ETS4 - Creative Conflicts

Why do some buildings give you everything you want but seem so effortless?

Modern buildings are complicated machines requiring large teams of professionals with different backgrounds and specialisms to work together to develop the brief, concept and eventually design information. This design information then needs to be communicated to a larger team of crafts people to deliver the final product. Delivering a building, let alone one that works is therefore a hugely complex process.

Architects should be the central role in a design team and must seek to understand the technical requirements of specialist disciplines in order to incorporate them into the design. This module seeks to explore this with an emphasis on how to build.

The course is focussed on exploring the following themes:

• Buildings as part of our urban infrastructure
• Resilince versues adaptatbility
• Advanced methods of construction
• Robustly challenging the technical aspects of a brief

Students are to place themselves as the technical lead on an early stage project or design competition. The project is chosen such that the focus will be on the technical aspects of the design. The aim is to ensure every feature in the building has a positive influence on its use. You will take a brief and develop it further then produce concepts which satisfy the requirements whist optimising the balance of the many competing technical constraints.

For the final output students need to build arguments to convince why their proposal is the most appropriate response.