Intellectual Q’s
_ Precisely how are the ‘intellectual’ question and the ‘constructional’ question posed as mutually exclusive?
_ Where do concerns of ‘craft’ lie in relation to contemporary computational design?
_ What is the threshold of computation in the domain of human and material error?
_ What are the implications of the distinction “building a sketch” (as opposed to the “illustration of a geometry”) suggested by Nader, and how does this apply to notions of the 4-dimensional constructive drawing?
_ Can the customized treatment of an industrially produced unit be ascribed to the domain of the craftsman or builder, by virtue of the attention to idiosyncratic details of fixed and predictable systems? Likewise, may the variability of unitized systems be ascribed to the domain of the designer? May one utilize the former in the service of the latter, exploiting this knowledge of the hand towards new applications – not merely fastidious craftsmanship, but crafted design?
_ What might reconcile the apparent incommensurateness of (increasing) complexity in rule-based logics and the synthetic, sensory responsiveness and intuition of contemporary craft? Is design itself not positioned as antithetical to such sensory responsiveness?
_ Can one say that stereotomy was a product of geometric practices associated with renaissance architecture? According to Robin Evans, stereotomy evolved from geometry just as it did from constructibility: Cutting would be thus a geometric and constructional “reciprocity between masonry unit and method of assembly” (Nader). I like this phrase.
_ Is such practical geometry not by nature a reconciliation of geometry and material, theory and praxis?
_ Is it possible for a masonry unit to generate states of in-situ structural stability?
_ There is an Irish word – ‘tomhais’ – which means both ‘guess’ and ‘measure’. Can such a concept be represented by the intuitive measuring and accounting of the craftsman? How can an intuitive accounting – synthesized knowledge of the hand, the eye, the body – come to be analytically represented through such a system as reductive computational analysis? How can this intelligence be extracted in application to a computational ‘craftsmanship’, a synthetic and analytic constructive sensibility?
_ What are the limits of analytical methodologies in computational programming?
_ Is the greatest weakness of computation that it considers all things as rule based logics, where rule-based logics have an inherent limit to the number of variables or parameters to maintain the coherency of a problem? Can sensory responsive logics of craftsmanship intuitively synthesize a great many more variables?
_ Does ‘computational determinacy’ exclude the reconciliation between what may be computationally generated and how it is resolved in construction?
_ Is most computational design motivated by a desire for the transcendence of the concerns of labor (ie. Gramazio + Kohler, Mark Goulthorpe), the elevation of automaticity in construction over the intelligences of the hand and the eye? How do latent class concerns play out here?
_ What in my own method is most similar to the tendencies of contemporary computation? Perhaps a methodological approach that proposes that mistakes – variations from normative logic sets – provide the opportunity for a new design intervention?
_ How may one embed this intuitive problem-solving back into the design process? Can this occur by problematizing errors – which exist already in the context of craftsmanship – within a different paradigm for resolution?
