On prototypes, part I

Prototypes, studios, the construction industry.

Prototypes have emerged as multivalent pathways of exploration in recent academic experiments and achievements.

They seem to be envisioned as “machines that could be used only once” (J. Bragança de Miranda ¹), therefore never perfect, resisting idealization. As a machine, a prototype performs. It actively embodies the technical contingencies that coalesce into its fabrication. That is, the constitutive difference between the prototype, and other design media that involve making, is in the former’s implied concoction of disparate procedures and techniques (electronic and otherwise) into something that distinguishes itself by what it does.

In the latest decades, the architectural academia explored the inherent potential of a subset of the techniques of “compunication” (Oettinger ²) that stemmed from World War II and the so-called Cold War Era. It seems that it is now more and more going beyond the versioning exclusively wrought in workstations towards full-scale material accomplishments.

These evolve in tandem with their strictly electronic counterparts. But they differ from traditional architectural mock-ups in the sense that they are not done to basically simulate a certain sense of scale or material qualities, but specially to test and embody, and thus understand, the specific processes, electronic and otherwise, that both constitute and are activated by the prototype.

So what could be some next steps in the exploration of such machines? What is the latent potential of prototypes?

A tentative suggestion: they might become instrumental in grappling with the difference between “making in the studio” (³) and making through the construction industry.

The expression “construction industry” is still too vague to name the vast and inarticulate set of agencies that ultimately define what may or not be built.

Practices have been relating to this new situation in the same way everywhere, i.e. see what products are available, and then attempt to combine or slightly adapt them.

In the case of the firms that claim the role of research units, there seems to be an interest in products originating from other fields. However, when confronting the industry, “they don’t innovate the transferred techniques, they just find useful bits.”(C. Price ⁴)

So, how can an envisioned inclusive studio escape this barren and subservient approach to the contemporary construction industry, and find ways to productively explore these unprecedented circumstances?

Could prototypes become a way for studios to confront the construction industry? They only realize themselves through their upgrades and the redefinition of their performances, and as such they might compel the studio to carry out their development beyond its own limited means of production.

This, of course, is not about naïvely falling for the technocratic allure or to bluntly trust the industry of R&D as a safe haven for the tentative exploration of possibilities.

It is about recognizing that the material production ambitioned by architecture will primarily take place within the realm of the construction industry, which can no longer be identified as a fixed, unequivocal set of rules and procedures embodied in stable businesses.

The realm of industry and engineering is a dynamic construction, in which standards guide the processes, as norms “only stabilized for the moment” (Banham ⁵). Prototypes are adaptable when conceived as more than bricolage. That is, not only pieces of machines put together into a different machine, but also an incessant fine-tuning of its configurations and performances. This means that they can work as resilient means of negotiation, thus embodying the contributions and assessments of diverse specialists, integrating and highlighting the conflicting demands of different stakeholders, etc. As well as they can be an adaptive vessel for the pretensions of the architects who propel them. They might even be adaptable to the potentially different situations of schools that work “conjecturally” (that view architecture as what redefines the whole built environment and its ecologies) and schools that work “canonically” (that view architecture as what specifically deals with order, proportion, structure, floors, walls and their openings, infrastructure as what serves, etc.). Because a prototype can be i.e. a portion of an external wall as much as an arrangement of embedded circuitry within a flexible partition system.

This, of course, implies considering different modes of how theory and practice might overlap and inform each other, as much as finding ways to tackle the difficulty of securing the financial means unattainable within the current conditions in architectural schools. But then again, the market and its contingencies constitute the landscape whereupon the construction industry develops. A collaborative work strategy centred on the making of prototypes would need to incorporate the input from external consultants in the most effective way: each insight struggling to reveal and infer potential opportunities and cravings within the industry that could nurture such accomplishments.

1 Bragança de Miranda, José “Machines: The Functional Impossibility", Prototypo #001, Lisboa, 1998.

ISSN 0874-4513

2 Oettinger, Anthony. 1971

3 This refers specifically to a paper presented on the previous Studio Culture conference – “Design through making”, by Bob Sheil (UCL).

4 Hatton, Brian “After High-Tech: Interviews with Ian Ritchie, John Frazer and Cedric Price”, Lotus International. Milano: Electa, 1993. N. 79, p. 6-37. ISBN 88-289-0663-4

5 Banham, Reyner “A Throw-away Aesthetic”, Design By Choice, (ed. Penny Sparke), Academy Editions, London, 1981 [1955]