Education 2008-2009 Semester 1

Thanks Sander for setting up this website. Very nice contributions and interesting to read. In this way also tutors that are not involved every day in the design studio can see what is going on and comment.

Looking at the Blog until now, I have the next remarks.

1) We should try to find a way to keep the total Blog limited to what a tutor, not being the design tutor, can read in one hour per week.

2) Don’t make a puzzle out of it. Be precise and concrete. What is it that you want to achieve? How do you think to do that? What means? What are your research questions? Philosophical contemplations about e.g.
time-space relations are in my opinion only interesting if you show how it affects your design. And eve then, keep it as short and precise as possible. I understand that this is ongoing work, but then only mention
what is the subject, don’t describe all the interesting information you found. Only what you will use. And I would prefer it in inversed order: first show the design result and then explain in short how you got there
and why you think this performs well.

3) Getting inspired by evolution or adaptation in nature or products or what ever is fine, but try to find the deeper mechanisms and try to map it to architectural design and buildings. And, like Kas Oosterhuis
suggested, try to answer the question: “What will be the next step in this evolution?” and how can you map that onto your design.

4) Also look at how the growth process functions, from egg to embryo to adult to ashes. Or in products: from idea, to components, to assemblies, etc. And then see if you can map this to architectural design and
buildings. E.g. how can you make a software program give form to your functional volumes?

5) Sustainability will be an important criterion for the design. What strategies do species in nature or products use to reach sustainability? From Prof. van Leeuwen, who was in our faculty some 30 years ago, I
learned that natural systems are more robust when they are complex. Monocultures are vulnarable. You can stimulate this complexity in nature by creating different, but balanced, conditions for the soil, the
shading, the water etc. In short: High spacial variation and low temporal variation give the most robust ecosystems. How can we map this to architecture?

6) It would be nice if there would be a place where we could put this kind of general comments in the Blog, instead of commenting every individual contribution.

Those remarks are my personal opinion and it could differ from that of other tutors. In that case it is up to you to decide and make up your own opinion.

Best regards,

Hans Hubers