Module 5
11) DESIGN LOGIC :Design generation process: Role of logic and intuition in conceptgeneration.
Step by step development of design from problem definition, siteanalysis to post occupancy
evaluation as the last stage of design.
12) Contemporary Significant Theory: Ideas of Hassan Fathy who pioneered the use of
appropriate technology for building in Egypt, especially by working to re-establish the use of
mud brick (or adobe) and tradition as opposed to western building designs and lay-outs and
Paolo Soleri's concept of "Arcology", architecture coherent with ecology. Shape of built
environment to come. Floating, walking, plug-in, satellite settlements, earth sheltered etc. Work
of Archigram, Paolo Soleri, Kenzo Tange, Moshe Safdie etc.
Design Logic:
Design can be viewed as a strategy of problem solving in which creative ability utilizes arts &
science to generate solutions to problem situations.
Designers solve problems in many different ways; however, they go through a pattern or
sequence of steps that they have previously found effective for achieving their designs from
conception to completion.
The design process may be a conscious or subconscious effort the designers use on almost every
project.
Design generation process: Role of logic and intuition in concept generation.
Design process as a very complex process which contains two types of intellectual activities:
*Unconscious intellectual activities: which related to the designer‟s intellectual and creative
abilities and intuition.
More psychological and based on imagery, thinking and not on facts.
Less accurate and short term
innovative
*Conscious intellectual activities: This related to the designer‟s rationality and logical
abilities.
Based on set standards, proven facts
Has a model or basis
More accurate
Helps in complex problems
Less innovative
Simple
Methodology of Design process
1. Formulation of Design Problem/ Programming/Data gathering and analysis
2. Schematic design- site analysis/Bubble diagrams/zoning Conceptual Drawing –
Alternatives
3. Design Development and refinement of selected design
4. Construction documentation-Working drawings/specifications
5. Hiring Contractor
6. Contract Administration / Execution
7. Post construction evaluation/ Post occupancy evaluation
Step 1: Programming/Deciding What to Build
The owner and architect discuss the requirements for the project (how many rooms, the
function of the spaces, etc.), testing the fit between the owner’s needs, wants and budget.
Step 2: Schematic Design/Rough Sketches
The architect prepares a series of rough sketches, known as schematic design, which show
the general arrangement of rooms and of the site. Some architects also prepare models to
help visualize the project. The owner approves these sketches before proceeding to the next
phase.
Step 3: Design Development/Refining the Design
The architect prepares more detailed drawings to illustrate other aspects of the proposed
design. Floor plans show all the rooms in correct size and shape. Outline specifications are
prepared listing the major materials and room finishes.
Step 4: Preparation of Construction Documents
Once the owner has approved the design, the architect prepares detailed drawings and
specifications, which the contractor will use to establish actual construction cost and build the
project. The drawings and specifications become part of the building contract.
Step 5: Hiring the Contractor
The owner selects and hires the contractor. The architect may be willing to make some
recommendations. In many cases, owners choose from among several contractors they’ve asked
to submit bids on the job. The architect can help you prepare bidding documents as well as
invitations to bid and instructions to bidders.
Step 6: Construction Administration
While the contractor will physically build the home or the addition, the architect can assist the
owner in making sure that the project is built according to the plans and specifications. The
architect can make site visits to observe construction, review and approve the contractor’s
application for payment, and generally keep the owner informed of the project’s progress. The
contractor is solely responsible for construction methods, techniques, schedules and
procedures.
• The documents and drawings for the project are now complete and construction begins.
Typically with a project of any complexity the architect is retained to answer questions, deal
with clarifications and administer revisions if necessary. The architect also protects the
interests of the homeowner and the integrity of the design. The architect reviews the
invoices, overall costs and scheduling. There is also the option for a homeowner to go the
design-build route – but that’s another post…
Step 7: Project Close Out
The architect can help bring your project to a close by ensuring that it is complete and
ready for use, and that the contractor is entitled to final payment.
Step 8: Post construction evaluation
Step 9: Building occupancy
Step 10: Post occupancy evaluation
• The process of evaluating buildings in a systematic and rigorous manner by the architect,
after they have been built and occupied for some time“
• It is done in order to know if there are any problems being faced.
• If the client is happy or there is any need for change or rectification.
