As much as we want to consider architectural space as an artistic expression, and something based on felicitous concepts of eccentric individuals – it is not! There are instances where architects and designers, under patrons, achieve immense creative aptitude and create a product that defines the design process for years to come. But, this is hardly the case when we approach most projects in practice.
All projects require a disciplined approach towards design. They require due diligence of the project brief, extensive study of bye-laws, study of pragmatic requirements and site characteristics. Architects and designers are required to practice within certain scientific parameters. Having talked about Cost and Value in the previous blog-post, one must not confuse the subject here as a negation of what has been talked about already. Rather, they must understand that these scientific processes are an effort to supplement value building in a design process.
When we talk about an excel sheet, most practices would align their experiences to the idea of generating tenders and bills. However, for the scientific domain, it is hardly the case. Excel is one of the tools required for understanding information, making it a prerequisite for Data Science and Big Data to exist. By ordering the information, carefully categorizing it and attributing certain values to it, we can understand qualitative aspects of space in coded numerical terms and algorithms.
By doing so, quite often, a process such as massing of the building, comes out of tabulation of discrete and distinctive factors such as – umber of people, daylight hours and heat gain, use of furniture etc. Therefore, such tools help us accurately collect, order, and derive from information, for each project. They help us articulate our inferences from each project, accurately. This is not only beneficial in enhancing our design aptitude and reasoning, but also provides tremendous help in communicating with people of other disciplines such as sociology, economics, geology, building automation, lighting automation etc.
The idea behind revealing this is not to obfuscate the role of conceptualization in design, but to develop consideration in the minds of our readers that there is a lot of information that needs to be documented and analysed prior to arriving at the ‘parti’ of a project – and that there are tools and methodologies that exist to facilitate the requisite.
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