Architecture as an Instruction-Based Art

The architecture of a building is a product of assemblage, or the way physical elements—forms, materials, textures, colors—are combined to create enclosed and open spaces that have a distinctive presence. In the process of combining these elements, the architect must also address a range of separate and often irreconcilable challenges and constraints, such as security needs, rights of light, sustainability engineering, and regulations for fire, health, and safety. Such constraints are an essential part of designing a building that will exist in a place and time and impact humans and nature. By defining priorities and making choices regarding what is fixed or moveable, traversable or impassable, audible or inaudible, visible or invisible, touchable or untouchable, closed or open, transparent or opaque, and the colors, geometries, and structures that are present, architects are capable of generating unpredictable assemblages that define people’s everyday experience in unique ways.

Unlike the painter or the sculptor, the architect’s final act results not in a completed work of art but in a set of instructions that enable the intended assemblage to be realized. In this sense, an architect’s work is closer to that of a conceptual artist. The architect’s instructions, which incorporate the input of engineers and numerous other experts, are recorded by a team of collaborators. These instructions are then implemented on a site that is usually exposed to the elements and the dynamics of time, often several years, as specialist builders, roofers, carpenters, plumbers, electricians, and decorators complete the building. Meanwhile, however, architects remain both legally and morally accountable for what follows from their instructions.

Today, architectural instructions appear as different layers of a complex, computer-aided design drawing, which can be described as a construction coordination drawing. Such drawings bring together the elements of a building that are visual and non-visual, physical and non-physical: pipes, studs, and conduits are indicated along with doors, windows, and stairs, as well as components related to lighting, sound, and heating. Architects produce construction coordination drawings to determine how a building should coalesce as a whole, while using them as point of reference when communicating with engineers and other consultants that they work with during the design process.

Construction coordination drawings are different from the sketches, perspectives, diagrams, maquettes, and other images that architects use to convey their ideas for a particular building to its patrons and users. They are also different from straightforward construction drawings that are extracted from the construction coordination drawings, with each drawing conveying a partial description of the building to the contractor or a subcontractor. Therefore, for architects, construction coordination drawings are not an aid to presentation or representation, but rather a tool—a way of working things out. They are the drawings that enable the architect to make decisions regarding the part each element will play, not only  in the underlying anatomy of a building, but in the way it is experienced.
 

National Taichung Theater Location: Taichung, Taiwan R.O.C. Completion: September 2016 Toyo Ito & Associates, Architects