What has digital design got to do with craftsmanship? Quite a lot, according to Maria Ponce de Leone, a Venuezuala-born architect who was guest speaker at a lecture last Friday at UWM’s School of Architecture and Urban Planning (SARUP).
Ponce de Leon is one of the principals of Office Da – an architecture firm based in Boston garnering critical praise for its cross-disciplinary approach to architecture that draws threads from engineering, fabrication and even textiles. The practice relies heavily on digital technology to realize its aims. When Ponce de Leone speaks of the potentials digital design holds for reintroducing a high level of craftsmanship into architecture, she is referring to the almost boundless possibilities and the high level of specificity the medium offers. I would argue the very term craftsmanship is inappropriate in this context. Inherent to the idea of craftsmanship is the indelible presence of the human hand – something that’s increasingly removed through digital software.
One also associates the idea of craftsmanship with an intimate working knowledge of materials and how best to bring out their unique properties. Although Office Da’s projects show a clear interest in materiality, they seem rather preoccupied with making materials do new, unimaginable things – and in doing so they rather cheekily overturn one of the fundamental axioms to which architects have clung to so long with an almost religious fervor –“Truth to materials.” Though I too cling to this truth, I can’t help congratulating this type of audacity. The problem arises when you recycle traditional terms to describe new approaches and innovations. Surely a new and tangible language must emerge to describe this kind of architecture.
Another, more important development that digital architecture has helped bring to the fore is the idea of architecture moving well beyond the static experience governed by single points of perspective. It contains the fourth dimension – time – in its very DNA. Is this the end of perspectival thinking – a movement away from the idea that man is the sole center of the universe towards the more contemporary reality of man residing in a many-centered universe? The possibilities are exciting.
The debate between digital and more traditional modes of design is no new thing, but it’s becoming increasingly pertinent as terms like digital vs. analog become part of our common diction (albeit through the dilemma of what to do with our old TVs). Nevertheless, the gap is closing, and though I’m no great proponent of all digitally based design or of its main champions, even I have to admit the possibilities new technologies have opened up for design are worth exploring to the full. Even if an architect doesn’t resort to cutting edge software he still needs to take account of some of the issues digital design raises about how we experience space today and how that experience is best accommodated. Likewise, the traditional modes of practice can’t be fully abandoned. A common ground exists, and will hopefully always exist: that decisive moment in which the architect must make that design leap, follow one path as opposed to countless others through his instinct or what Ponce de Leon would call “architectural whim,” or what an old instructor of mine simply described as “taking a leap on a wing and a prayer.” I can’t imagine any technology sophisticated enough to substitute that creative leap.
