What every door should know about itself

What every door should know about itself

Doors have a fascinating duality. Open they become space, part of the 'voids' of architecture: a hole that connects two spaces. Closed they are 'solids': building elements that separate the two spaces. Their interactionwieh humans can be complex, allowing first of all change between the two states of open and closed, as well as recognisable variation in between: ajar, half open, half closed - many recognisable states, often with specific maning.

This duality and interaction makes doors critical for the behaviour and performance of a building. It also makes them prime candidates for intelligent behaviour of the kind that delights me: local, practical, modest. Such intelligence can be observed both n real life, with automatically opening doors and similarly smart recognition of the user, and in design representations, with doors sticking to their walls or otherwise becoming attuned to their context.

What delights me above all is that such intelligence, certainly in a design representation, can be made possible by collecting all constraints on a door and using them to determine the behaviour of the door symbol. It's an interesting perspective: when the door knows enough about itself, it can become intelligent.

Open and closed

Open and closed 

Now that research is so much about grants, one gets confronted with conflicting ideas about research output. Open access and open data are deemed essential for the dissemination of knowledge - and rightly so: even with the vast expanses of the Internet, there's a lot of scientific knowledge that remains inaccessible to the people who should be able to use it, like students, especially at poorer universities that cannot afford all subscriptions to all journals. Naturally, if everything is open and digital, I wonder what's the use of publishers any longer. Editors, reviewers etc. are almost always academics who deliver services just to further their area or career. Any colleague who asked for something like that would have my cooperation and of course any colleague can set up a website for accommodating publications and datasets.

At the same time, we're asked to be careful about intellectual property (IP), both our own and that of others. We have to register background IP when we enter a collaborative venture, administer foreground IP produced in such a venture, note side ground IP produced alongside the venture, and monitor postground IP that is produced afterwards thanks to the venture. Neologisms aside, I accept that IP is important as an asset and we have to protect our institutes' rights, even if we're not talking about formal IP like patents. We have to earn money nowadays and safeguarding IP is a good way of guaranteeing that.

Obviously there's a conflict between opening the door for others to access our publications and data and closing it to protect the IP that's in these publications and data. If one reads a text of mine and learns how to do something as well as I do, what prohibits them from using this knowledge? Or should I obscure some critical details in order to have exclusive rights to the real IP? Sharing knowledge and learning from each other have been hallmarks of science and research, and I'm unwilling to change that.

Even worse is that these issues are sidetracking us from our core business to legalese and managementspeak topics that contribute nothing to the main reasons why one does research: learn and explain. I don't want to spend my days like that; I don't even want to pay managers and lawyers to protect me from that. I prefer a simpler, perhaps naive world where research is an integral part of an academic's work, regardless of grants and IP. And yes, any publication provides open access to knowledge. Free access to the publication is a different matter; as I expect students to pay tuition fees, even if only to treat the education they receive as a privilege, I expect that one pays at least a small sum to be able to read a scientific book or journal. It's not different to any other book or journal.

Properly constructed walls

Properly constructed walls

When one sees a wall one can never tell what's behind the outer layers. The paint and plaster may be immaculate but underneath the bricks can be rotten, thrown together haphazardly or full of holes. Reversely, the paint may be flaking off, the plaster cracking but otherwise the wall can be sound, just in need of some light maintenance. It's often difficult to know.

I guess it all melts down to what one wants to do with the wall. It's condition may be acceptable depending on one's requirements and purposes. A flaking wall indoors makes little sense but in a garden it may be acceptable as a picturesque element, something weathered and full of reminiscences. Even a crumbling wall might do in a garden but one wouldn't have it indoors. It would n't just be unity and dirty, there's little if anything one can do with a crumbling wall: one can't use it to support a floor or a roof, or to separate spaces; it might be useless even for hanging up shelves or pictures.

It's always like that: it's not the wall but what one wants to do with it in the particular location and situation. It might be because we call too many things "a wall". If we used more specific terms, we might be able to express more precisely what we want. It can also be that a wall doesn't have a purposeful existence without a space to bound and support: what we want may be part of the space and it just gets projected on the poor wall.

Solids & voids

Solids & voids

It's quite uncommon to see building elements and spaces represented in the same way. Most of the time, the one is implicit in the other (as with spaces in conventional architectural drawings) or is a product of the other (as with spaces in BIM). Usually, its the spaces that are implicit or derivative. In architecture, we may shape space but in fact we build solid elements; what is left over within the volume of a building is the 'voids' (a bad name because spaces contain quite a lot). A figure-ground reversal is seldom applicable to the duality of solids and voids in architecture.

This is one of the reasons why I'm interested in alternative representations like graphs. Using graphs one can describe both building elements and spaces in the same way, si that their complementary character becomes apparent. After that, it's possible to see different patterns emerge, patterns that describe and possibly explain stuff one's only vaguely aware of.

Analysis and synthesis

Analysis and synthesis 

I've always been fascinated by analysis, by the means that help explain something and the insights they produce. Especially with computers, their ability to calculate large quantities of complex data in quite short times made me believe that computer simulations are the most important contribution of digital means to designing. When it comes to synthesis, however conceptually elegant, automatic generative systems are no match to human creativity yet.

