BACKGROUND

TRANSLATIONS: REVERSE DESIGN OF PRECEDENTS

By: Diaan van der Westhuizen 

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The theme “Translations” was the driving force behind the 2020 course work for ARPL4002 Contemporary Theory of Architecture. This seminar course exposed students to current philosophical/theoretical positions and discourses in architecture and the built environment through readings, lectures, and discussions. For several years, I have attempted to make complex and critical theoretical ideas about architectural production and the world more accessible to students from diverse backgrounds and experiences. Without implying, or forcing, a notion that architectural theory is somehow the holy grail of successful architectural projects, I proposed to the students that we invert that idea: to rather acknowledge that any design work, successful or not, is framed, substantiated, or built upon some combination of theoretical attitudes, positions, and world views. Architectural projects are, by nature, strategic speculations about what the world could be, and therefore explicitly or implicitly position themselves within a network of values, ideas, and ways of doing. The way for us to recognise these forces and world views at play in and through designs, is to apply different lenses of theory in the ‘readings’ of design.

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The course is not organised chronologically, but rather into a set of leading themes: power and difference, poststructuralism, deconstruction, gender, feminism, and queer theory, postcolonialism, critical vernacular, programming, capitalism, and psychogeography. Under these umbrella themes, complex historical, political, socio-cultural, economic, and material conditions are unpacked through, and situated in, built examples. The students were asked to (1) select a theoretical stream of interest for further reading and (2) to select a case study project for analysis. Right away, students had to balance their interests in a particular stream of thought in architecture with a selected building that they deem demonstrable of these ideas.

Fundamental texts for teaching architecture students consist of comprehensive graphic surveys of architectural precedents, with often limited textual analysis and clearly defined (narrow, yet useful) theoretical focus. Such examples include books like “Form, Space, and Order” (Ching), “Precedents in Architecture” (Clark & Pause), “Analising Architecture” (Unwin), and “Elements of Architecture” (Von Meiss). On the other hand, important theoretical anthologies are predominantly text e.g.,” Theorising a New Agenda for Architecture” (Nesbit), “Rethinking Architecture” (Leach), “The Sage Handbook of Architectural Theory” (Crysler, Cairns, & Heynen) and others. Inspired by book “The Elements of Modern Architecture” by Radford, Morkoc, and Srivastava (2014), the students started exploring theoretical texts and graphic analysis as an iterative process of thinking, analysing, and writing simultaneously.

The aim of the project soon emerged: to reverse engineer possible design processes by looking into a single precedent in greater depth. The work of Rivka and Robert Oxman entitled:” Precedents: Memory Structures in Design Case Libraries” was important in their investigations to understand how ideas translate into built form. (We adapted the Oxman model for the purpose of this investigation—see below). This approach recognises that building precedents can be decomposed into “knowledge chunks” and reassembled as a series of “design stories” (p. 275). In their description, "design ideas" (or issues) set out the position and domain of the design problem, "concepts" are the formulation of ideas through the design task (the solution principle), and "form" speaks to the possible material manifestations of the design (Oxman & Oxman 1993).