4 – 2018

Design and Reference

Politecnico Milano, a design crit in the bachelor degree course, the students open up their laptops: a design is explained using the Pinterest website: four references that lie miles and decades apart for a design of forty metres of open space. What used once to require an education acquired through collecting can be done today with a single click. Digital platforms feed the endless stream of images. A picture makes the architecture into a potential commodity: the image sells the project.
This was not always the case. When the Zurich Analogists presented their perspectives in competitions and at exhibitions in the 1980s they caused profound dismay among the expert and lay public. The reason for this was not their dark, melancholic mood alone, but also the new technique of mounting images. With these images the analysis of problems and work on the floor plans was replaced by mounting pieces of architecture history, more or less eloquent, but only understandable to the trained eye. “Show your analogies”
 was the demand and creed at crits and in discussions between colleagues.
The quintessence of the theory of analogue architecture as represented by Fabio Reinhart and Miroslav Šik was to trust in the expressive strength of the image alone and to place the handcraft of designing entirely at its service. And so it became possible to understand architecture as a user interface for the eye. Reinhart and Šik could never have anticipated that their process would provide a brilliant model for digital images. But in the brave new world conscious selection and arduous xeroxing of obsessively gathered library material is something we cannot be bothered with.
As a result of universal availability the transformation of images generally gets left behind. However, Adam Caruso, Elli Mosayebi and Martin Steinmann say in this issue, the blending of the references to form a strong design is the central challenge. And the use of historical references calls for knowledge about the context in which they arose and which gives them their meaning. It is only when, as necessary elements, they have become a part of the new design and have, in a sense, been digested that references can create a new meaning as part of a contemporary and realistic architecture.