The
focus of our work, from the very beginning, is to find a powerful combination
between architectural theory and practice, because the architectural
practice in Germany generally lacks of any theoretical background and
on the other hand architectural theory very often lost contact to the
practice. Therefore our projects seemed to be not theoretical enough
for a theorist and much to theoretical for a practist, but we still
think our strategy is very promising. In the 21th Century other disciplins
like biotechnologie or computer technologie will influence our life
radically, while architecture seems to have no impact at all. Just architects
still think that architecture is important. The only interesting thing
about architecture in comparison to these other disciplins is the strong
connection to the physic of our body and the human scale. So there is
still to hope that as long we have something like a body, there will
be something like architecture. There is a lot to learn from the other
science disciplines like biotech, computech or chemistry.
First
of all it is important to understand, that this is a question of methodology.
It is not so important to control the result of this upgrade but to
find a methodological strategy. Architects must retain their experimental
autonomy in order to find answers to questions of the future. Our office
for example sometimes develops a project by taking two different competitions.
In the Düsseldorf competition we shaped a form of a building by
using lots of contextual references. In a second step we took this form
an implanted a program of a Stuttgart competition into it. The building
with the Düsseldorf form looks brilliant on the Stuttgart site.
Probably somebody will built this idea in Seoul or Kopenhagen. This
strategy sounds very funny, but it has a serious background. This methodology
allows us to design a visionary building very slowly with an informational
input of the present. Designing the form in Düsseldorf is not a
question of contextualism. We just used the context to get to the form.
Taking the program of Stuttgart is not a question of fulfilling a service
demand. We just used the program to get to a project. The real project
has nothing to do with Düsseldorf or Stuttgart. But we submitted
both competitions with our proposal. This is very important to our strategy,
because doing so we have something like a test run in reality for our
visionary prototype. This prototype will get better and better and more
and more complex in future. The first time we invented this methodology
was by using the building prototype of our Yokohama Terminal and transformed
it to a School of Architecture in Weimar. At the very beginning of each
project we put much emphasis on finding a design strategy. Sometimes
we continue working on projects like Düsseldorf to Stuttgart or
Yokohama to Weimar. Sometimes we try to define the project with a drawing
technic like in Erfurt. The design methodology is the key to a successful
project: designing the process instead of designing the project.
