Chapter 13: Do Not Resuscitate! Thoughts on the Origins of a Paradigm
Tom Maver
This contribution is a personal account from someone who considers himself to be privileged to have had his academic career exactly contemporary with the extra-ordinary development, over just 5 decades, of computer aided architectural design – a wonderful period of intellectual struggle and paradigm change - arguably the first in architecture for some 300 years. As a PhD student the author was fortunate to hear Russell L Ackoff – educated as an architect, but celebrated as a world renowned leader in Operations Research (OR) and Systems Theory – define the ideal state as one in which every individual can obtain whatever she/he wants and in which he/she has an expanding set of desires… Ackoff set out the necessary and sufficient conditions to achieve this state, as:
Politico-economic (PLENTY)
Scientific (TRUTH)
Ethico-moral (GOOD)
Aesthetic (BEAUTY)
Around that time, I was wrestling with how to deploy a massive, frightening, KDF9 mainframe in the analysis of data gathered laboriously from post-occupancy appraisal of what was increasingly recognised as failing post-war buildings across the UK. This sparked my interest in the power of statistics (in particular the relevance of the extreme value function to rational design) and in the power of computers (however frustrating with which to communicate).
As a junior member of the Building Performance Research Unit, set up by Prof Tom Markus, I was presumptuous enough to imagine that – rather than appraise the failings of buildings already built – we might, through the techniques of OR and the power of the computer (however powerless they were at that time) – anticipate the cost, performance and image of buildings while currently on the drawing board: the notion of a “virtual prototype” as opposed to a physical prototype. Such youthful arrogance yielded a paper in Building journal (in 1970) entitled “A Theory of Architectural Design in Which the Rôle of the Computer is Identified,” a presentation at the first conference of the Design Methods Group (DMG) at MIT and a simplistic software program entitled “PACE – Package for Architectural Computer Evaluation” that claimed to predict from a primitive coordinate-based representation of a small building – its cost/performance characteristics.
The DMG in the USA was paralleled in the UK by the Design Research Society (DRS) in the UK that gave a platform to the early heroes of design theory and methodology, such as Bruce Archer and J C Jones. The DRS and the DMG jointly sponsored the major conference The Design Activity in 1973.
Three years earlier, the Royal Institute of British Architects donated the princely sum of £2,000 to advance R+D in the field – an investment never repeated but which was to trigger, over the next 40 years, a multi-million funding from the UK. The Research Councils and from various programmes of the European Union in the work of ABACUS – the Architecture and Building Aids Computer Group, Strathclyde.
As we know, in those early days, the architectural profession generally was ill-disposed to such nonsense. Whereas students seemed keen to hear of the new technology, tutors and practitioners were openly hostile [my little article in the newsletter of the local chapter of architects “What’s a Drawing Board Daddy?” got an angry response]. However, our ability to refine, sophisticate and validate the predictive capability of computer-based models was increasing pace. Nowhere was this more explicit and relevant than in the field of energy prediction (originally deemed by practitioners as having nothing to do with them!). With the signal contribution of Prof Joe Clark, the software ESP was created and, coupled with our ability to generate realistic images of buildings in their landscape (visual impact analysis –VIA), the interest of progressive practices was engaged. The validation of visualisations was relatively easy but the validation of energy models required a major international investment.
Collaboration with a few progressive architectural practices in both live design projects and controlled design scenarios was able to establish:
Applications of advanced computer-based models were able to demonstrate the fallacies of crude rules-of-thumb and human intuition
Investment in increased capital cost, though not necessarily resulting in decreased recurring cost, delivered significant reduction in energy consumption and consequent atmospheric and stratospheric pollution
Valuable insights can be revealed into the causal relationships amongst design decisions on form and construction and the consequent cost/performance characteristics
Photo-realism in visualization
A useful definition of the necessary and sufficient conditions of sustanabilit: fitness-for-purpose, cost-beneficial, culturally significant, environmentally friendly
The concerns of architectural tutors to the new technology came, it is argued, with the MIT evolution of multimedia software. In the School of Architecture the ABACUS research group, in association with tutors of history and theory, created a host of multimedia documents including the 2,000 year history of the City of Glasgow, the utopian town of New Lanark, the Neolithic village of Skara Brae. This conjunction of evolving ICT with what had been at the core of architectural scholarship for very many years, was immensely satisfying.
But… to cut to the chase of this publication. Notwithstanding the evidenced value of computer-based design appraisal of cost, performance and image there remained the big question of the complex relationship amongst these variables. At each stage in the evolution of a design. The rate of change of one to many of the variables is not explicit; a change in the fenestration on the south-facing façade (or the plan layout, or the orientation of the building, or…etc) has a complex impact on cost, performance and image of the design… As each design change is made, does the design come closer (or further) than Ackoff’s “ideal state”? Does one person’s increase in daylight trade off to another person’s increase in energy cost? The view I have had from the get-go – some four-five decades ago - is that the more we know about the objective cost, performance and image characteristics of design alternatives, the more we are in a position to exercise our subjective value judgments. The big question is BY WHOM should these value judgements be made?
In association with Robert Aish, the author won modest funding from the (then) UK Social Science Research Council to conduct design experiments involving Nursery School teachers in the design, within governmental cost and area limits. The software PARTIAL based on PACE, was used. Teachers first produced their own designs then worked in groups to modify individual designs to produce a group solution. Individual teachers favoured the group solutions, architectural tutors could not differentiate between designs produced by architects and teachers and, most importantly, teachers from another city universally preferred the designs produced by the original teachers.
So… is the architect dead?… These five decades have indeed brought about a paradigm shift that has affected all of society, and surely, none more than the practice and education from research groups such as ABACUS (e.g. Integrated Environmental Systems – now employing some 170 clever people) and education of architecture. Academics now contribute to papers that share best practice in international conferences such as eCAADe, ACADIA, ASCAAD and SIGRADI. The cumulative index – in CUMInCad – gives access to over 13,000 full papers in a myriad of diverse ICT topics. Spin-out companies (Integrated Environmental Solutions – now employing over 170 clever people in 4 continents) are commonplace and serving progressive practices. International Conferences now focus on design participation. Previously unbuildable buildings are gracing our cityscape. – the old fears dispelled?
The question is not “is the architect dead”; rather the question is “can those that call themselves architects, engineers, designers, students and users” embrace this wonderful paradigm shift? Ackoff’s necessary and sufficient conditions for the ideal state remain. Plenty if fulfilled by the reduction of our consumption of energy; truth if fulfilled by the validation of our models, beauty is now in the eye of the beholder and GOOD: - still to be fulfilled?
Negroponte’s wonderful dedication to the Architecture Machine was and remains: “To the first machine that appreciates the gesture.”
Glasgow, Scotland, 15 May 2018
copyright Tom Maver 2024