DESIGN POCESS AS GIVEN BY Geoffrey broadbent
•
1. Briefing:
2. Analysis
3. Synthesis
4. Evaluation
5. Implementation
6. Post Occupancy Evaluation
Hassan Fathy
Hassan Fathy’s book Architecture for the Poor, which also appeared in 1973.
The Egyptian architect had originally been trained in Western practice, but by the end of
the 1930s he had come to see the failure of modernism in Egypt – that is, its rampant
destruction of traditional forms, its lack of climate-controlling strategies, and its indifference
to the cultural hierarchy of living spaces.
During the war years, Fathy began work on the Nubian village of New Gourna, in which
he, now rejecting entirely the modernist vocabulary, turned to mud-brick construction
and indigenous vaulting techniques, traditional shading and ventilation devices, and
historical courtyards.
The result, he argued, was not only a much happier population now eager to reclaim the
vestiges of a nearly extinguished tradition but also farmore humane and comfortable
housing built at a fraction of the cost of “modern” housing projects.
Fathy’s case for indigenous techniques was compelling and blatantly anti-modern,
although its full implications would not be felt for some years.
Paolo Soleri's concept of "Arcology" (1919-2013), Italian-born American architect and
designer who was one of the best-known utopian city planners of the 20th century.
Beginning in 1959 with his designs for Mesa City (a desert city intended to house two
million people), Soleri drew up the plans for a series of gigantic urban centers that
extend vertically into space rather than horizontally along the ground.
These megastructures were designed both to conserve the natural surroundings and to
intensify the human activities of living and working by condensing them spatially.
The resulting integrated, total environments, Soleri hoped, would provide for all the
needs of rational, aesthetic human beings.
Soleri coined the term arcology (from architecture and ecology) to describe his utopian
constructions, which he delineated in drawings of great beauty and imagination.
Soleri’s Arcology: The City in the Image of Man (1969) provides a good overview of his
ideas and designs.
In 1970 Soleri began to build a version of Mesa City, though not in the ambitious terms
of the original drawings. In Arizona, between Phoenix and Flagstaff, he began the
construction of a single structure called Arcosanti, a smaller version of Mesa City.
The work, by unpaid students, proceeded slowly and was partially financed by the sale
of the ceramic and bronze wind bells Soleri produced.
The Arcosanti “urban laboratory” was designed to have a population of 5,000, but, at the
time of Soleri’s death in 2013, only about 75 people were in residence.
In 2006 Soleri received the National Design Award for Lifetime Achievement from the
Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum in New York City.
Soleri, Paolo: ArcosantiApartments at Arcosanti, north of Phoenix, Arizona; designed by Paolo
Soleri.RileyOne
Work of Archigram
Archigramwas a publication, begun in 1961, that quickly became known for its
alternative ideas.
Short for ArchitecturalTelegram, Archigramwas produced by the young English
architects Peter Cook, David Greene, Michael Webb, Ron Herron, Warren Chalk, and
Dennis Crompton.
The full Archigramgroup later included Colin Fournier, Ken Allison, and Tony Rickaby.
Though the actual collaborations between these architects were often sporadic and
difficult, the magazine’s agenda called for a holistic vision of the city and its parts as a
living, flowing, pulsing, flexible organism.
Challenging the grid established by Le Corbusier, Archigram’stexts, collages, and comic
book–style designs emphasized the use of anything but 90-degree angles and
thematized the curving and twisting of Le Corbusier’s straight lines. Using bright colors,
a nonstandard format, and an explicitly cut-and-paste style of assembly, Archigram
delivered visions of technologically advanced cities that walked on four legs, so-called
Plug- In Cities that could be stacked and changed like cords in an outlet, and even Instant
Cities that could be flown in and made to sprout like spring flowers in the hands of any
eager architect, critic, or admirer.
Though many of Archigram’sstructures were unbuildable, Peter Cook’s recently built
Kunsthaus in Graz, Austria, with its amorphous blue shape that contrasts with the
traditional architecture around it, gives some indication of the Archigramaesthetic and
the excitement that it can generate.
The work of one member of the Archigramgroup, Mark Fisher, a student of Peter Cook
at the Architectural Association in London, embraced the language and images of the
youth culture that was then blooming in England and elsewhere.
His investigations into inflatable technology led to the Automat in 1968.
It was a user-responsive pneumatic structure supported by internal bracing cables that,
attached to high-pressure jacks, allowed the structure to expand and contract in
response to a user’s weight requirements.
