Grabbing for Control, and Acceding it

Last month in San Francisco, a panel of contributors to Peggy Deamer’s and my book “Building (In) The Future:  Recasting Labor in Architecture” discussed the future of technology and practice in the realm of labor:  how is the act of design remediated by technology?  While much of the current conversation focuses on questions of process improvements that technology has enabled—alternative project delivery, sustainable analysis, digital fabrication, even better BIM-based working drawings—Peggy is more interested in the how technological protocols affect the act of design and particularly its aesthetic results.  In her remarks she explained that her view of this circumstance can be traced back to the traditions of Adolf Loos and the Werkebund at the turn of the twentieth century, where the architect’s work acknowledged and respected both the craftsmanship inherent in the architect’s design and that of the innate knowledge and value of the people who built that work.  In fact, their knowledge was considered to be an integral part of the design’s trajectory, incorporated into the final result by definition.  Design contemplated by Loos was thus much closer to the concept of architect as “Guild Master” than heroic, Roarkian super-figure attempting to control every particular of the built outcome.

Fast forward almost a century and these issues of control, transfer of knowledge, risk and result have changed considerably.  Today’s tools are about the control, coordination and integration of information, organized in support of both design intent (the architect’s design) and design realization (the builder’s final product).  They have created an interesting bridge, almost an interdependence, between these two realms.  As  modeling and collaboration technology, mixed with the heady objectives of delivery integration, draw the architect and builder ever closer together, Peggy suggests that a battle of sorts may ensue, between what she aptly called “control” (the architect needed to detail to the last nail to achieve the aesthetic end) and “accession” (acknowledging that the complexity of construction will always exceed the reach of the common working drawing).  That accession itself might be facilitated not simply by deferring to the knowledge of craft, but actually facilitating it; the guild master of yesterday transformed to the master information coordinator of today (as anticipated by Kieran and Timberlake in “Refabricating Architecture”).  If the tension between designers and builders is cast as a power struggle, both sides will fail to accede to the larger logic of the relationship and the old tensions will return.  And, Peggy would argue, the inherent tension and risk of the aesthetic result will be lost, to the detriment of the design itself.  What I found most provocative about this position was Peggy’s assertion that the new tools and methodologies introduce such risks that might, in the end, benefit the designed result if the risk of the proposition was properly  deployed.  It’s a change in the definition of risk in the building enterprise that might serve us well as we redefine and rebalance the relative positions of the players in the process.