In the post-digital age, how we design has become as important as what we design. Never before have there been so many, or so varied, techniques and methods at our disposal, each with the capacity to leap only previously imagined frontiers. Designing has become a liquid discipline pouring into domains that for centuries have been the sole possession of others, such as mathematicians, neurologists, geneticists, artists and manufacturers. Post-digital designers more often design by manipulation than by determinism, and what is designed has become more curious, intuitive, speculative and experimental. Each of these new techniques vies for dominance in the competitive world of advanced tooling. They battle to outdo one another, predict the unpredictable, promise the unattainable, materialise the immaterial, solve all our problems, and so dazzle the beholder that all previous paths to architectural wonderment pale into the archives.Our new tools are more malleable than before, so much so that no sooner do they graduate from beta mode than a brighter, fitter or shinier sibling has emerged. As recently as 20 years ago, when I began my architectural education, the methodology of designing buildings had largely remained unchanged in 500 years. Drawings were prepared by hand and evolved from the tentative to the fully costed. Things got built, sometimes in strict accordance with what was drawn, but not always, as records later captured. A few well-known but rare individuals such as Pierre Chareau, the designer of the Maison de Verre in Paris (1932), managed it all without such dogmatic trappings, creating his magnificent pièce de résistance in collaboration with Bernard Bijvoet and the craftsman Louis Dalbet, largely through conversation and modelling. Others of the 20th century, such as Antoni Gaudí, Richard Buckminster Fuller, Jean Prouvé, Cedric Price and Charles and Ray Eames, also pioneered efforts to rethink the habitual practices of the design process, but the tools to develop it remained largely the same. Now we are spoilt for choice, and are frantically catching up with the latest definitions on how the design revolution is to unfold. While a diverse and uncertain future is the only plausible outcome, this issue of AD is an attempt to cut across rhetoric, prediction, manifesto and obsession regarding what beckons for the near future by taking a temperature reading on the near present. It has been a highly enjoyable task that has taken me from London to New York, Copenhagen, Tokyo, Winnipeg, Ypenburg and back to the warren of cramped rooms that somehow sustain the insatiable Bartlett School of Architecture at UCL. At the outset my ambition for the issue was twofold: to let the diversity and quality of content speak for itself; and to resist editorial temptation to tie it all together in too neat an argument. 'Protoarchitecture' is not a recognised word. It is therefore only part real, and that is how I see it -part real, part ideal. It recalls propositions that are prompted by vision rather than convenience. It may...
Developments in computer-aided design and manufacturing are breaking down divisions between designing and making, opening up radical new opportunities for the practice of architecture.
One of a series of installations at the former Queen Elizabeth Hospital, now a dilapidated and abandoned assembly of unoccupied rooms. The work presents a dense cluster of unique fragile plaster-castings where each piece is either suspended or supported from precarious stainless-steel rods. The work recognises the present sense of delicate decay as the hospital slides into a weak and hazardous condition. The castings randomly smash to the floor as slight changes in temperature or air circulation disturb their environment. Alastair McDonald, Eavesdropping, Queen Elizabeth Hospital, London, 2004 Handmade/hand-held modulated polymer 'clinical' surface. Alastair McDonald, Eavesdropping installation. Tom McGlynn, Under Observation, Queen Elizabeth Hospital, London, 2004 Ambient lighting of redundant operating theatre.
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