Design Build

Hearing John and Greg talk about the past significance of design build in the school turned into a revealing look at the basis behind the teaching philosophies throughout the first few years of this school. While these years do not seem incomplete now, their mode of instruction makes a lot more sense given a context of design build. Greg's fascination with do-dads and tangible, expressive details become infinitely more relevant when students are actually faced with a project that requires them to build it. Ultimately, the conversation about the place of design build in the program highlights the struggle for direction that the school faces. While I have seen attempts recently to bring design build back into the program, I think that the way we think about it should be fundamentally different than the large-scale aspirations of its previous incarnation.

John made an interesting comment towards the end of presentation, about doing a digital design build. While I think his idea of digital to physical translation is much different than ours, it may point to a way that we can reintegrate design build with the digital at the forefront of the drive. In our own sense this is already happening, most of the digital classes end with the construction of a installation scale piece. I highly doubt that these pieces, or even the works by other schools is close to what John was talking about, but with the limitations of current computational tools, this is what is possible. At this point, the technology that we have allows us to experiment with form within a previously tested contraction system. It does not deal with designing digital details, or making something that needs to stand up semi-permanently, but I have no doubt that we will get there, and the result will look radically different than the design build of the past.