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National Conference on the Beginning Design Student

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Author: Ziada, Hazem ×

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    From CFY to DFN: Artifact > Category > Building
    (Georgia Institute of Technology, 2008-03) Ziada, Hazem
    The author's move from a 'Firstyear' program (advocating a cross-disciplinary approach) to a 'Foundations of Architecture' program (pedagogically bound by the promise to deliver 'comprehensive' architectural design within a five-year professional degree) forces questions of the disciplinarity of architecture to the foreground. This paper pursues this probe into (inter)disciplinarity by focusing on its outcomes: its design artifacts - rather than on its processes and knowledge-base. The move is conceived as a leap into a framework of design-instruction which appreciates the conceptual coherence of one artifact category. The 'building', as central to mainstream architectural practice, becomes the object of questioning; do buildings "exist"? And if so, should they? Tracking the evolution of design-studio exercises and projects (and others) which migrated with the author between programs, the argument demonstrates attempts to explore and question the singularity of the building category. Moreover, the paper draws on the author's concurrent doctoral-research into the peculiarity of the 'building' in light of early Soviet architecture, and which casts the 'building' as an artifact with exceptional sensitivity towards orchestrating social exchange (co-presence). The outcome of such attempts is a working conception of the 'building' as indeed possessed of singularity but in an open-ended way. It poses 'building' as an unpredictable assemblage of 'events' rather than as an entity bounded by spatial or socio-economic confines. It underlines the 'building's' exclusivity, while not precluding that its components may evolve into dynamic hybrids with other artifacts.
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    A-Disciplinary Artifacts; Un-Disciplined Bodies
    (Georgia Institute of Technology, 2008-03) Ziada, Hazem
    Discourses on (inter)disciplinarity in design usually debate methods of constructing epistemological frameworks and procedures of practice - yet have inadequately extended to qualifying the artifact(s) thereby generated. This paper starts by observing inconsistencies in perceived correspondences between (inter)disciplinarity and artifact complexity. Fundamentally, questioning the design-artifact of (inter)disciplinarity problematizes the relation between design and knowledge-generation. The paper posits that design-artifacts should be emancipated from the limiting confines of our preconceived disciplinary cartographies altogether. It approaches the design act while appreciating the design artifact itself and its mind-independent material, as generative of unpredictable, unclassified knowledge. Exploring a-disciplinary design-artifacts was undertaken in Firstyear design-studio exercises at SPSU. Students were instructed to embed unpredictability in material-constructions and design-procedures, allowing the artifact room for 'form-finding'. Throughout, it became clear that inducing this a-disciplinary artifact into 'existence' warranted an un-disciplined body for its critical appreciation. This is the body emancipated, not only from (Foucauldian) disciplinary techniques, but also from prescriptive Humanist ideals of the self as the center of design-thought. Students were thus asked to re-cast their own bodies as afforded by the created artifact (following literary traditions of 'monstrosity' as emancipatory deformations of our bodies). In effect, they were tasked to re-work conventions of graphic representation as would be enacted by this alternative un-disciplined body: the Identity Drawing. What representation does the artifact demand of the 'monster'? The interface between a-disciplinary artifacts and the un-disciplined body is an act of mutual judgment - an essentially political negotiation, and an indispensable component of (inter)disciplinary design practice.