shanjida shamma: DESIGN INTELLIGENCE-Micheal Speaks

As postmodernism, deconstructivism, minimalism and super modernism become more historical than contemporary concerns, the professional trendsetters in architecture are aggressively on the hunt for the next big thing.

Many of the practitioners suggest a new trend in architecture which is driven by a new relationship between Thinking and Doing.

THINKING as DOING:

“What is called THINKING?” – Martin Heidegger.

-Rather than asking what it means to think, he interrogate the fundamental grounds of thinking itself before undertaking the task of thinking.

- Philosophy (as metaphysics) has come to an end because science in the contemporary period has overtaken philosophy's metaphysical ambition and historical role as discoverer and provider of such essential truth.

-Science, especially cybernetics, rationalizes the entire world as an object, transforming it into a calculable, mathematical truth.

"What is Philosophy"? - Gilles Deleuze

- Philosophy should not concern itself with discovering and representing metaphysical truths.

- Rather than discovering fundamental truths, each philosopher creates instead "an image of thought."

- This image consists of a "plane of immanence,"

- Deleuze suggests three forms of thinking which produces its own distinct product:

· Philosophy produces concepts

· science produces precepts (mappings of states of affairs)

· Artistic thinking produces affects and percepts.

-He does so not because it prevents a more fundamental thinking, but because it inhibits a more experimental thinking that produces the "asyet-unthought"

Distinction between the "plan” and the "plane” - Gilles Deleuze

-He draws a distinction between the "plan" as a transcendental, regulatory device and the "plane"

of immanence, which philosophers construct.

- The "plan" is an already completed design, a program of development or organization

- The "plane" is a facet or geometrical section, a plane of composition, of making and experiment.

A conference held in the fall of 2000 at the Museum of Modern Art entitled,

"Things in the Making: Contemporary Architecture and the Pragmatist Imagination"

- The real issue raised by the conference- the relationship between theory and practice.

-To address the problematic relationship between thinking and doing in architecture, the

conference turned to Pragmatism, because "Pragmatism offers itself as a theory of practice."

- Pragmatism belies that thinking and doing as distinct and distinctly disconnected activities.

-Thinking, the prejudice assumes, results in ideas, and good thinking results in true ideas.

Distinction between problem solving and innovation- Drucker

-Problem solving simply accepts the parameters of the problem given.

-Design is meant to work within those parameters until a solution to the problem is worked out, a

final design.

-Here, even if thinking is no longer concerned with discovering metaphysical or philosophical truth,

and is applied to doing, doing only completes what it is given by thinking.

-Innovation, works by a different, more experimental logic where, by rigorous analysis,opportunities are discovered that can be exploited and transformed into design innovations.

the relationship between thinking and doing becomes more and more blurred so that thinking becomes doing and doing becomes thinking engendering highly collaborative, interactive forms of practice that are already changing the face of architecture.