in fact, to overcome itself is natural. It is so also for sci-ence even if, in comparison to technique, pretends a recognition of eternity.
While it is very difficulty to speak about an art that overcomes itself.
An important distinction that creates conflicts, but that can also favour the dialogue among the three spheres, if faced with the correct criticality.
However we can better unravel in these not simple questions if we short-ly remind some developing aspects of the different approaches to the problem.
For ancient Greek the art was the only way to apply the great theories of the science. The art – defined tekné, or rather that is between the practical doing and the modalities of knowing – two things in one – was the expression of relationship between science and physical world.
This type of approach lasted centuries, even if accompanied by a lot of changing and some typicalness/topical aspects, as during Gothic period when the purpose of the construction lay in considering knowledge and technical
“miracle” even as forms of spirituality.
Its crisis occurred with the coming of mechanization: in the 1859, in a passage concerning London Universal Exposure, Marx wondered “what’s about Volcano compared with Robert & Company, about Jupiter in the face of the lightning–rod? “ With this affirmation he questioned the whole previ-ous “mystical” apparatus, technique took the place of miracle.
The Modern movement tried to propose some alternatives to a world imprisoned by techniques and consumption, for which the tools of market pro-duction would have been able to contribute to renew art and set free society. An illusion as well as an utopia, considering that production sector and market were not quite interested to the problems of the art.
This gave the start for the crisis in which we now find us, that expresses itself through a sort of division, a dualism between technologists and formal-ists. With the result that the ones and the others, closed in their own enclosures, hardly succeed in having a suitable relationship with real problems.
For some – among these Negropontes – a solution can come from the elec-tronics and information technology world, the so–called invisible techniques.
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A world, sometimes, compared to the ancient mythology, that needs to project always forward its own ideas and that persuades us to worry in exclu-sive and frantic way of our future.
Other similar pointers come from a certain culture of design, that starts from the idea of a designing decomposed in specialized parts; a sort of hybridization with publicity, with fashion, with multimedia, with communica-tion and the research of the wonder at any cost, with the unceasing research of success.
They are contemporary driving positions and concepts but they are also extraneous to the statutes of the architectural tradition, whose peculiarities are:
besides creativeness and innovation, also some other essential concepts, as safe-guard, placement, rooting and permanence.
What said doesn’t mean that the “ways of doing” remained those of once. Novelties, for who practice the trade of architect are many, their way of doing is changed: just thinking about the actuality of management and techniques’ control that have introduced into the studying of architecture, economy and managerial ability; about the procedural tendencies introduced by European Community that has turned the handcrafts of design studies into service society; about the problem of specializations and relative tech-niques that have broken up the design homogeneity; about the indefeasible use of computer in designing, that has brought to design at one to one scale, not more for following approximations; about the use of very diversified semi finished products and components, also fungible in the constructive assem-blages; about the dominant idea of architectures as “event”, jointed with publicity logo with the name of its author, who has become more important than the work in itself.
These are only some of the novelties with which the architect has to face his work and on which has to work, strengthening the idea that architecture cannot give up facing reality. Reality exists and represents our field of prac-tice; we can interpreted it, in order to decide if and how transform it; but we cannot be exempted from know it and from responsibility of making our work with the awareness of how much our decisions will engrave on its future; a non simple fact because we live in the age of sudden changes and uncertainty.
The relationship between theory and practice becomes essential, in facing these complexities and these uncertainties, radically modifying the attitude of architectural culture that, for long time, strives for considering techniques, now as negative and depersonalized phenomenon induced by productive ratio, now as mythical opportunity to overcome every problem.
According to an opposing trend it is perhaps useful sustaining a third course that offers some interesting ideas regarding the question of executive techniques. It is that proposed by Martin Heidegger (The question of technique, 1953), for whom the common representation of technique doesn’t tallies with its true meaning.
It is necessary to disclose the concept of “instrumentality” according to its essence and this is possible connecting the concept of “technique” with that of “causality”, summed up, in its turn, in the Aristotelian theory of the four causes: materialis, formalis, finalis and efficiens (material, form, utili-ty and abiliutili-ty of who work), that concur, all together, in establishing a same goal.
The four causes are the ways of being responsible, that are connected among them, this means to make possible what it is not yet: the “making”, that for the Greek stays for the artistic making not separated by the mate-rial making.
Following Martin Heidegger, basically, the building techniques become the central category from which depart for questioning on the meaning of architec-tural making. So the idea that the technician moment is subordinate to that of the function and of the form considered by many, the only ones able to confer “artistic” value to the construction, is overcome.
It will be probably possible modify usefully the debate inside architectural discipline and, perhaps, recompose the lost unity of Technology of Architecture, putting it at the service of the trade of the architect; a trade, as affirmed at the beginning of these notes, that involves less and less the prob-lems inherent the subjectivity of doing; rather concerning the objectivity of a common, shared and concerted way of doing according to the complex profiles of contemporaneity.
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MASSIMOLAURIA1