Fourteenth International Conference on Design Principles & Practices

Abstract

In a current academic architectural design culture often characterized by parametricism, cybernetics, and online reality, architectural design’s visceral and haptic dimensions have assumed an inferior position in architectural design ideation and process. The design process pursued in many undergraduate architectural programs has assumed an occularcentric modality. Rather than advance a nostalgic, anti-digitally mediated position, the design practices described here deploy haptic means to tender a design process that advances a tactile tectonic grounded in the DNA or patterns of human experience and nature. Thus, design mediates the rupture between the knowledge of matter and the knowledge of form, to achieve a cooperation of instinct (encounter with matter through making) and intelligence (abstraction separate from making) through the lens of what Alvaro Malo would call Homo faber, “a kind of ontological centaur, half immersed in nature and half transcending it.” The origins of this tactile tectonic approach to design can be found in the work of educational theorists Friedrich Froebel, Johann Pestalozzi, and the Psychologist John Dewey’s writings on aesthetic experience. Captivated in the simultaneity of their individual and collective responses to the transformed Froebel-based design pedagogy, students discover that the patterns or design DNA sourced from human experience and nature can inform their future design speculation, decision making, and project outcomes. Transcending Architecture as Optic, the student as a new form of Homo-faber whose “corporeal imagination” advances a “supernature” interposed between human beings and nature aimed that “naturalizes” humankind and “humanizes” nature while revealing the poetics of its Making.