An article published last year surveyed 111 theses registered in the Council of Higher Education’s National Thesis Center under the keyword “digital media.” It read 109 of them and sorted them by subject. The oldest record in the survey turned out to be the master’s thesis I wrote at Yıldız Technical University in 2003: Dijital Medyada Mimari Tasarım: Tasarımı Tasarlamak.
Another row in the same table caught my eye. Over those twenty-two years, five theses came out of the field of architecture. Less than five percent.
Seeing the article, I opened the thesis. I had not opened it in twenty-two years.
A three-year-old piece of software
In the middle of the text there is a screenshot: Revit. In 2003 the software was three years old, it had been part of Autodesk for a year, and it had almost no presence in Turkey.
I had not referred to it as a drafting program. The distinction I set up on that page was this: in the CAD packages of the day, the only parametric thing is the building element itself — a window, a staircase; its parameters can be changed, but the same identity is not carried through the product as a whole. Software like Revit, on the other hand, expresses the product itself as variables defined within constraints and limits.
I did not use the name given to this today, because that name was not yet in circulation in Turkey. But what I was describing was exactly that.
Objects to look at, objects to think with
A distinction stands at the axis of the thesis: what does digital media produce in architecture? Objects to look at, or objects to think with — objects that can be operated on?
When the computer became the instrument of architectural representation, both in practice and in schools it was used for the most part to present a design already considered finished. Once a design is visualized in order to be presented, it breaks away from its context; it turns into an image whose architectural identity is no longer questioned, one that is looked at with a different frame of mind. The designer’s product moves out of the position of “that which is to be designed” and into the position of “that which is to be looked at.”
The same medium does something else entirely when it is used inside the process. With the flexibility the software offers, the designer can build a method of their own; apart from established generative systems, they can develop personal design strategies.
Reading the thesis, I realized that I had set the same distinction up again when writing about the distance between a render and a photograph — the same intent, twenty-two years apart.
Designing the design
The last sentence of the thesis reads:
As designers acquire further skills in this field, they will come to design how they will design buildings. In other words, they will also design their design methods.
A sentence earlier I had described that skill: writing programs and scripts that can intervene in software from the outside, for specific purposes.
At the time this was a prediction. What I had in hand was a body of literature on shape grammars going back to the 1970s, and the process record of a competition project — the method three architects working on the Grand Egyptian Museum developed by using the possibilities of the software in line with a strategy. The fourth chapter of the thesis tells that process from beginning to end.
Twenty-two years later
In the office today we are writing our own checking scripts, to comply with the digital submission requirements the new regulation brings. A tool that opens the drawing file and checks layer names, line types and block structure one by one; that finds the error before submission. No one asked us to write it; when the rules of submission changed this was simply the most sensible thing to do.
In a working group we are also developing floor-plan type generators that, drawing on our archive of apartment housing, take the regulations, the plot and the distribution of the floor area ratio into account layer by layer. In the thesis the name for this was “computer-based generative systems.”
I was not thinking of the thesis while writing that script. But what we are doing matches, word for word, the description in the sentence I wrote in 2003: not settling for using the tool, but designing how the tool will do our work.
I am not writing this to say “my prediction came true.” On the contrary, the place where the thesis held up unsettled me a little: that only five theses came out of the field of architecture in twenty-two years shows the question is still open. Visualization has settled into the language of the profession; but intervening in the tool from the outside, building a method of your own, is still the exception.
The full text of the thesis, its bibliographic details and the source of that survey are here.