The problem is that the promise of computerised analysis has yet to be fulfilled. Technical progress seems to be limited by the lack of serious interest by those who would benefit from analyses that go beyond the capacities of rules of thumb, normative abstractions and the usual conventional stuff that serves as alibi in architectural design. I spend days in meetings on computational and data-driven approaches that are mostly about decision support but it's unclear where the support is founded on; it's all about the decisions. Well, as far as I'm concerned, analysis is the foundation of any decision, any design action, as well as most communication. Unfortunately, there seems to be an important prerequisite: some goal to be achieved, some constraint to be met, something that requires transparent, effective and reliable reasoning. If synthesis is about other matters, a self-contained exercise, then analysis is a just formality.

Solids & voids

Solids & voids 

It is unfortunate that many perceptions of architecture consider only its solids: the building elements that comprise a building. The voids, the spaces bounded by those elements, are at least as important. It's in these spaces that we deploy our activities; it's for the benefit of these spaces that we construct these building elements. Yet, I wouldn't consider the solids as just means for the voids. The relation of the two is more complex and interesting than that. Thankfully, a few researchers have realised that and worked on useful formalisms and produced some interesting insights.

There's a lot that we still haven't properly explored in the duality of solids and voids in architecture but what never ceases to surprise me in a most pleasant way is that once once acknowledges it, many problems can be easily resolved. Propagating properties, constraints, behaviour or performance from solids to voids and vice versa becomes a transparent, straightforward solution to all kinds of information and design issues - and the existing techniques help a lot. In fact, I would argue that this duality should be a foundation of architectural thinking; not something one just says and then forgets but an operational correlation that supports a complete toolkit of methods and techniques.

Orthodoxy and orthopraxy

Orthodoxy and orthopraxy

Design methods are split into two categories: proscriptive ones that tell you what is acceptable and prescriptive ones that tell you how to do it. This distinction between orthodoxy and orthopraxy is quite fundamental. One can fine it everywhere, including in religion: the ancient Greeks and Romans were arguably more into orthopraxy (making offers and following rituals) than orthodoxy (developing a dogma).

In archtiecture, proscriptive methods tell you that a classical or modernist building is what you should make. That's what matters and in order to do it, your building should include elements from the corresponding canon. It's not possible to make a classical building without elements from the classical orders.

Prescriptive methods can be seen as a reaction to proscriptive ones: it's not enough to know the final state of a design, we need to know the way to reach it. So, prescriptive methods love algorithms and sequences of well-defined steps. They tell you to do first this, then that and so on. If you're lucky, they also tell you when to stop.

One might be tempted to see proscriptive and prescriptive methods as complementary: by putting the two together, one would have a complete, strong method. However, I fear that any union would bring out the weaknesses of both. Proscriptive methods restrict designing to arbitrary systems and conventions leading to stagnation and frustration. From an intellectual viewpoint, it's interesting how they operate by excluding all other options but adopting them can be quite claustrophobic. Prescriptive methods, on the other hand, tell you too little to feel confident. They often amount to hill climbing: taking small steps towards some local optimum that may not be the best option or even good enough - but then you cannot know that as you move blindly around.

The recurring fascination with generative systems

The recurring fascination with generative systems 

Soon after I had entered the area that used to be called CAAD (Computer-Aided Architectural Design), I realised it was motivated by two quite distinct and actually conflicting ambitions: to computerise drawing and to automate design. The design automators were in power back then, leading the area with creeds like "intelligent design versus stupid drawing". I didn't agree; I have always been fond of drawing and fascinated by visual representations in general.

Still, when the democratisation of computing meant that computerised drawing became commonplace and hence dominant, I was less than pleased for the basic reason that much in computerised drawing was not about new, intelligent representations but about producing the same old stuff on paper, only seemingly more efficiently (people think that efficiency is merely the ability to change easily the content of digital documents). What followed is what one can see in architectural education and practice today: an overemphasis on visualisation, combining poorly readable line drawings with lavishly rendered perspectives, meaningless or jittery walkthroughs and often no time to study all those images for the benefit of the design.

The funny thing is that design automation persists and is resurrected by every other generation of students and your researchers, who somehow inherit or more frequently rediscover the appeal of the same techniques for generating patterns one can pass off as schematic designs. Among them, those relating to space allocation never fail to come up: one makes a list of rooms, determines some clustering of these rooms, uses some elementary way of arranging them in a floor plan, usually without the benefit of architectural knowledge (e.g. spatial typology), makes some manual adjustments to make the layout look less like the product of a child playing the architect, and calls it a design. It's amazing how easily people believe in the same old, tired techniques. It could make one believe that they have some inherent power but I suspect that they're simply easy enough to be rediscovered again and again. That they lead to nothing and are forgotten for a generation or so is a truer indication of their power.

Art or science

Art or science 

Is architecture (or design, in general) an art or a science? I've had the feeling that this was a rather unproductive debate long before I came across the suggestion that both art and science are just two facets of the same human intellectual attempt at improvement, exploration and understanding (e.g. in Lisa Jardine's work) or unifying approaches to human cognition through viewpoints like information processing or problem solving (e.g. by Herbert Simon). My key problem with such lofty debates is that they are exactly sidetracking us from fundamental issues in our cognition and history towards superficial demarcations that simply confine our thinking within conventions and arbitrary goals. I'd rather spend my time trying to unravel the former issues than servicing supportive silos. One doesn't get thanks for doing so but the satisfaction that comes from even minor revelations can be great.