Revealing Architectural Design

Methods, Frameworks and Tools

Philip D. Plowright

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317918738
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

Revealing Architectural Design examines the architectural design process from the point of view of knowledge domains, domain syntax, coherence, framing, thinking styles, decision-making and testing. Using straightforward language, the book connects general design thinking to underlying frameworks that are used in the architectural design process.

The book provides historical grounding as well as clear examples of real design outcomes. It includes diagrams and explanations to make that content accessible. The frameworks and their methods are described by what they can accomplish, what biases they introduce and the use of their final outcomes.

Revealing Architectural Design is an advanced primer useful to anyone interested in increasing the quality of their architectural design proposals through understanding the conceptual tools used to achieve that process. While it is intended for undergraduate and graduate students of architectural design, it will also be useful for experienced architectural practitioners. For the non-architect, this book opens a window into the priorities of a discipline seldom presented with such transparency.

Section III

Frameworks and Methods

Chapter Eight

Patterns

In every country, the orderly art of building was born from a pre-existing seed. Everything must have an antecedent; nothing whatsoever comes from nothing, and this cannot but apply to all human inventions. We observe also how all inventions, in spite of subsequent changes, have conserved their elementary principle in a manner that is always visible, and always evident to feeling and reason. This elementary principle is like a sort of nucleus around which are assembled, and with which are consequently coordinated, all the developments and the variations of form to which the object was susceptible. Thus did a thousand things of all sorts reach us; and in order to understand their reasons, one of the principal occupations of science and philosophy is to search for their origin and primitive cause. This is what ought to be called type in architecture as in every other area of human invention and institution.

Quatremère de Quincy¹

The use of patterns to model composition and geometry can be found at the heart of numerous approaches to architectural design. Many architects maintain a belief that ‘architectural design is essentially pattern making’² and that a ‘central purpose of architecture is to bring order to chaos: to create recognizable patterns of material construction that might allow the meaning of habitation to emerge’.³

As developed through the history of the discipline, composition through patterns is about the application of rules based on the relationships between architectural elements of various scales. It is better to think of the rules as general principles broadly applied, or guiding rulesets, rather than ‘letter of the law’ directions. This distinction is important as the type of repetition used by designers is fuzzy. Fuzzy repetition allows variation in application while still maintaining adherence to core principles. Quatremère de Quincy, the late Enlightenment theorist, described the rulesets as types. He considered a type as a pattern that detailed the essence of an architectural situation and contained a set of principle relationships between the parts. In architecture, the most prominent source of these rulesets is the extraction of relationships from previously successful projects and naturally occurring events through the analysis of precedent or case-studies. The way people use a space creates an identifiable structure between the parts – a pattern. If that pattern is successful in supporting a particular use of a space, it should be found over and over again in the same context, thus becoming a type. The repetition of successful patterns is the basis of traditional approaches to design. When used as a vernacular, the patterns are not at an active level of awareness. However, patterns and types can be used consciously to give architectural designers access to the social use of space through fundamental spatial configurations. Patterns are repeated in composition because they work in the context where they are found.

Patterns in architectural design embed social information in formal composition – how a space is used by a person is expressed in its shape, volume, adjacency, qualities (light, sound, textures, atmosphere), and distribution (where elements are found within the space). If the formal aspects of a space are a strong reflection of the use – the space supports specific rituals such as eating, sleeping, or gathering – and the use is not unique, then there is little need for active decision-making on the part of the designer. The reproduction of the same composition should bring the same successful type of occupation and social use. The space is not duplicated exactly, but the formal principles of the space are extracted and reapplied in a fuzzy repetition. Instead of applying judgement criteria based on framing or starting bias, the designer can focus on developing a proposal based on ‘geometric schema’.⁴ Geometry is directly accessible by the tools architects use, such as the drawing techniques of plan, section, and elevation, or models and formal diagrams. Architectural tools have been developed to provide direct access to the core type of content that is found in architectural design, such as mass, void, texture, colour, shape, adjacency, grid, light, volume, rhythm, procession, and circulation. Tools such as plans generally respond to grids, circulation, and rhythm; sections address volume, voids, and vertical relationships; elevations represent massing, texture, and shape; and diagrams detail adjacencies and intangibles such as light, sound, or view.

A pattern-based framework is considered to be an internal method as it does not require the transfer of content between domains of knowledge. Methods based on a pattern framework might have external content embedded into spatial configurations, such as cultural values and vernacular practices. As a design method, only the spatial relationships are used explicitly; everything else is ignored. This process assumes that all activities and events are reflected in how a space is arranged. For example, a designer must develop a space for several small groups of people to gather at the same time in order to discuss sensitive information. Social content might include a need for privacy, a light quality that supports a sense of intimacy, discrete (and discreet) entrances and exits from the location, and a sense of ritual and solemnity. In terms of architectural spatial configuration, this might translate into patterns that include several small, convex spaces that support the need for gathering, indirect light coming from high on a wall for soft light levels, circulation paths that allow movement into the space from multiple directions, and a certain isolation of the interior spaces from each other. The spatial configuration can be diagrammed in its generality and its patterns identified, including the relationship between parts of each pattern. Once the patterns and their components are identified, the spatial configuration can later be reapplied in the same type of context without needing to address the social forces that originally formed it explicitly.

