Scarcity of Materials vs. Scarcity of Knowledge
All the respect that we have for the likes of Sam Mockbee and Jeremy Till come from their insistence that the best design comes from creativity working with a lack of materials and/or funds. But for the 99% of architecture (as Till puts it) this type of scarcity is not the driving factor. It's knowledge. It's the lack of an understand of different building types, an unwillingness of architects to explore options. Especially if those options are outside of their Revit library. We are going to be practicing in a discipline that has increasing cast aside knowledge of wood for knowledge of wood patterns that look good in renderings.
So the question is: how do we apply the philosophy of designing with scarcity in a profession that increasingly values process streamlining technology and adherence to the bottom line?
To get to the point where we can start designing using a scarcity of materials as a driving factor, we must comprehensively understand the systems within which we work. This means knowing Revit inside and out. This means understanding every system that can work for a situation. Until we completely understand how the world is asking us to work, we can't take the time to understand what we are working with and why. We have to eat, sleep, and breath the contemporary process that we are inheriting to be able to work with it to produce truly sophisticated architecture.
This is a great point and I look forward to the point in all of our careers where we have enough knowledge of materials and construction processes to be able to begin experimenting with and pushing the boundaries of creating complex construction that looks simple. Often times in a firm, they recommend you to just use details from previous projects rather than "reinventing the wheel", which in some ways I agree with, but it is also exciting to get to a point where you know a detail enough inside and out to be able to change it for lower cost, improved aesthetic, or the better use of materials.
ReplyDeleteI think a lot of the unwillingness to explore options comes from the dramatic change the Revit brought to architectural practice compared to previous programs like Cad. I think in typical firms principles are just now starting to get comfortable doing what they used to do with the old technology and can now begin to explore more.
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