Theme

Architecture as a Collaborative Design Project

In the last two decades contemporary practices of architecture have fully embraced the possibilities given by digital design tools; new geometries, drawing techniques, fabrication processes and communication methods have flooded every aspect of the exercise of architecture. As consequence, the traditional image of the architectural practices as contained in a building has diluted in to an atmospheric behavior. Build up on a sophisticated network that spreads across the computer lab, the workshop, the site, servers and portables _laptops and mobile devices_, this phenomenal transformation has set a context in which the figure of the architect is not longer fulfilled by the individual, but rather by a social web immersed in an aggregate set of distributive design systems.

An electrical informational infrastructure has profoundly challenge all previous attitudes of what design operations consist on, redirecting the goals and lines of architectural education and practices towards the collaborative in ways that not only ideas of architectural form are reconfigure, but those of architecture itself. From our perspective, the most interesting aspect of change in this reconfiguration it that of design itself, which has become something greater than the expression of the individual vision.

Interscaless has been set as an agenda that explores the limits and relations of these new ways for architecture. By exposing the students to a collaborative team based design structure, the studio addresses scale as a specific architectural device to bring together innovative ideas across the design spectrum. From urban design strategies to discrete interventions, the group explores the intricacies of the city; urban sprawl, international energy infrastructure, no zoning, climate controlled interior environments and macro architecture are some of the most critical aspects not only of a city like Houston and many cities in America, but of emerging cities in Latin America, India and China.

Inserted in the nerve of architectural discussion around the world and Rooted at the core of the design disciplines, scale draws a diagonal that allows students not only to use a specific agent to explore and react upon new ways of city being, but also to interchange information using a range of parametric scalar systems opening architecture to new communication paradigms.

NubePET by Arturo Revilla