Chuang, Che-Kuang
When I was a freshman in architecture school, my teacher told me that
architects are all-rounder designers who can design everything including furniture,
graphics even vehicles. I deeply believed his words and thought that
architecture is a compressor, a perfect system which you can apply its methods
into any fields. Then five years passed and I have already graduated from
schools for two years, and I finally know that my teacher and I were completely
wrong about that.
Architects are not all-rounder designers, so is architecture not a perfect
system which could cover all the different fields. It is true that architects
have to study a lot of interdisciplinary subjects such as programing,
environmental engineer and maybe sociology, etc. Maybe they might think
themselves are pretty talented that they almost know everything – but it is
totally wrong. Actually they only know a rough outline about those subjects,
and most of this knowledge is dead knowledge which is hardly to be applied. It
is just like all the college fresh men have to study some basic credits which are not related
to their major, architecture students are the same. Therefore architects are
not all-rounder designers who almost know everything, sometimes not even to
mention talented.
And about the question: is that architecture a perfect system which could
cover any different kind of fields? Yeah, it is true that in the architecture
design process, architects will use different kind of methods and aspects to
find the best result. For example, it is very popular now to use programing and
scripting to analyze the environment in order to get the best form of architecture,
something like that. It seems like that architecture is such a flexible subject
which you can apply any ideas into it and this feature make this discipline so
unique. However, applying new methods and aspects from different fields is not
the distinguishing feature only for architecture field. Actually it is the
common point in any design field, even any field. For example, industrial
designers also use digital tools to design industry products, and some
physicists use programing to calculate and analyze their experiments, too. So we
can’t say that architecture could cover different kind of fields just because architects
use some new tools from other fields, because all the other designers and scholars
do that, too.
And there is a very important thing that people must know: the core of
architecture is construction. Since maybe ten thousand years ago, it has been
its final purpose and ultimate value- architects build something that people
need: that is it, nothing else. Therefore, if those methods from other fields could not be applied into the
construction process; we can’t say that we find new ideas for architecture,
because they didn’t change the core of this field. Unfortunately, most of those
architects who declared themselves are interdisciplinary designers and used new
methods from different fields didn’t do much in construction. Therefore most of
their works are only paper works which have never been built. Since these
new interdisciplinary ideas couldn’t progress the construction methods, it is
hard to say that architecture is such a flexible subject which could contain different kind of fields.
In conclusion, I was a believer who thought we, architects could do
anything and make anything possible; but now I know myself. I spend almost six
years to recognize that architects are not all-rounder designer and understand
what the main value of architecture is. Although I still want to be an
interdisciplinary designer who brings innovations into architecture field, before
that I must find what is the connection between this new ideas and construction-
in the other words, how to build it. Eventually, what I want to say is: “Don’t
be arrogant, architects. You are just mortals.”
建築相對於其它領域最大的特色是Construction. 當然它是一門綜合的學門，囊括了很多事，但最基本也是最特別的部份就是Construction.
的確在設計的階段，建築設計是無所不包的:Scripting...方法學...對時代社會政治的反應...看起來的確是個Compressor。但須注意的是這是所有設計學門，或是說所有學門的特色:哪一個學門不會引用它人，並且反應時代??
而最大關鍵是這些應用，其實跟Construction沒太大關係-意即它們跟建築的最大的特點沒有關聯。也許有人會說:"不會阿，這幾年智慧型住宅不是引入了user interface嗎?" 或說:"營建體系也開始數位化了阿?" 這些不算是應用整合嗎? 當然不算，這只是把其它門學問用的工具拿來用。我們不會說修車子的跟修飛機的人都有用鈑手，就說這兩者互有應用整合吧?
而我想這也是為何臺灣明明也出現了如此多"跨領域設計公司"，其中卻一無所成之故-建築的本質是Construction，沒有跨越這條門檻，就沒有所謂整合。
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