Technology needed by Architects: Integrating Architectural design and Construction Teaching through a Combined Approach to Environmental Issues

In a short story published a year ago in Technology Review, the American science fiction writer Bruce Sterling (2007) writes about an architect, Yuri, who in the not too distant future describes a possible scenario in which architecture ‘has given way to software management, so he turns buildings into brilliant yet often chaotic visions, easier to talk about than build’. “This design isn’t even a “building”, from what I can understand. The way in which the structure keeps turning around … it is a process permanently being constructed and deconstructed” This scenario projects us into a future that prefigures the possible consequences of the transformations in the entire production and construction process of an architectural project. Transformations already correctly identified by David Celento (2007) and influenced by the availability of new tools (such as rapid fabrication, parametric design and BIM-Building Information Management) which in turn determines the need for new professionals - defined by Kieran and Timberlake (2003) as ‘Digital Master Builders’ - capable of managing and integrating knowledge in order to create new architectural concepts. Current changes in production and construction and modern experimental architectural design do not correspond to a reorganisation of technological knowledge and education, still entrusted to obsolete and fragmented studies on techniques. These experiments demonstrate how scientific research and the contemporary architectural practice are contributing to establish new rules and principles to construction and how much innovation requires a revision of the teaching of building technology (at present relegated to being a specialist branch of Engineering) starting with the problem of integration between realistic practice and experimental research (on site or in the lab).