When is Architecture Not Design?

Saul Fisher

doi:10.7203/laocoonte.0.6.15500

Abstract

If there’s nothing more to architecture than design, and to its attendant thinking processes than design thinking, then core dimensions of the enterprise from production and use angles have no special character over and above their counterparts in general design. Yet that does not appear to be true by the lights of architects or design specialists or the public at large. So what is it, at the core or periphery of the discipline or its objects, that makes architecture not design? The ways in which architecture and design constitute artistic enterprises, drawing on and promoting aesthetic interest, differ such that architecture is not, or at least not only, a branch of or variation on design generally construed.

Highlights

Sort of architectural idea, whether related to composition (Soane, 2000); the unconstructed or not-yet constructed (Scott, 1914); or the intellectual and immaterial, as characterized architectural practice increasingly divorced from construction in modern times
In light of the nature of its objects, representational or built, architecture has at least these attendant cognitive norms: requiring recalibration in thinking about plans for a given built structure, and reasoning to solutions that are incomplete or non-fixed
Given the PH view of design, those norms appear sufficient to embracing autonomism

Summary

Contingent Differences

Objects, and History of Concepts The contingent differences between architecture and design that I have in mind are found in the ways those disciplines are pursued professionally, the sorts of artifacts for which they provide plans or designs, and the historical discussions of each discipline. The word ‘design’ gained increasing currency in professional architectural circles in the West over the course of the twentieth century, as emblematic of growing interests of architects beyond the built environment and buildings in particular Among numerous such instances, Joseph Hudnut organized all architecture-related disciplines at Harvard University into the Graduate School of Design, and in the following year brought in as Chair of the Architecture Department Walter Gropius, who subscribed to the slogan “from the spoon to the city”. There is a yet more compelling reason to see architecture as autonomous from design, rooted in the ways that each discipline is pursued, according to what might be thought of as ways of thinking, or cognitive norms, of their respective professions

Disciplinary cognitive norms

Conclusion