The history of patterns as a source for architectural design stretches very far into the past. Pattern-based approaches have been present since the earliest treatises of architectural design, existing as a series of rulesets and best practices communicated to other architects. Vitruvius, in his De Architectura, or Ten Books of Architecture, identified patterns for use in architectural design on various scales when he gave instruction on how to locate a city, lay out healthy streets, site public buildings, configure temples (e.g. column placement), and design and construct houses.⁵ When Vitruvius discussed the design of a farmhouse and instructed that ‘the kitchen be placed on the warmest side of the courtyard, with the stalls for the oxen adjoining, and their cribs facing the kitchen fire and the eastern quarter of the sky’,⁶ he was communicating a generalized and repeatable pattern of spatial configuration. There was no discussion of why the oxen should face the fire, or why the kitchen belonged on the warmest side – these decisions were embedded in the rulesets. Vitruvius’ rulesets for a farmhouse kitchen can be easily diagrammed using architectural tools. Starting to design a new farmhouse, the patterns of spatial composition can be extracted and applied without ever worrying about the cultural mythology that places belief in the fact ‘that oxen ought to face only in the direction of the sunrise’.⁷ The same approach was updated for the twentieth-century architect by Christopher Alexander, although in a much more sophisticated way in order to accommodate complexity. Alexander addressed the application of pre-existing formal relationships when he wrote:

it makes the most sense to think of the inside as a FARMHOUSE KITCHEN, with a big table in the middle, chairs around it, one light hung over the center, a couch or armchair off to one side […] When I start to imagine this, and imagine entering it, I realize that it is more important than I realized to keep it back, slightly, from the door, to make something out of the ENTRANCE ROOM that lies between.⁸

The FARMHOUSE KITCHEN is a pre-existing set of relationships between architectural elements. The relationships are not exact – the size of the table, the distance from the table to the comfortable sitting area ‘off to one side’, the style or intensity of the light – none of these elements is explicit. However, the relationship represents a pattern that can be repeated.

Information used in a pattern-based framework is generally addressed as typology or the study of types in architectural design. A type is created by a ‘process of reducing a complex of formal variants to a common root form’,⁹ which basically means that a large collection of architectural objects with common relationships can be understood by their shared characteristics regardless of individual differences. Rafael Moneo says it more clearly when he notes the fact that architecture ‘belongs to a class of repeated objects, characterized, like a class of tools or instruments, by some general attributes’.¹⁰ A repeated object is identified by the core characteristics of its formal composition. A hammer is a hammer because there are core and persistent compositional characteristics found in each and every manifestation of the hammer. When it comes to describing the root form of the hammer, that which makes it not a screwdriver, an axe, or a pick, a relationship can be identified between a handle and a head with at least one flat striking area. The handle could be longer or shorter but there will be a range that is common (finishing hammer to sledgehammer). The head might have two striking surfaces or one with a claw, pick, waffle, or other variation. Material, or even colour, has not entered the description of the hammer type as these are non-critical. The handle might be wood or steel, wrapped in rubber, painted, varnished, or left bare; the head might be steel, wood, or rubber – all depending on the application. Every variation is still a hammer because it satisfies the essential pattern of relationships between elements (handle attached to flat striking head). A new hammer can be designed by applying the hammer type to the context in which it is to be used. The type will repeat the basic relationships between parts, the context will allow modification of those relationships to fit the purpose. This is what is meant by fuzzy repeatability – common set of relationships is satisfied while the particular application allows for variations to occur as long as they do not break the core relationships.

In the same way as a hammer can be considered as a formal pattern identified as a type, architecture contains patterns which are types. These are standardized patterns of relationships among architectural objects found over and over again within our inhabited spaces. An architectural object can be at various scales – from an element, such as a column, to a building, such as a courthouse. The key factor is understanding architectural types not as the object but as the relationships the object represents in architectural syntax. As such, the core of an architectural type will be found in the spatial configuration (circulation, gathering, public/private, entrance), the articulation of the surface (transparency, translucency, opacity, solidity), and the structural systems (span length, volume, void) as these define the core information of any formal composition. Patterns and types in architecture will always be defined by internal characteristics of formal features, such as dimension, distance, massing, surface quality, aspect ratio, and scale. These formal features set up a situation that allows a space to be washed with a certain quality of light, or that projects a particular psychological atmosphere.

Patterns and types do not tend to be supported as a design process in curren...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Section I Conceptual Foundations
• Section II Thinking Tools
• Section III Frameworks and Methods
• Bibliography
• Index