Kenzo Tange
His background:
Kenzo Tange (1913-2005), winner of the 1987 Pritzker Architecture Prize, is one of
Japan’s most honoured architects. Teacher, writer, architect, and urban planner, he is
revered not only for his own work but also for his influence on younger architects.
Tange was in charge of the reconstruction of Hiroshima after World War II. The
Hiroshima Peace Center and Park begun in 1946 made the city symbolic of the human
longing for peace. Architecturally, the Peace Center shows a deep understanding of
traditional culture while at the same time is a signpost in the search for a modern style
in Japan.
His Works:
Tange research and interest in urban planning extended throughout his career.
His "Plan for Tokyo 1960" was the Tange Team's logical response to these problems,
giving thought to the nature of the urban structure that would permit growth and
change. His Tokyo Plan received enormous attention world-wide, for its new concepts of
extending the growth of the city out over the bay, using bridges, man made islands,
floating parking and mega structures.
Few of his buildings include Tokyo City Hall Complex, The Akasaka Prince Hotel (1982)
in Tokyo, SogetsuCenter (1957), the Hanae Mori Building (1979), the Hyogo Prefecture
Museum of History (1982), the Ehime Prefecture Culture Center (1985), theToin School
(1986) in Yokohama.
Tange's only completed project in the United States, to date, is his expansion of the
Minneapolis Art Museum, originally designed in 1911 by McKim Mead & White in the
neoclassic style. Completed in 1975, the expansion, almost doubling the size of the
original 120,000 square foot structure, was accomplished with large symmetrical wings.
Other works outside of Japan include major buildings in Singapore: the Overseas Union
Bank, the GB Building, the Telecommunications Centre, and the Nanyang Technological
Institute.
His theories and arguments
In all of his projects, there is a recurrent theme that Tange has verbalized, "Architecture
must have something that appeals to the human heart, but even then, basic forms,
spaces and appearances must be logical. Creative work is expressed in our time as a
union of technology and humanity. The role of tradition is that of a catalyst, which
furthers a chemical reaction, but is no longer detectable in the end result. Tradition can,
to be sure, participate in a creation, but it can no longer be creative itself."
Moshe Safdie (1938- )
Moshe Safdie, Israeli-Canadian-American architect best known for designing Habitat
’67 at the site of Expo 67, a yearlong international exhibition at Montreal.
Habitat ’67 was a prefabricated concrete housing complex comprising three clusters of
individual apartment units arranged like irregularly stacked blocks along a zigzagged
framework.
Habitat 67 was an idealized, Modernist apartment complex composed of prefabricated
concrete units, stacked in irregular patterns. It was lightweight, efficient with its use of
space and materials, and cost effective. Inspired by the dense cities of the Middle East
and the hillsides of Europe, Habitat 67 encouraged a sense of community as well as a
connection to nature; every unit had access to outdoor terraces and gardens. This was
Safdie's utopian vision: affordable but aesthetic housing that made economical use of
modern materials to bring all the benefits of suburban life into urban centers.Moshe
Safdie grew up into a domain of severe modernist theories, at a period when these
theories had already begun losing some of their strength.
Safdie extended the principles of functional industrialization to a residential complex
that was simultaneously functional and individualized.
Safdie grappled with an old urban problem - one which became exacerbated during the
sixties with the growing profusion of anonymous high-rise buildings in the cramped
urban centers of the United States - and sought to introduce individuality and a rural
quality of life into urban residences.
The theoretical project was implemented (for the international exhibition Expo ’67) as a
modular residential complex which enabled a large degree of freedom in the design of
each one of the residential units, including attached roof gardens.
Peter Eisenman(1932– )
His theories and arguments
Eisenman created his buildings with a set of formal constraints that had nothing to do
with function or program.
His radical formalism lies at the opposite end of the spectrum from Robert Venturi’s pop
contextualism.
Nonetheless, both celebrated the disjuncture of expectations in the understanding of
what architecture is.
Eisenman’s architecture, however, maintained a focus on the design process by seeking
out a self-referential language that excluded the traditional priority of client needs.
For the design of a house he created a type of game in which a cubewas cut, rotated,
sliced, and otherwise manipulated. Whatever was left over was the “house”: function,
siting, weather, and use were given no consideration at all.
He wanted to demonstrate that function is just as flexible as form and that a “house” is a
semantic indicator of an architectural object, not itstypology.
This is different from the views ofRossi, who wanted functionalism to bend tothe
primacy of type.
