Engineering and Architectural process

There is one fundamental difference between an engineer’s thinking and an architect’s. An engineer draws upon past experiences when presented with a “problem” to solve, while an architect  must start with a blank slate, always cognizant of goals and limitations. An architect who does not start with a clear mind is essentially mimicking and modifying the past, not adding anything substantial to the world that will live far past the lifetime of the designer.

Gyorgy Kepes discusses the idea of the fundamentals of design as a clear idea apart from any previous solution to a similar question. For engineers this is not so much the case, they draw on past experiences in a sort of trial and error process, one that learns from past failures. However, in the architectural field, it is not so easy to learn from past examples when presented with a blank slate to work with. One must recognize their own failures during the design process in order to make a stronger result, but cannot begin the design process based on past failures. Regardless there is an importance in the knowledge that no solution in architecture will be perfect (Kepes).  While engineers begin work on a project almost half way through because of past experiences, architectural process is much lengthier. It is because no other process is as long that architects often lose touch with the initial constraints and goals of the project—one must always remember where they started.

As far as the blog post that desginers  “create ideas which lead to problems. The more ideas he has, the more problems he creates”– I find that statement ludicrous.  By that logic, the greatest designers in the world must have insignificant and trivial ideas, because brilliant ideas and would only lead to “problems” in the world.

Ellie