at that | orda hak verdim çocuğa

i (have?) attended a, so called (appropriate?), colloquyum, collokiyum, kollokyum, qolloquium? öeeh wadevır, it was nice, so nice that it was worth spending all afternoon on it, in it, with it, around it, wadevır again... the event was organized to (on, towards, at?) the honour of another more important event (that was bige's phd defence) by, let's say the unit, design informatics, which i am currently enrolled in, as a guest researcher. here this unit is under the title of building technology! if it were in my home-institution, this wouldn't be the case, but this is a reason why i wanted to come here, and if somehow i were (was?) to work on (in, at, around..) academics, why i would prefer to go back (oh what a complex relationship with an academic institution (home-inst.)one of those love-hate smtg (will you dare?)...)

i wasn't (haven't been) thinking about those reasons for the time being (fail again! no! not the best usage man(dare?)).. this unit is working mainly on performance based design, or an integral approach to design where "rational" performances of a to be(just write "prospective" as an adventure!) built artifact is meant to be used as an important driver of the design process. here, performance means, environmental, ecologial and sometimes structural performance (this is a rough generalization of course).

OK. what's performance? which performance? what about a minimum design task, to be counted as architectural design? describe me a minimum design task and minimum requirements to be answered, if the solution is to be counted as a solution. oh you won't. i will find out. or better: i will narrate.

now i want to combine vagaries of a designer and current rationalities of economics, environmental comfort or ecological sensitivities (sensibilities you fool!) and make (bake?) out of this dough (come and utter this word!) a nice spongy(is this the word you've found as a substitute to "gevrek"? the opposite? go back to your country to where you belong, gow-back joh-jo) bread. just as a human designer does. it will, no doubt, be a caricature. but that's okay. we all like humor. (but not a cynical humor!)

i was talking to a friend (jurrian), i told him that, watching and watching all those performances, all the presentations, conferences, collo(smtg)s, lectures etc. they only become meaningful when you are also producing something yourself, and he said, you have to balance those things (watching and doing), he had a point in that (on that, at that) at that.

_prof. sariyildiz described her unit's recent phd projects in contrast with projects just focussing on fancy forms. the message was: there are serious challenges, facing humanity, and architects (like environmental exicengies), and formal issues are not mere free-form excercises. she was deliberately omitting a good portion of the story (i.e. marketing aspects) but this omission is the basic tenet of her stance. the unit (which i am visiting) is re-describing form generation in terms of rational performances, in an integral manner (sounds quite like form-follows-function eh?), hence a nice paper-opponent for me to better forge my stance (which has a lot to do with past years' anti-professionalist studio experiences and also patrick janssen's (who's in part following lawson i guess) seemingly simple but for me important theoretical underpinnings) out of... (long sentence) (saying out loud the obvious) (so now let's shout:) any architectural design process is formed out of both, in a way, rationalized or substantiated acts, and also vagaries (or for janssen, "preconceptions"), none to be missing. form has never been totally a function of function. but, you know, it was because the means were not developed yet. until now we weren't able to assess an important portion of the performances of a building beforehand. perhaps, from now on, form might become a function of several performances? it's easy to believe it in netherlands, cause they generally tend to keep it really simple. but wait a minute, we seem to be omitting something here!?

_prof. krishnamurti was here, and presented their latest work on parametric BIM(?). at least for simple buildings (with definable floors and cornered plan layouts), using revit, they produced a system that measures the building performance in terms of BREAM, or LEED. nice tool, nice work. he was suspicious of the adequacy of LEED but it is the current standard for many countries. he also mentioned "design patterns for parametric modelling". so the patterns of alexander came back through the backdoor, only after passing through the realm of programming, where the idea was adopted rather effusively (but here my colleague juse is also using the idea of pattern language, in conjunction with shape grammars for urban design). the most peculiar moment of krishnamurti's presentation was, that, he was also suspicious of all those tools that has continuously been developed tirelessly by the phd researchers, to be used "in the early phases of conceptual design", or to give designers decision support on formal matters, or supply designers with alternative designs so that they can choose, or do the design on behalf of them.. he was quite right at that, designers want to do the enjoying part themselves and would be happy if something manages to do the boring, uncreative jobs. (that's why i'm producing a similar application but never calling it a tool :] i'm well avare that, only i, will be fascinated with using it. and i even don't plan to use it for education, for i could better help the students if i could assist them develop their own ideas with programming skills. what's the justification of forcing a studioful-of-students to use your own program [or idea] for designing?) actually that remark was in complete opposition to the work of some academics that were present :] but the man has a nice and funny air, and he's so venerable and established a researcher in the field, that it didn't bring a cold breeze at berlagezaal at all (which was already cold by the way.)

_joop paul, a professor at the university and an engineer of ARUP at the same time (it's not surprising that it's possible here), showed slides of a hi-rise. which had a slender prefabricated (as i understood) structure which didn't cost more than conventional methods and forms of tower building. the message is: by using computational tools effectively, you can stay both feasible and creative. another point on behalf of performance based design? but a hi-rise has always been an application where structural performance (and circulation and evacuation performance) has a sheer precedence; so this doesn't count? or does it? look at CCTV and similar novel hi-rise projects...

_prof de vries from eindhoven mentioned bayesian belief networks and design decision support systems. actually these tools, as krişnamurti asserted are not for human designers, they are for automated systems, at least i understand it this way, surprisingly, during this week i was searching in their archive of phd dissertations, and i have downloaded several of them.. bayesian belief networks in design decision support eh? niiice!

_and finally, the question of adaptive systems. the "quest" for adaptive systems? (something more than showing the realtime "weather forecast" which is currently surprisingly popular in architectural surfaces!?) adaptive buildings or systems can only be possible by integrated data-form environments. so that form follows data follows form follows... "integral"? "integrated"? when you say integral, it's a puzzling term.