Innovations in architectural technology

Phi Kappa Phi Forum, Summer 2003 by McCleary, Peter

More so than other professions, the discipline of Architecture struggles with the relative importance of deriving its processes of design and construction from imitations of its past, conventions of the present, or the invention of its future.

Most practitioners derive their normative models from present practice.

The role of the retroguard, even rearguard, is interpretive copying of the order of yesterday's archetypes. Among its expressions are the alleged retrogression of retrograde neo-Classicism, post-Modernism, neo-Modernism, and "New Urbanism." Interpretations of the antique are labeled "new."

The avant-garde, pioneers and innovators of a forward movement that embraces progress, devises its creations to express tomorrow's forms. It is a movement that favors the development of continuous change over the flux and reflux of functioning systems, and it totally replaces the stationary state as a reference datum for designing, building, and living.

To a large extent, the innovations of the avant-garde are inventions or contrivances rather than discoveries of some fundamental or emerging principle. Their advancements in theories and practice are in response to a search for order or "principles of form."

Today, in every field of human production, the emphasis is on changing environments and a concomitant search for a novel response. To cope with these changes, architects attempt to formulate new hypotheses. They replace their older theories of order (cosmos) and reexamine recent experiments with the disorientations of deconstructivism (with its instabilities, displacement of equilibrium, and chaotic order). Today, as in several other disciplines, architects speculate on the implications of chaos, catastrophe, or complexity theory with its identification of formal archetypes that represent discontinuous changes in systems.

Whether cosmos or chaos, any system-of-order or order-of-systems in architectural technology must examine the continuum (whole or fractured) that relates matter and materials, systems of production and structure, space and place, the natural environment, and finally the role of technical equipment, processes, and theories in both designing and building.

Let us examine a few aspects of each part of that continuum.

MATERIALS

The architectural vanguard continuously adjusts its "style of expression" in response to the newest building materials of its era. Greek temples were structured with stone columns and beams; Roman basilicas used brick walls, arches, vaults, and domes; Gothic cathedrals had limestone ribs and panel vaults; train stations, market halls, and so on of the Industrial Revolution are of cast, wrought, and "puddled" iron; the Chicago School's high-rises are rolled-steel frames; the mid-twentieth-century Modern Movement espoused reinforced concrete; early-twentieth-century Russian constructivists, mid-twentieth-century British High-Tech, and late-twentieth-century U.S. deconstructionists adopted rolled-steel, braced frameworks. Since 1977, the focus has been on a dematerialization, or transparency, of the wall - and that is achieved by means of steel tension cables and rods supporting glass laminations with silicone joints; the end of the twentieth century saw the introduction of skins of aluminum, titanium, and polycarbonates; this new millennium began with a shift to composites of carbon fiber ("black metal") impregnated with resin; and today some architects imagine that nanotechnology will be the basis of tomorrow's achievements.

Originally, building materials were found raw in nature (logs and mud). Later, natural materials were reshaped (cut stone, lumber) and even later were reformed by pressure and/or temperature (brick, steel). More recently inorganic chemistry's composed materials (concrete) are being replaced by organic chemistry's fusions (polycarbonates) and composites (carbon fiber and resin), and some believe that building materials of the future will be produced morphogenetically.

Until recently, the architect used a limited palette of materials. Louis Kahn regularly composed with a reinforced or prestressed concrete structure, a travertine infill to complete the walls, conventional glass windows, and oak flooring and furnishing. The contemporary architect does not speak of materials, but of "materiality," which means that only after the performance of the building envelope is specified can the material composite be "invented" and then produced in a much larger range of forms.

PRODUCTION PROCESS

The production process transforms natural materials into building materials through the processes of extraction and manufacture while consuming energy, and under the control of equipment (ranging from hand-tools to machines and robots) designed for that purpose. These building materials, fabricated into sub-systems and then assembled into a whole, are thus transformed into complete buildings. The impact of labor and capital (materials, energy, and machines) on the final shape of the building, and the structure of the society that constructed it, is better known than the equally profound effect on the form of buildings that results from the temporal and spatial characteristics of the equipment itself. "Machines" or equipment, like bodies, have oriented directions of movement and concomitant rhythms, or metric measure, in time and space.